To begin with, he considered that he could not enjoy a more splendid
opportunity to give children a taste for science and to stimulate their
curiosity than by finding a means to interest them, from their earliest
infancy, in their simple playthings, even the crudest and most inexpensive;
so true is it that "in the smallest mechanical device or engine, even in
its simplest form, as conceived by the industry of a child, there is often
the germ of important truths, and, better than books, the school of the
playroom, if gently disciplined, will open for the child the windows of the
universe."

"The humble teetotum, made of a crust of rye-bread transfixed by a twig,
silently spinning on the cover of a school-book, will give a correct enough
image of the earth, which retains unmoved its original impulse, and travels
along a great circle, at the same time turning on itself. Gummed on its
disc, scraps of paper properly coloured will tell us of white light,
decomposable into various coloured rays...

"There will be the pop-gun, with its ramrod and its two plugs of tow, the
hinder one expelling the foremost by the elasticity of the compressed air.
Thus we get a glimpse of the ballistics of gunpowder, and the pressure of
steam in engines..."

The little hydraulic fountain made of an apricot stone, patiently hollowed
and pierced with a hole at either side, into which two straws are fitted,
one dipping into a cup of water and the other duly capped, "expelling a
slender thread of water in which the sunlight flickers," will introduce us
to the true syphon of physics.

"What amusing and useful lessons" a well-balanced scheme of education might