Each child was asked to tell a verse or story to be recorded verbatim, and nearly half could do so. Children of this age are no longer interested in mere animal noises or rhymes or nonsense words of the "Mother Goose" order, but everything to interest them deeply must have a cat, dog, bird, baby, another child, or possibly parent or teacher in it, must be dramatic and full of action, appeal to the eye as a "chalk talk" or an object lesson, and be copious of details, which need be varied but slightly to make the story as good as new for the twentieth time. A long gradation of abstractions culminates here. First, it is a great lesson for the child to eliminate touch and recognize objects by the eye alone. The first good pictures mentally seen are felt of, turned over with much confusion to find the surface smooth. To abstract from visual terms to words is still harder. Eyes and tongue must work together a long time before the former can be eliminated and stories told of objects first absent, then remote, then before unknown. Children must be far beyond this before they can be interested, e.g., in fairy tales, and stories told interest them far more than if read to them, no matter how apt the language. They are reproduced about as imperfectly as objects are drawn, only a few salient and disconnected points being seized at first, and sentence and sequence coming very slowly after many repetitions. Their own little faults may be woven in or ascribed to animals or even plants in a remote way which they themselves will feel at each stage, and the selfish birdie or the runaway squirrel or flowers as kind words may be referred to in case of need as a reserve moral capital. Why do we never teach maxims and proverbs which, when carefully selected, are found so effective at this age and teach the best morality embodied in the briefest and most impressive way?

Of the 36 per cent. or 72 children of the table who never saved their pennies, 52 spend them for candy, which growing

children need, but the adulterations of which are often noxious. Of toys, big things please them best. A recent writer in Austria fears that school savings banks tend to call attention too early to money matters, and to cause its value to be dangerously overrated; but to pass the candy by and drop the cents where they are beyond their control for years is much less pedagogic than to save them until their sum amounts to a total sufficient to buy a larger and more costly, and perhaps more keenly desired, toy.

The next experimental inquiry1 in the field was also made in quest of a natural basis of the first school instruction. If we look at the developing effect upon the person of the pupil, progress in the upper gymnasial classes is perhaps less than in the first year of school, although, if we regard the quantity of acquisition or its importance, it is much greater. That the matter of instruction is preferred to the development of the person of the pupil is the cause of the memory cram and neglect of pedagogy, which often makes school keeping, as Grimm called it, lower than the work of the day laborer. Herbart, Ziller, and Stoy, however, plead for "educating instruction," and show will to be rooted in the sphere of thought, which should first be moral and religious. Manysided interest is the root and key of all. Interest may be of knowledge or of perception, and statistical inquiry might seek to determine which class of interests predominate, and whether reproduction was slow, confused, partial, or the reverse. The Berlin tables showed what ideas were lacking, but Lange sought the ideas that were not lacking as a basis of school knowledge. The child's soul is no tabula rasa, and very suggestive are papers on the best methods of excursions for city schools, on the educational value and use of home and its environment, and on apperception.

1 Dr. B. Hartmann, Die Analyse des Kindlichen Gedankenkreises als die Naturgemässe des ersten Schulunterrichts. H. Graser, Annaberg, 1890.

Hartmann's tests were made solely, he says, in the interests of the Annaberg schools, to determine the natural basis of the course of study there for the first year or two. The fourteen plainer questions were not enough, and he had not heard of the Boston tests, so those of Berlin were largely his model. His tests were better than all others in one respect, viz., they were repeated five years (1880-1884) on as many groups of children entering school, and they have given rise to analogous tests in other cities, best perhaps in Döbeln. For Hartmann's purpose a large number of questions were needed, and interests of knowledge must be regarded more than those of sympathy or participation. To an Herbartian the former seems earlier and richer, but the ideal of normalizing a sphere of thought is evident. Concepts likely to be wanting in children of that town were excluded in favor of those easily accessible to every child, yet those chosen were not model or normal in the sense that often others as good may have been excluded. The flying, singing lark may be seen every day in spring at Annaberg, and if it has not been noticed, the child may be inert and indifferent, or its senses dull or defective, and this would also be the inference had the swallow been chosen. By this method each locality will find objects especially prominent and peculiar to it. A book by E. Piltz, entitled Über Naturbeobachtung des Schülers (1882), and Sigismund's Die Familie als Schule der Natur (1856), contain good lists of topics (the former 700 of them) and reports from similar tests. As a manufacturing center of passementerie, and a shire town and retail center, Annaberg has rich and poor, and its prosperity depends on changes in fashions, so that the 265 children entering its schools yearly differ greatly. Some children were very bashful on first entering school, used to only the local dialect which most teachers did not speak, but by beginning with the easiest questions and talking of parents and toys these difficulties were minimized.

Thus answers were often enigmatical, and much cross and indirect questioning was required before the dash which signified knowledge on the point, or the plus sign which signified its absence, could be made. In all 1312 children, 660 boys and 652 girls, were tested, all between 5 and 6 years old, the tests being made before and after regular school hours by the teacher, who worked with small groups and made them answer individually when possible.

The table below reads as follows: out of 660 boys entering schools in Annaberg from 1881 to 1884, 126, or 19 per cent., had seen a wild hare, etc.