4 PREFACE. 



or thought about the familiar things around them, so 

 much the more necessity is there for books that will 

 develop this spirit of inquiry. It is often urged that, 

 because of the technical names with which science is 

 loaded, the teaching of it to children is impracticable ; 

 and yet geography, itself a master-science when prop- 

 erly taught, is put into the hands of every child 

 with scarcely any thing left in it hut the names, 

 whereas, in true scientific teaching the name is inva- 

 riably associated with the thing itself. Geographical 

 names are for the most part learned abstractly, because 

 of the difficulty the child finds in adjusting the relation 

 of a flat map to the round earth ; likewise, the relation 

 of the parts of the earth's surface to the whole. 



Again, there seems to my mind far more practicality 

 in teaching to a child first domestic rather than foreign 

 science. It is more essential that he should know the 

 course of his own blood than that he should know the 

 course of the Nile, not but that both are well to know ; 

 but, if either must be unknown, let it not be himself. 

 And the way to know himself is first to know the lower 

 forms of life. I use geography as a comparison, be- 

 cause no one objects to it as too difficult for children ; 



DSJ 



