February 18, 1887.] 



scmjsrcE. 



165 



heads, when illustrating the training; of the faculty 

 of conception, will serve admirably for exercising 

 the child in forming implicit and explicit judg- 

 ments, and in making statements concerning the 

 striking attributes of things. For material ob- 

 jects, chalk, salt, coal, and the common metals 

 will afford us numerous lessons ; and so will the 

 series of inquiries into the nature, properties, and 

 action of water, so admirably described in Hux- 

 ley's 'Introductory science primer.' For form, 

 we may use the regular solids, surfaces, and lines ; 

 while botany and natural history will provide an 

 inexhaustible supply of lessons on life." The main 

 thing will be to make sure that the child states, 

 in clear, unambiguous language (which he under- 

 stands), only such facts as he has really observed. 

 Classification will inevitably introduce the forma- 

 tion of judgments, and defioition will involve the 

 13utting of them into words." But better, at this 

 stage, than classification or definition, will be a 

 simple narrative, given by the child, of what he 

 has seen in the above lessons, or of what has hap- 

 pened to him during the past week or on some 

 specially marked occasion. 



Later, propositions may be presented to the 

 child for acceptance or rejection, those being the 

 best which can readily be shown to be true or 

 false. Perhaps the easiest of svich propositions will 

 concern number and magnitude. For number, 

 the simplest problems of arithmetic are ready to 

 hand : even such as the old catch, ' which would 

 you rather have, six dozen dozen, or half a dozen 

 dozen?' will be useful. For magnitude, we may 

 take such a pi'oblem as the ai'ranging of a number 

 of fractions in the order of their value, or a com- 

 iparison of incomes derived from investments in 

 different stocks, every step in the proofs being 

 clearly indicated and explained. If we desire to 

 be more concrete, we may choose such a problem 

 as the finding of the shortest distance between two 

 points, — placing the two points on the blackboard 

 and letting a piece of string hang in a loop be- 

 tween them, showing how it projects beyond them 

 when pulled straight ; and then beginning with 

 it straight, and showing how its ends must ap- 

 proach one another in order to allow the string- 

 to hang in a loop : and so on through the many 

 simple problems of practical geometry. But the 



1 See the admirable list of lessons under the heads of 

 * Form and space : Material and force : Life and organic 

 products,' given by Dr. Wormell, in his paper on 'The 

 teaching of elementary science,' in the Educational times, 

 March, 1886. 



2 By classification and definition, I, of course, do not mean 

 here the complete, full-grown acts of the adult, but the imper- 

 fect gradually-growing acts of the child. We are too often 

 .given to ignoring that there must be a growth and progress 

 in these processes as in every thing else which a child him- 

 self does. 



opportunities for exercising judgments are too 

 numerous to need particular mention. Let us 

 only bear in mind the order of their difficulty, and 

 very soon introduce reasoning side by side with 

 them. 



At an early stage, you will remember, the child 

 is to be encouraged to search for causes. Here, 

 again, a wide field lies before us. The only diffi- 

 culty is what to choose. Again, our only guide is 

 the order of nature and simplicity. The reason 

 why fire burns the hand, or why a book, when let 

 go, falls, is difficult and complicated. But it is 

 simple to discover why, if I divide a sheet of paper 

 into four equal parts and take three of them, I 

 get the same amount as when I divide it into eight 

 equal parts and take six of them. At a much 

 more advanced stage, we may attempt to find the 

 reason why, if a number is divisible by nine, the 

 sum of its digits is also divisible by nine ; while 

 all the simpler theorems of abstract geometry 

 will supply the young inquirer with numberless 

 examples fairly within his power — the theorems 

 being put in the form of questions (why is a cer- 

 tain fact true? or, is it true or not true?). The 

 main difficulties about causes lie in there being 

 more than one of them at a time at work, and in 

 their being hard to find. At first, therefore, the 

 cases we choose should involve only single causes, 

 and those very evident. Later we may proceed 

 to such lessons as those on the forms of water, in 

 Huxley's 'Introductory primer,' which I have 

 already referred to, and which introduce more 

 than one cause, — change of temperature and 

 change of pressure, for instance, in the cases Oi. 

 evaporation and condensation. But even here we 

 may make things much simpler by taking one 

 agent at a time and noting its effect, instead of 

 seeking for all the causes of some phenomenon. 

 So we may note the effect of heat and of cold on 

 water separately, the nature of steam, the ef- 

 fect of sudden change of density on moist air in 

 the bell of an air-pump. A most interesting lesson 

 may be given by gathering from our pupils, and 

 discussing, all the instances we can of the disap- 

 pearance of water — apparently into the air: 

 clothes hung up to dry, wet pavements after a 

 shower, water in a kettle boiled away, etc., etc. 

 Again, the re-appearance of moisture from the air : 

 the cold plate held over the steam from the spout of 

 a kettle, the moisture on the outside of a glass of 

 iced-water, dew when the sky is clear and the 

 night fine, the washing-house, etc., etc. Then, 

 the experiment with moist air in the bell of the 

 air-pump, — the formation of the cloud due to the 

 sudden lessening of pressure, the cloud depositing 

 its moisture on the glass, and so on. We note the 

 frequent, if not unvarying, concomitant in each 



