6 HIS FIRST TEACHER CAMPE. 



tures with which the nurse pacified him when he was 

 sick, he goes to it, and opening the door softly, lights 

 by a sort of impish instinct, on the costliest volume on 

 the shelves. It is some famous work on natural history, 

 a ponderous quarto filled with coloured prints of strange 

 plants and animals, and still stranger men. He pores 

 over them with great eyes. Fearing at last that he is in 

 mischief, for she has heard nothing of him for a long 

 time, his mother steals into the room, and finds him fast 

 asleep, with the book in his lap. As he grows older he 

 takes himself out of doors on all possible occasions. 

 Now he is in the garden, plucking and studying 

 flowers and grasses ; now in the pine grove filling his 

 pockets with last year's cones and needles, and now by 

 the edge of the lake, skimming pebbles over its surface, 

 or watching its fleet of mirrored clouds. 



In such wise, says Fancy, who is sometimes truer than 

 Fact, lived the boy Alexander, until 1775, when his 

 education commenced. The science of education, a 

 science which is still in its infanc}^, the opinion of its 

 professors to the contrary notwithstanding, was at that 

 time agitating the European world. The new method 

 of Rousseau, which aimed at the physical as well as the 

 mental development of its pupils, and which considered 

 the study of natural science full as important as that of 

 metaphysics, and the classics, had made many adherents 

 in Germany, and among others Joachim Heinrich Campe. 

 Born in 1746, Campe studied theology at Helmstadt and 

 at Halle, and was appointed, in 1773, chaplain to the 

 Prince of Prussia's regiment in Potsdam. He fulfilled 

 for two years the duties of his sacred calling in that 

 doubtful sphere of action, and feeling himself much more 



