bards.

Even a prose story "should run in the ears like the noise of

breakers."

This little child is not æsthetic. His taste is rude and barbaric. This does not mean that he should be surrounded by chromos, or read or listen to sentences that are not literature even in his primer or first The effect of an environment full of masterpieces of painting, music, and literature will assuredly show itself at the right time, tho at present it is absorbed unconsciously. All attempts to call attention to it will fail, or else result in the moral blight which is propagated in a child's intellect when he is trained at this early age to say, "I love Whittier; he writes so beautifully," or, "Mr. Longfellow has a very clear style." As for morals, our little child under eight is a veritable pagan in the concreteness of his theology. Abstractions, sermons of any kind, touch not him. He gathers his ideas of goodness and his impulse to be good in life from his associates; in literature, from allegories and stories so simple that you need never mention the moral.

CHILDREN FROM EIGHT TO FOURTEEN'

This is the transition period so puzzling to the keenest child observer, sometimes called the dark age. The brain, and indeed the body, is comparatively sluggish, storing up material for the great and sudden demand. made upon it in early adolescence.

This boy is intensely practical. He has no use for beautiful fancies or sentimental tales. His muscles are aching to be trained to skilled work, and his interests turn toward details. He reads invention and travel and stories of industry greedily, to find out how things should be done. This interest greatly increases if he is given opportunity to work out the ideas he gets, tho you may find him a little dangerous if he must needs scalp the small sister or lasso the baby. The books read with such interest are books of invention and travel, books of information rather than literature; but if it should ever be your lot to read Poe's Gold Bug to a group of these fellows and answer all their questions, you will discover in these interests a possible avenue to literature-loving.

But the boy has another instinct which leads directly to literature, the love of fighting and adventure. He wants a tale full of grim death and plenty of bloodshed. "Give me a highwayman," says Stevenson, "and I was full to the brim." This child is as far from comprehending church or state as was the child under eight, but biographies of men who have done concrete things are his favorite dish. Robin Hood, Richard the Lion-Heart, and the long list of heroes who did something the boy would care to do these make literature which the boy loves. There is a nice distinction here which must not be overlooked. When Philip Wakem told Tom Tulliver stories, Tom liked some, but rejected others. "He had I FREDERICK BURK, "From Fundamental to Accessory in the Development of the Nervous System," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. VI, No. 1, pp. 5-64.

small opinion of Saladin whose cimeter would cut a cushion in two in an instant; who wanted to cut cushions? That was a stupid story, and he didn't care to hear it again. But when Robert Bruce, on the black pony, rose in his stirrups and, lifting his good battleaxe, cracked at once the helmet and the skull of a too hasty knight at Bannockburn, then Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy, and if he had had a cocoanut at hand, he would have cracked it at once with the poker."

In the book good for the boy at this period there should be embodied in the incident which so stirs his blood, character, thought, and emotion -the vital truth of life capable of indefinite transformation in the boy's soul. But this is precisely the difference which marks off literature from sensational trash, distinguishing the epic poem from the dime novel, the Merchant of Venice from Dick the Highwayman. The boy will swallow either at first, as a child seeks a stimulating diet with no thought of nutrition. But a diet of the sound literature, with the unconscious digestion of good sense and truth, will soon produce the taste which will lead the boy to reject the poorer stuff of his own accord. It will bear repetition, however, that the literature you offer this boy will never compete with the trash, unless it has in it this element of vivid portrayal of the sort of incident he craves.

So much for the boy of this period; the girl is a much harder problem, for she usually reads a more dangerous class of books. She keeps her love of fairy tale and fancy, and this should be developed into the modern poetry and literature which have grown out of it. She seeks the love story earlier than the boy, and will delight in Evangeline and Miles Standish, which the boy at this age rejects. Her danger lies in the vast body of sentimental, false, religious novels whose weakening touch on character often accompanies the woman thru life, rendering her foolish and melodramatic, and desirous of posing as a saint where she should be strong and sensible. E. P. Roe's novels will serve for a type; Mrs. Wiggin's Polly Oliver is not to be trusted; and many of Miss Alcott's are not literature. The only remedy to be suggested is to let the girl read her brother's books at this period, and when the love story can no longer be ignored, give Scott and Dickens and the highest class of novels.

EARLY ADOLESCENCE - FROM FOURTEEN TO EIGHTEEN'

This period is a critical one. Emotions develop suddenly far ahead of judgment and intellect. Art, therefore, whether music or painting or literature, is a necessity in bringing youth into its full heritage. Now, for the first time, the thoughts and passions, the realities of the great world

I E. G. LANCASTER, "Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. V, No 1, pp. 61-128; GEORGE A. COE, "The Morbid Conscience of Adolescence," Transactions of the Illinois Society of Child Study, Vol. III, No. 2; G. STANLEY HALL, "Moral and Religious Training of Children and Adolescents," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. I, No. 2, pp. 196-210; G. E. PArtridge, "Reverie," Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. V, No. 4, pp. 445-75.

without, begin to penetrate to the young soul. Very important now are adolescent day-dreams. In them are practiced beforehand the acts of future life, and they serve the same purpose as a preparation for emergencies that play does in its development of the child's conception of life's duties. The whole breadth and fullness of after-life depend upon the range of these dreams; and the dreams are often widely influenced by the literature read. The craze for reading is a most legitimate tendency now; and such reading! Did you ever read as you read at that period, hungrily searching, searching for something greater than you had yet found, some answer to the problems that stirred you; in breathless hurry, details skipped, description skipped; generalizations, sentimental or religious, sometimes catching and copied in notebooks, sometimes skipped with the rest; worshiping now this character and now that; sure today that this book had solved everything, but finding life much the same to your great surprise-up and at the hunt again tomorrow; thru and thru the library, at a rate that horrified the elders, who could never see that reading is the main business of life, and all school lessons and home duties ought to be suspended, for the ship must "find itself" before it can be of much use in the carrying service?

There are three fates which may befall the young girl or boy at this period, which are all to be deprecated..

Most pitiful of all is that of the ignorant boy or girl, arriving at this age with no books for help, with ideas of love and marriage gained only from street and a low environment. The form work, the arithmetic, geography, and grammar of our public schools may well give way before the need of presenting these young people with noble ideas of the life they are to live, of love and marriage; for early associations in these matters cling for life. Even if results are not bad, a narrow life without horizon or.atmosphere is often compelled. Our public-school teachers, our librarians, must reach this class if possible.

The second class have gotten trash, possibly vile trash, full of false ideas of life. They are the ones to be won by better books.

The third are held in by some geographical, chronological, exegetical Amos Barton who considers it a crime to read a book for what you want from it, and wicked to skip or ignore obscure allusions. These instructions carefully followed, and one classic read in this thoro manner will effectually kill all aspirations toward literature. People so trained always respect the classics, advise you to read them, buy them for their bookshelves, and are deterred from ever peeping between the covers by the associations of that aforetime drudgery.

All this comes from a lack of knowledge of the early adolescent's growing points. He is just opening his eyes on the world and should be allowed opportunity to become familiar with it. The wider the range of his reading, the broader basis laid for detailed study hereafter. The more

he lives out the life of the race in varying experience, the larger the horizon he will command when he settles down for the close logical study that should follow. Only let it be wholesome literature. Let his mind catch fire at many points so that it be from a divine spark. Novels are for him that he may understand his own social life. Poetry is his now, if ever. Philosophy and religion dipped into, and the newborn sense of responsibility and the question Why? will respond to touch. He will not study history or science with delight in each detail, as did the younger boy. He wants to try his newborn powers of interpretation and learn only what it all means. He'll get back to accurate observation and detail later, when he finds a necessity of proof of theory or of new discovery. Let him try his new-found wings. If they are clipped or bound now, he will never soar far.

PRESENTATION IN GENERAL

If the interests of children at different periods are consulted and the right literature is at hand, the problem of making children love good literature is largely solved. But the presentation needs a word of suggestion. Man's power to get images from printed characters is a late acquisition. The human voice is a much older means of firing the imagination. Undoubtedly children may be best introduced to good literature by the story-teller or the good reader. There should be more reading aloud in home and library and school.

The much-edited literature with its critical notes is often so handled as to produce disgust. If the publishers only appreciated how many children in our schools have been compelled to learn the lives of the authors and where they graduated and what they wrote, before they have been allowed to laugh over Ichabod Crane or enjoy Snowbound, I believe they would omit the preface on the authors in their admirable masterpieces of British and American literature. For inducing a love for literature such preparation is as absurd as it would be to send a young man to study the family records as a means of getting him to fall in love with the daughter of the house. "I liked Ivanhoe after I got into it," says the boy. Begin in the middle of the book, if you can so lure the boy to read it. If he falls in love with that, he can be trusted to go back to the stupid preface.

The abbot in Richard Yea and Nay did not like "to have his periods truncated," but everyone who tells or reads stories to children must learn to truncate his own periods, and to judge when to do it by the faces of his audience.

A little three-year-old sits beside me at every meal, allowed to come to the same table with her elders. She demands a pickle because others seem to enjoy them. The small mouth puckers and the tears come, I REUBEN POST HALLECK, The Central Nervous System (Macmillan, 1897), p. 258.

for the sourness and pepperiness are against all her natural taste; but she moans bravely, "I like them ;" and soon, too soon, she will like them. No child in an environment of those who love good literature, if allowed to come to the table, will fail to acquire the taste. Probably the teacher should sing and should draw, but before we legislate in this respect, let us see that no teacher who knows not literature, and loves it not, is appointed to the charge of children of any age. A knowledge of children's interests and a love of literature in the teacher, and our problem is easily solved.

THE PLACE OF THE LIBRARY IN EDUCATION

BY MELVIL DEWEY, DIRECTOR NEW YORK STATE LIBRARY, ALBANY, N. Y. New conditions bring forth new problems and demand new solutions. Libraries in some form are almost as old as the race. It was steam when the bobbing cover of the teakettle suggested confinement of the vapor, but how different from what the word "steam means today! The lightning on Franklin's kite hardly gave promise of the telephone, phonograph, cable, and wireless telegraphy, and other modern miracles. The chief factor in our new conditions is quick and cheap transportation. Railroads, trolleys, express, mail, rural free delivery, telegraphs, cables, telephones compel us to readjust our ideas in the light of new conditions and possibilities. One result is the modern library.

The old education was completely revolutionized by the invention of printing, the real beginning of university extension. Once students walked hundreds of miles, perhaps begging their way, to sit within sound of the voice of some chosen teacher or to read some book securely chained to a pillar. But the volume which cost as much as a village has by the new process become as cheap as a lunch. The wisdom and learning, which had to be sought out with infinite labor, are printed and made accessible to the poorest. The world thus solved one of its greatest problems when it brought forth the traveling book, the precursor of the traveling library.

We know from our own experience and observation that the eye rather than the ear is the great gate to the human soul. Most ideas and ideals are chiefly drawn from reading. Books, magazines, and papers more than sermons, addresses, or conversation set in motion the effective currents. A recent careful investigation by educational experts as to what most influenced the lives of children showed that it was not the father, nor the mother, nor the school, but, as might have been predicted, the reading.

By common consent the supreme thing in education is the building of character; but character grows out of habits, habits are based on