‘parrot-like reproduction’ that we are so familiar with to-day.  A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a young class in geography.  Glancing, at the book, she said:  “Suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom,—­warmer or colder than on top?” None of the class replying, the teacher said:  “I’m sure they know, but I think you don’t ask the question quite rightly.  Let me try.”  So, taking the book, she asked:  “In what condition is the interior of the globe?” and received the immediate answer from half the class at once:  “The interior of the globe is in a condition of igneous fusion.”  Better exclusive object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must always play a leading, and surely the leading, part in education.  Our modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest years of the pupil.  These lend themselves better to explicit treatment; and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to the line of least resistance in describing.  Yet away back in childhood we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract terms.  The object-teaching is mainly to launch the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.

To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating the same sort of tedious weighing and measuring operation:  whereas a very few examples are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine lines, and then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract treatment.  I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the kindergarten, “but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately.”  Too many school children ‘see’ as immediately ‘through’ the namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make them interesting.  Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the only kind of things their minds can digest.

But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last resort, the teacher’s own tact is the only thing that can bring out the right effect.  The great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing just what meaning the pupil attaches to the terms he uses.  The words may sound all right, but the meaning remains the child’s own secret.  So varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out.  And a strange secret does it often prove.  A relative of mine was trying