While the old method of presenting truths in the abstract has been falling out of use, there has been a corresponding adoption of the new method of presenting them in the concrete.  The rudimentary facts of exact science are now being learnt by direct intuition, as textures, and tastes, and colours are learnt.  Employing the ball-frame for first lessons in arithmetic exemplifies this.  It is well illustrated, too, in Professor De Morgan’s mode of explaining the decimal notation.  M. Marcel, rightly repudiating the old system of tables, teaches weights and measures by referring to the actual yard and foot, pound and ounce, gallon and quart; and lets the discovery of their relationships be experimental.  The use of geographical models and models of the regular bodies, etc., as introductory to geography and geometry respectively, are facts of the same class.  Manifestly, a common trait of these methods is, that they carry each child’s mind through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through.  The truths of number, of form, of relationship in position, were all originally drawn from objects; and to present these truths to the child in the concrete is to let him learn them as the race learnt them.  By and by, perhaps, it will be seen that he cannot possibly learn them in any other way; for that if he is made to repeat them as abstractions, the abstractions can have no meaning for him, until he finds that they are simply statements of what he intuitively discerns.

But of all the changes taking place, the most significant is the growing desire to make the acquirement of knowledge pleasurable rather than painful—­a desire based on the more or less distinct perception, that at each age the intellectual action which a child likes is a healthful one for it; and conversely.  There is a spreading opinion that the rise of an appetite for any kind of information implies that the unfolding mind has become fit to assimilate it, and needs it for purposes of growth; and that, on the other hand, the disgust felt towards such information is a sign either that it is prematurely presented, or that it is presented in an indigestible form.  Hence the efforts to make early education amusing, and all education interesting.  Hence the lectures on the value of play.  Hence the defence of nursery rhymes and fairy tales.  Daily we more and more conform our plans to juvenile opinion.  Does the child like this or that kind of teaching?—­does he take to it? we constantly ask.  “His natural desire of variety should be indulged,” says M. Marcel; “and the gratification of his curiosity should be combined with his improvement.”  “Lessons,” he again remarks, “should cease before the child evinces symptoms of weariness.”  And so with later education.  Short breaks during school-hours, excursions into the country, amusing lectures, choral songs—­in these and many like traits the change may be discerned.  Asceticism is disappearing out of education as out of life; and the usual test of political legislation—­its tendency to promote happiness—­is beginning to be, in a great degree, the test of legislation for the school and the nursery.