There is very little spontaneous classification. This is natural, as quantity is evidently more interesting than kind. Throughout all ages the care of collections, the simply keeping them together, far outweighs any classification or arrangement of them. This is the only method up to nine years of age, when there is a small proportion of miscellaneous arrangements and of classifications according to color and size, with some few instances of classification according to kind. But these arrangements and classifications appear chiefly after eleven years of age. Decoration comes in chiefly from fourteen years on. Boys show more sense of classification than girls, and girls exceed in decorative and miscellaneous arrangements. Boys and girls show the same large proportion of "no special order."

To summarize the facts which this study seems to indicate, we find :

1. The collecting impulse is practically universal among children.

2. It is an impulse of great strength, leading the child generally to make collections along several lines. It has its rise in early childhood, develops rapidly after six years of age, and is strongest from eight to eleven years of age, just before adolescence, the greatest number of collections per child occurring at this time, after which it declines in intensity.

3. A remarkable variety is shown in the kinds of things children collect. What they collect seems to be largely the result of circumstance, environment, suggestion, or imitation, but to collect something seems to be the part of instinct.

4. Certain collections are very prominent and have a widespread following, showing the part imitation plays as incentive to the collecting instinct. The imitative influence is strongest in the preadolescent years, while in adolescence a specialized form of imitation appears in the way of faddism.

5. Certain inherent interests, however, are shown by groupings of the various collections. Of these the nature interest appears to be strongest. The next greatest number of collections is in the line of stamps, cigar tags, etc.; then come the trivial childish collections of sticks, glass, buttons, etc., and the collections ministering to the play interest; and then those pertaining to the æsthetic interest. Collections along literary, historical, sentimental, commercial, useful, and "luck" lines are comparatively few.

6. The collecting impulse shows a certain trend of development in its character. In childhood there appears the crude instinct to collect anything, however trivial, anything simple and easy to obtain. In the preadolescent years the collecting interest reaches its height in genuineness. Interest in the things collected is here strongest. At this age nature and

play collections are more prominent than at any other age. There is also greater susceptibility to the imitative influence at this age. In adolescence the instinct declines, and degenerates into a matter largely of fad and fashion, along sentimental and social lines.

7. In obtaining their collections the young children are given their things largely; the children in the preadolescent period are most active in obtaining their specimens by their own exertions; in adolescence the commercial spirit, as shown in buying and trading, appears as an additional factor.

8. As to motives for collecting, the influence of others, shown in imitation and rivalry, appears strongest. Then comes the interest in quantity, in large numbers, and great possession. The interest in kind and in the things themselves as specimens is small. Other motives also appear, such as the enjoyment and use of the objects collected, the pleasure in collecting as a pastime, the æsthetic and commercial attractions of the objects. A considerable proportion of vague reasons for collecting is given by the children.

9. In arrangement of their collections children show very little sense of classification. The large majority of children keep their objects in no order, simply keeping them together. There are some attempts at arrangement, as, for example, according to beauty, value, shape, and in arbitrary forms. The first classifications appearing after nine or ten years of age are on the sense basis of color or size, classification according to kind, what there is of it, coming a little later.

We have made no attempt to go into the psychology of the collecting instinct. In the mere calling of collecting an instinct, however, we have assumed considerable psychology, perhaps more than is warrantable. But certainly this phenomenon is no accidental affair, no merely acquired trait.

When we consider its universality, its widespread affection; when we consider its intensity, the number of collections children make and the interest they take in them; when we consider the variety of the things collected, showing that the mania seizes upon any and practically every outlet imaginable, and showing, too, that to collect is more important than what is collected; when we consider, moreover, that the phenomenon has a definite progress, a rise, a growth and a decline, an age development, we are inclined not to hesitate in calling it an instinct.

But, at any rate, whatever the psychological interpretation, the fact remains that the collecting instinct, passion, or interest is wonderfully universal and wonderfully intense among children, and that consequently it may be used to practical pedagogical advantage.

Again the question may be raised, Admitting that collecting is a genuine interest, is it an interest in the scientific sense? The scientific collection is made not for the purpose of obtaining quantity but for obtaining varieties in completeness, and for the purpose of classifying those varieties. But children care more for quantity than kind, they desire to possess things rather than to illustrate principles, and they show very little sense of classification. However, in scientific development there seems to be room for a purely naturalistic stage preceding the analytical stage, a stage of going out and gathering in before sitting down to staid induction, a stage, too, of mere gathering before the stage of searching along the line of any hypothesis. Children seem to be in this more primitive naturalistic stage, and as in such we must deal with them.

The age at which the collecting interest is of greatest pedagogical importance is largely in the preadolescent period, before which collecting is more or less a blind, groping, purposeless instinct, and after which it largely loses its purity

by being bound up with other associations, but during which period it reaches its greatest intensity and genuineness. Here we find the greatest reveling in quantity, here the time when the instinct acts most easily through the incentive of wide imitation, here rivalry comes in to add zest, here the true naturalist's spirit of finding and hunting, as opposed to receiving or buying, is most prominent, here the beginnings of a sense of classification develop. In fact, at this period the instinct seems to be at its height. Its tractability, too, through the incentive of imitation, makes it most practical now for use in education. So much for the period when the collecting instinct is most important as an educative channel. What content interest of most value appears at this preadolescent time? Here we find the nature interest at its crest, and this is the time for sending children forth to gather in nature's stores, to let them roam and wander, to encourage their naturalist clubs where they may proudly exhibit their collections, where they may compare their treasures with those of the other children, where they may be stimulated to relate how and where they found their specimens and to tell all they know about them, not in any methodical way but in their own way, where what they have imbibed naturally or with unsuspected stimulus may overflow in the telling.

As we have suggested before, the naturalistic interest is a beginning interest, and the collection passion may be used normally as a beginning help in literary, historical, and artistic studies in adolescence, in the same way that it may be used in nature lines in the preadolescent period.

CAROLINE FREAR BURK