of a nation is like a branching tree, all connected and intertwined,
and that the books of a race mirror faithfully and vividly the ideas
of the age out of which they sprang. What makes books dull is the
absence of any knowledge by the reader of why the author was at the
trouble of expressing himself in that particular way at that
particular time. When, as a small boy, I read a book of which the
whole genesis was obscure to me, it used to appear to me vaguely that
it must have been as disagreeable to the author to write it as it was
for me to read it. But if it can be once grasped that books are the
outcome of a writer's interest or sense of beauty or emotion or joy,
the whole matter wears a different aspect.

The same principle applies with just the same force to history and
geography; both of these studies can be made interesting, if they are
not regarded as isolated groups of phenomena, but are approached from
the boy's own experience as opening away and outwards from what is
going on about him. The object is or ought to be slowly to extend the
boy's horizon, to show him that history holds the seeds and roots of
the present, and that geography is the life-drama which he sees about
him, enacting itself under different climatic and physiographical
conditions. The dreariness and dreadfulness of knowledge to the
immature mind is because it represents itself as a mass of dry facts
to be mastered without having any visible or tangible connection with
the boy's own experience. The aim should rather be to teach him to
look with zest and interest at what is going on outside his own narrow
circle, and to help him to move perceptively along the paths of time
and space which diverge in all directions from the scene where he
finds himself.

It may be indisputably stated that all connected knowledge is