nurse to move in and out of the room without protest.  If this fault has appeared and the child cannot be left alone, our whole educational system is undermined, and play will be profitless and over-exciting, because it demands the constant participation of grown-up people.  As a preliminary to all improvement in the management of a nervous child, we must see to it that he becomes accustomed to being alone.  We must so arrange his nursery that he can do no damage to himself.  Scissors and matches must not be left lying about, and a fireguard must be fixed in position so that it cannot be disturbed.  Then, disregarding his protests, the nurse must leave him to himself, at first only for a moment or two, re-entering the room in a matter-of-fact way without speaking to him, and again leaving it.  Soon he will learn that a temporary separation does not mean that we have abandoned him for all time.  Then the period of absence can be gradually lengthened till all difficulty disappears.  Once his attention is removed from the grown-up people who mean so much to him, his natural impulse to explore and experiment with his playthings will show itself.  Those toys are best which are neither elaborate nor expensive.  For a little child a small box containing a miscellaneous collection of wooden or metal objects, none of them small enough to be in danger of being swallowed, forms the material for which his soul craves.  Everything else in the room may be out of his reach.  A dozen times he will empty the box and then replace each object in turn.  He will arrange them in every possible combination, and then sweep the whole away to start afresh.

At eighteen months of age observation and imitative capacity will have made more complex pursuits possible.  As a rule the objects which are most prized and which have most educative value are those which lend themselves best to the actions with which alone the child is familiar.  Hence the supreme importance of the doll and the doll’s perambulator.  The doll will be treated exactly as the child is treated by the nurse.  It will be washed, and dressed, and weighed, and put to bed in faithful reproduction of what the child has daily experienced.  Dusting, and sweeping, and laying the table will be exactly copied.  If a child has no opportunity of being familiar with horses, if he has not seen them fed, and watered, and groomed, and harnessed, he may not find any great satisfaction in a toy horse, or pay much attention to it, no matter how costly or realistic it may be.

In the third year more precise tasks, such as stringing beads, drawing, and painting, will play their part, while at the same time the increased imaginative powers will give attraction to toy soldiers or a toy tea-service.  Playing at shop, robbers, and rafts are developments of still later growth.  In the child’s games we recognise the instinct of imitation—­playing with dolls, sweeping and dusting, playing at shop or visitors; the instinct of constructiveness—­making