arranged in systematic order. Mathematics, 1-8; astronom-
ical, 9-13; meteorological, 13-21; animals, 22-31; plants,
32-40; local geography, 41-61; and miscellaneous. Of three
fourths of these concepts as objects more girls are ignorant
than boys, and those who have not been in the kindergarten
are more ignorant than those who have. Some of these
objects were doubtless known but had not acquired a name
for the child; others they had seen but had not had their atten-
tion called to. It is often said that girls are more likely to excel
boys in learning concepts, the more general these concepts are.
Perhaps we may also assume that the most common concepts
are acquired before those possessed by a few individuals
only. The greater the number of concepts in the test lists,
the more boys seemed to excel girls. The easy and widely
diffused concepts are commonest among girls; the harder and
more special or exceptional ones are commonest among boys.
The girls clearly excelled only in the following concepts:
name and calling of the father, tempest, rainbow, hail, po-
tato field, moon, square, circle, Alexander Platz, Frederick's
Grove, morning sky, oak, dew, and Botanical Garden. Of
all the children the sphere was known to 76 per cent., the
cube to 69 per cent., the square to 54 per cent., the circle
to 49 per cent., the triangle to 41 per cent. The girls
excel in space concepts and boys in numbers. Girls excel
in ideas of family, house, and thunderstorms, children from
houses of refuge had more concepts than children from fami-
lies, and those from kindergartens excelled both. The child's
characteristic question, What is that? is so poorly answered
at home that he comes to school so poor in concepts that in-
struction must either operate with words, or use pictures,
or go back to nature. Thus text-books and other means of
instruction assume a knowledge which the child does not
possess, and it is hard to find those which are well adapted
to a given population. Thus object lessons, excursions, etc.,

are suggested as first steps to fill the gaps in the child's knowledge.

The following table shows the relative number of children who knew four Bible stories and four of Grimm's favorite fairy tales.

Children

Children from Children Children Per Per Boys Girls from Kinder- from alto- cent. cent. Families garten Refuges gether

Boys Girls

Schneewittchen. 2173 3009 2436 4387

2263

2538

3025 2967

.

563 1044 661 1871 808 773

39.7

Rothkäppchen 2427 3664 2800 4581
Dornröschen.

Aschenbrödel]. 1784 2897 2182 3871 2032 2270

Average

Religious.
Fairy tales

5852 3846 5138 4790 4659 5021 60.3
1734 2654 2020 3677 2032 2137 39.5 60.5

Thus girls excel in fairy tales and boys in religious concepts. As the opportunities to learn both would not probably differ much, there seems here a difference of disposition. God and Christ were better learned at home, and the tales best in the kindergarten. Rothkäppchen was better known than God, and Schneewittchen than Christ. More boys could repeat sentences said to them, or sing musical phrases sung to them, or sing a song, than girls. Kindergarten children come from the richer, refuge children from the poorer, class, while parents between these extremes occupy themselves most with their children. The better off the parents, the stiller and less imitative the child, is a law suggested by the statistics of abilities. Not only method but choice and arrangement of the material of instruction depend on the knowledge the

child has. Further investigations on narrower and more closely related subjects should be chosen. Investigation of six to twelve closely related points is suggested as the best method, and every teacher could occasionally complete such inventories in his or her room.

In Germany it is more common than in our country to connect songs, poetry, reading and object lessons, instruction in history, geography, botany, geology, and other elementary branches with the immediate locality. A school geography of Leipzig, e.g., begins with the schoolhouse and yard, the street, with cross sections of it to show drainage, gas, etc., and then widens out into the world by concentric circles. Stated holiday walks conducted by teachers for educational purposes and for making collections for the schoolrooms are more common. The psychic peculiarities of different school districts of Berlin seemed to be influenced surprisingly by locality.

In 1879 Dr. K. Lange1 urged that a six-year-old child has learned already far more than a student learns in his entire university course. "These six years have been full of advancement, like the six days of creation." Concrete conceptions have been accumulated in vast numbers and the teacher must not assume that a tabula rasa is before him. Both this and the presumption of too much knowledge would be to build upon sand. Children have experienced and learned far more than they can put into words; hence again the need of cross questioning. Lange's table on the following page was based on 500 children entering the city schools of Plauen, and 300 entering 21 country schools in outlying districts, and the figures represent the percentages of those having the concept.

1 See "Der Vorstellungskreis unserer sechsjährigen Kleinen," Allg. SchulZeitung, Bd. 56, pp. 327 et seq. Darmstadt, 1879.

Only 43 per cent. of the city children had ever been to any other town or village, only 18 per cent. had seen the castle near by, and knowledge of colors was as follows, beginning with those best known and ending with the least known: black, white, red, green, blue, yellow. The ignorance of city children shows the utility of school excursions. Girls had seen, heard, and experienced less than boys of all the seventeen subjects of inquiry save the "dear God," of whom they knew more than the boys. Little is told of Lange's methods, or whether or how far they led to a modification of the elementary curriculum.

It was with the advantages of many suggestions and not a few warnings from these attempts that the writer undertook, soon after the opening of the Boston schools in September, 1880, to make out a list of questions suitable for obtaining an inventory of the contents of the minds of children of average intelligence on entering the primary schools of that city.

This was made possible by the liberality of Mrs. Quincy
Shaw, who detailed four excellent teachers from her compre-
hensive system of kindergartens to act as special questioners
under the writer's direction, and by the coöperation of Miss
L. B. Pingree, their superintendent. All the local and many
other of the German questions were not suitable to children
here, and the task of selecting those that should be so,
though perhaps not involving quite so many perplexing con-
siderations as choosing an equally long list of "normal
words," was by no means easy. They must not be too
familiar nor too hard and remote, but must give free and
easy play to thought and memory. But especially, to yield
most practical results, they should lie within the range of
what children are commonly supposed or at least desired or
expected, by teachers and by those who write primary text-
books and prescribe courses of instruction, to know. Many
preliminary half days of questioning small groups of children
and receiving suggestions from many sources, and the use of
many primers, object-lesson courses, etc., now in use in this
country, were necessary before the first provisional list of one
hundred and thirty-four questions was printed. The problem
first considered was strictly practical, namely, what may Bos-
ton children be, by their teachers, assumed to know and
have seen when they enter school; although other purposes
more psychological shaped other questions used later.

The difficulties and sources of possible error in the use of
such questions are many. Not only are children prone to
imitate others in their answers without stopping to think
and give independent answers of their own, but they often
love to seem wise, and, to make themselves interesting,
state what seems to interest us without reference to truth,
divining the lines of our interest with a subtlety we do not
suspect. If absurdities are doubted by the questioner, they
are sometimes only the more protested by the children;