scientific enough. We dislike the entire arrangement of cards
alphabetically classified according to streets and names of families,
with the unrelated and meaningless details attached to them. Our feeling
of revolt is probably not unlike that which afflicted the students of
botany and geology in the middle of the last century, when flowers were
tabulated in alphabetical order, when geology was taught by colored
charts and thin books. No doubt the students, wearied to death, many
times said that it was all too scientific, and were much perplexed and
worried when they found traces of structure and physiology which their
so-called scientific principles were totally unable to account for. But
all this happened before science had become evolutionary and scientific
at all, before it had a principle of life from within. The very
indications and discoveries which formerly perplexed, later illumined
and made the study absorbing and vital.

We are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle to human
affairs in general, although it is fast being applied to the education
of children. We are at last learning to follow the development of the
child; to expect certain traits under certain conditions; to adapt
methods and matter to his growing mind. No "advanced educator" can allow
himself to be so absorbed in the question of what a child ought to be
as to exclude the discovery of what he is. But in our charitable efforts
we think much more of what a man ought to be than of what he is or of
what he may become; and we ruthlessly force our conventions and
standards upon him, with a sternness which we would consider stupid
indeed did an educator use it in forcing his mature intellectual
convictions upon an undeveloped mind.

Let us take the example of a timid child, who cries when he is put to
bed because he is afraid of the dark. The "soft-hearted" parent stays