removes destructive worms and bugs from their leaves and stems, and weeds from their vicinity,—­carefully watching to learn what peculiar insects affect what particular plants, and how the former can be destroyed without injuring the vitality of the latter.  After all the most careful gardener can do, he knows that the form of the plant is predetermined in the germ or seed, and that the inward tendency must concur with a multitude of influences, the most powerful and subtile of which is removed in place ninety-five millions of miles away.

In the Kindergarten children are treated on an analogous plan.  It presupposes gardeners of the mind, who are quite aware that they have as little power to override the characteristic individuality of a child, or to predetermine this characteristic, as the gardener of plants to say that a lily shall be a rose.  But notwithstanding this limitation on one side, and the necessity for concurrence of the Spirit on the other,—­which is more independent of our modification than the remote sun,—­yet they must feel responsible, after all, for the perfection of the development, in so far as removing every impediment, preserving every condition, and pruning every redundance.

This analogy of education to the gardener’s art is so striking, both as regards what we can and what we cannot do, that Froebel has put every educator into a most suggestive Normal School, by the very word which he has given to his seminary,—­Kindergarten.

If every school-teacher in the land had a garden of flowers and fruits to cultivate, it could hardly fail that he would learn to be wise in his vocation.  For suitable preparation, the first, second, and third thing is, to

  “Come forth into the light of things,
  Let Nature be your teacher.”

The “new education,” as the French call it, begins with children in the mother’s arms.  Froebel had the nurses bring to his establishment, in Hamburg, children who could not talk, who were not more than three months old, and trained the nurses to work on his principles and by his methods.  This will hardly be done in this country, at least at present; but to supply the place of such a class, a lady of Boston has prepared and published, under copyright, Froebel’s First Gift, consisting of six soft balls of the three primary and the three secondary colors, which are sold in a box, with a little manual for mothers, in which the true principle and plan of tending babies, so as not to rasp their nerves, but to amuse without wearying them, is very happily suggested.  There is no mother or nurse who would not be assisted by this little manual essentially.  As it says in the beginning,—­“Tending babies is an art, and every art is founded on a science of observations; for love is not wisdom, but love must act according to wisdom in order to succeed.  Mothers and nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and oftenest do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse them, and weary themselves the while.  Froebel’s exercises, founded on the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse without wearying, to educate without vexing.”