Every specimen of literature in this collection is a complete unit or
is at least a section easily detached--like an Uncle Remus or an
Arabian Nights story--from its original setting. This principle
precluded the inclusion of extracts from such children's classics as
_Gulliver's Travels_, _Robinson Crusoe_, and _Treasure
Island_. No survey of children's literature is complete without an
examination of such books as these; but they can easily be supplied
in inexpensive editions and used as supplementary to this collection.

It is evident that not every masterpiece of writing for children
could be included in this volume; but it is believed that no
selection has been included that is not a masterpiece. This belief is
based primarily on the fact that most of the specimens have been
chosen and approved by generation after generation of children,
culled out from the light and worthless as by an unerring hand,
through the most pragmatic of tests.

The only distinct type of children's literature not represented in
this collection is the drama, which is omitted because the editor was
not able to find a dramatic unit that would satisfy the ideal he had
in mind: that it be dramatic, that it be literary, that it be brief,
yet complete within itself, and that it be an original selection, not
a dramatization of some classic. For a similar reason no story of
American Indian life was put into the collection, though this
exclusion does not mean the omission of a type of literature. A large
number of Indian stories, both of Indian folklore and myth, and of
adventures with Indians, were carefully read; but not one of them, in
the editor's opinion, came up to the standard of a masterpiece and
was, at the same time, brief enough to be practicable for this book.