on by means of printed syllabi. One topic is taken up at a time, say the feeling of the beautiful, and a limited number of printed questions is placed in the hands of a large number of persons, who are requested to send written answers to these questions, based either on memories of their own childhood, or observation of the children with whom they come into contact. These answers are then collated, and whatever general conclusions seem warranted, are put in published form. Dr. Stanley Hall has issued a large number of such syllabi, touching a great variety of topics. Some of the results of these studies may be found in the pages of the Pedagogical Seminary, and of the American Journal of Psychology. Professor Earl Barnes and others have obtained some valuable results from the study of children's compositions, written in the ordinary course of school work. Interesting light has been obtained in this way on the thoughts and reasonings of children regarding such topics as punishment, truth and falsehood, and the leading religious conceptions.

The principal advantage of this method is that it gives large general averages, gathered from observation of many children; and its results, therefore, while they may not be true in detail for any single child, are likely to represent more closely the average child than those obtained by the individual method. For it must be borne in mind that children differ widely from one another; probably no two in all the world being exactly alike; whence it follows that results obtained. by the individual method with respect to one child, cannot be assumed to hold good, except in a broad, general way, for any other child, or for children in general. In short, these two methods, the individual and the statistical, supplement each other, the former revealing the individual peculiarities, the latter bringing to light that which is common, fundamental, racial.

D. The Experimental Method. The present age is an age of experiment, and of active interrogation of nature. The spirit of experimental inquiry has penetrated the sciences which have to do with human life; and we have biological and psychological laboratories of investigation. Apparatus has been devised by which the ability of a child to exercise prolonged control over certain muscles of his body may be definitely measured; as well as many other facts having an important relation to the work of the school-room.

Now which of these methods are available for the ordinary teacher in a Public School? None of them in any complete sense; yet all of them to a certain limited extent. The average teacher is far too busy to be able to make a thorough and exhaustive study of even one individual child, much less of all the children in his school; yet it is of such vast importance that he should know his pupils as fully as possible, in order to do his best work as a teacher, that we make bold to urge in the strongest way the employment of the Individual Method, in so far as is practicable, not only upon one child, but upon every child in the school. Moreover, the teacher who is really interested in his work, will be habitually alert to observe the workings of the child-mind wherever he may come into contact with it; he will therefore find opportunities of employing the Normal Method. Again, he will be able from time to time, so to utilize the school-room essay writing, as to reach deductions having a measure of generality, after the manner of the Statistical Method. And finally, he will certainly fail in his duty, if he does not at least assure himself with regard to the condition of the sense-organs of his pupils, so as to make special provision for those who are defective in sight or hearing, or in any of the other senses. This he will do by means of simple experimentation, as we shall explain further on.

IV. ITS RESULTS:

It would not be possible here to give a full account of what has been already accomplished through Child Study; but we may record our belief that many parents and teachers have found their interest in childhood greatly stimulated by means of it; and that their efforts to teach and train have been made with a more definitely conceived purpose, in a more natural and, therefore, a more scientific way, and with better results. Already there is evidence of a clearer recognition of the general order of development, and, back of that, of the fundamental fact that all education has to do with living processes rather than with dead things. Greater attention is being paid to the psycho-physical relation, with all that it involves; and to the inseparable connection between assimilation and construction, or between receptivity and activity. That there is a natural order and a natural method of procedure in education is fully recognized, and the effort to find and follow that natural way promises to render pedagogic dislocation and arrested development less and less likely to occur as time goes on.

V.-HEREDITY AND PRE-SCHOLASTIC ENVIRONMENT:

Thus far we have discussed the nature, purpose, scope, methods, and results, of Child Study. Let us enter now into some further detail, in order to show as clearly as possible what the teacher should know about his pupils, why he should know it, and how he may best obtain this knowledge.

The present is the outcome of the past. But for the past, the present would not be what it is. This is true of nations, of communities, and of individuals. If my past life had not been what it was, my present life could not be what it is. In the same way the character of my future depends on that of

my present. This truth is commonplace enough, and yet truly startling when you consider what it involves. At the same time it furnishes a strong incentive to all sound education, as well as to all moral reform.

Two deductions follow at once from these facts. In the first place, it is of the highest importance that all the work of the teacher with his pupils should be of such a character as to conduce to the highest good of those pupils in the future as well as in the present. In the second place (and this is what we are concerned with at present) if the teacher is to do his best work with his pupil, he ought to know something of the past history of that pupil, since the past exerts so potent an influence upon the present and the future. Would it not be possible for the teacher, without being officious or meddling in any way, to acquaint himself somewhat with the pupil's ancestry and home surroundings? Sometimes there are strongly marked hereditary qualities, or qualities developed by home surroundings, with which the teacher ought to be acquainted, and which ought always to be taken into account in dealing with the child. One child inherits tendencies in the direction of a coarse, vulgar, and sensual life; another is the offspring of refined and cultured ancestors, who, perhaps, at the same time, having known nothing of hardship, were somewhat inclined to effeminacy or vanity. It would be greatly to the teacher's advantage to know these things. In the writer's own experience as a teacher, he came into contact with two cases which illustrate very well the influences of heredity and home environment on the pupil's character. The one girl not only inherited from dissipated ancestors a weak and excitable nervous organism, but was treated with great cruelty in her home; so much so, that she came to school expecting similar treatment at the hands of her teacher; and, withal, so thoroughly frightened in advance as to be quite unable, for a good while, to give a creditable account of her

self in her classes. The other girl was the exact opposite of this in almost every particular. Inheriting from her ancestors a physical organism of the most robust and vigorous sort, with nerves of iron, she had still further developed that hardy frame by a life of continual activity in the open air. Having no sisters, and having lost her mother in infancy, she had grown up in the constant companionship of brothers still hardier and rougher than herself; until, at the age of twelve or thirteen, she was a fearless, boisterous hoyden, with more masculinity in her disposition than many of the boys in the school possessed. Was it not evident that these two pupils required entirely different treatment, and that a knowledge. of all these facts which I have cited made it a hundredfold easier for the teacher to adapt his treatment to the requirements of these two cases? The facts were learned without recourse to any improper means; merely by becoming acquainted with the two families in the ordinary course of events, and carefully remembering what one saw and heard.

It is absolutely necessary, if good results are to be looked for, that the child's school education shall link itself on, at every possible point, to his pre-scholastic education in the home. For it must not be forgotten that every child, when he comes to us, is already partially educated, even though he does not know a single letter of the alphabet. He has already spent half-a-dozen years in close contact with nature and with human life, and has received a large store of ideas through his keen sense activity. He has laid the foundation of a multitude of habits. His powers of perception, representation, and action, have all been to some extent evoked, exercised, and developed; so that the teacher will make a serious mistake if he supposes himself to be dealing with a tabula rasa. The teacher's work is not to begin the education of the child, but to continue it; and his aim should therefore be, to make his part of the work really continuous with that which has