child can possibly attain. And as for botany, geology, history, and
geography (beyond the range already specified), these are far better
relegated to the school library and the initiative of each child. Every
child has its specific range of interest, and its specific way of
regarding things. In geology, for example, one boy may be fascinated by
the fossil hunting, another will find his interest in the effects of
structure in scenery, and a third, with more imagination, will give his
whole mind to the reconstruction of the past, and will pore over maps
of Pleistocene Europe and pictures of Silurian landscape with the
keenest appreciation. Each will be bored, or at least not greatly
interested, by what attracts the others. Let the children have an
easily accessible library--that is the crying need of nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of a thousand schools to-day, a need every school-
seeking parent may do something to remedy--and in that library let
there be one or two good densely illustrated histories, illustrated
travels, bound volumes of such a publication as Newnes' _Wide World
Magazine_ (I name these publications haphazard--there are probably
others as good or better), Hutchinson and Co.'s _Living Animals of
the World_, the Rev. H. N. Hutchinson's _Extinct Monsters_, the
Badminton volumes on big game shooting, mountaineering, and yachting,
Kerner's "Botany," collections of "The Hundred Best Pictures" sort,
collections of views of towns and of scenery in different parts of the
world, and the like. Then let the schoolmaster set aside five hours a
week as the minimum for reading, and let the pupils read during that
time just whatever they like, provided only that they keep silence and
read. If the schoolmaster or schoolmistress comes in at all here, it
should be to stimulate systematic reading occasionally by setting a
group of five or six pupils to "get up" some particular subject--a
report on "animals that might still be domesticated," for example--and
by showing them conversationally how to read with a slip of paper at