THE STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF THINGS. 353 

 THE STUDY OF THE EELATIONS OF TlimOS. 



Br ELIZA A. YOUMANS. 



EVERY reader of the preceding article will recognize that it is 

 one which I can not let pass as a final statement of the subject. 

 Mrs. Jacobi's very first sentence is so misleading as to put me in a 

 wrong relation to this discussion. She says, " The comments made by 

 Miss Youman's upon a single remark in my article on primary educa- 

 tion," etc. ; the implication of which is that I had a very slender basis 

 for getting up a controversy. But her "single remark " was in point 

 of fact a complete paragraph of nearly a page in length containing a 

 series of affirmations, condemning the principles adopted as fundament- 

 al in my First Book of Botany. Her criticisms, besides, acquired spe- 

 cial force from the circumstances in which they were made. Mrs. 

 Jacobi is a trained scientific scholar, an independent inquirer untram- 

 meled by traditions, and she had taken up the critical study of pri- 

 mary education in connection with the practical management of her 

 own child, and published two articles on her method and its results. 

 All this gave such strength to the case, that her incidental comment 

 upon my method, if allowed to pass without notice, would have been 

 more injurious than would have been a separate and formal attack. 

 That I did not mistake the import of her first critical passage is now 

 sufficiently apparent, as her present elaborate article is but an amplifi- 

 cation and a justification of positions taken at the outset. 



As will have been seen by the reader, Mrs. Jacobi sums up my 

 views in five propositions upon which she comments in their order. 

 With the first proposition she agrees, and with the second she is in 

 partial agreement. But, while admitting that ideas of evolution are 

 unsuitable to childhood, she insists that the idea of life and its changes 

 is proper for their very early contemplation. I have only to say, as I 

 said in my former article, that I have gone as far as she has done in 

 this direction of objective study, having provided a series of experi- 

 ments in the sprouting and growth of various seeds in my " First 

 Book." But while I should be content to furnish the child with 

 materials for simple observation, and leave him very much to himself 

 to find out what his experiments disclose, Mrs. Jacobi would use 

 the occasion to make "as profound an impression as possible upon the 

 imagination " of the child in regard to " the facts of life and growth 

 and death." With all she says of the importance of these conceptions, 

 and the immense part they have played in the history of mankind, 

 I entirely agree ; but I should be very cautious about undertaking to 

 introduce them into the mind of a child, while, with its lack of experi- 

 ence, it is still so dominated by imagination as not to know the dif- 

 ference between the true and the false among ideas, Mrs. Jacobi 

 says, " The great fact of growth and incessant change in living organ- 



TOL. XXTIII. — 23 



