MANUAL WORK. 379 



phenomena, leaving the discovery of the laws of 

 those phenomena to the next series of deeper 

 and more specialised studies. 



On the other side, we all know how children 

 like to make toys themselves, how they gladly 

 imitate the work of full-grown people if they see 

 them at work in the workshop or the building- 

 yard. But the parents either stupidly paralyse 

 that passion, or do not know how to utilise it. 

 Most of them despise manual work and prefer 

 sending their children to the study of Roman 

 history, or of Franklin's teachings about sav- 

 ing money, to seeing them at a work which is 

 good for the "lower classes only." They thus 

 do their best to render subsequent learning 

 the more difficult. 



And then come the school years, and time is 

 wasted again to an incredible extent. Take, 

 for instance, mathematics, which every one 

 ought to know, because it is the basis of all sub- 

 sequent education, and which so few really learn 

 in our schools. In geometry, time is foolishly 

 wasted by using a method which merely con- 

 sists in committing geometry to memory. In 

 most cases, the boy reads again and again the 

 proof of a theorem till his memory has retained 

 the succession of reasonings. Therefore, nine 

 boys out of ten, if asked to prove an elementary 

 theorem two years after having left the school, 



