384 BRAIN WORK AND 



twenty-five," while most of my readers surely 

 remember how this same zero at the head of a 

 row of figures puzzled them in their boyhood. 

 We do all that is possible to render algebra un- 

 intelligible, and our children spend one year 

 before they have learned what is not algebra 

 at all, but a mere system of abbreviations, 

 which can be learned by the way, if it is taught 

 together with arithmetic.* 



The waste of time in physics is simply re- 

 volting. While young people very easily under- 

 stand the principles of chemistry and its formulae, 

 as soon as they themselves make the first ex- 



* To those readers who are really interested in the education 

 of children, M. Leray, the French translator of this book, recom- 

 mended a series of excellent little works "conceived," he wrote, 

 " in the very spirit of the ideas developed in this chapter. 

 Their leading principle is that ' in order to be soundly educative, 

 all teaching must be objective, especially at the outset,' and 

 that ' systematical abstraction, if it be introduced into the 

 teaching without an objective (concrete) preparation, is noxious. '" 

 M. Leray meant the series of initiations published by the 

 French publishers, Hachette : Initiation mathemaiique, by C. A. 

 Laisant, a book completed by the Initiateur mathematique, 

 which is a game with small cubes, very ingenious and giving in 

 a concrete form the proofs of arithmetics, the metric system, 

 algebra and geometry ; Initiation astronomique,- by C. Flam- 

 marion ; Initiation chimique, by Georges Darzens ; Initiation 

 a la mecanique, by Ch. Ed. Guillaume ; and Initiation zoologiqvz, 

 by E. Brucker. The authors of these works had it would not 

 be just not to mention it predecessors in Jean Mace's UArith- 

 metique du grand-papa, and Rene Leblanc, ' " whose excellent 

 manual, Les Sciences physiques a I'Ecole primaire " M. Leray 

 says that from his own experience upon pupils from eleven to 

 thirteen years old " gives even to the dullest children the 

 taste or even the passion for physical experiment." 



