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father knows the child's delight at being vigorously danced up and down, and much of this delight arises from the play then given to its muscles. As the child grows, the most unaccustomed positions into which it can be safely twisted are those from which it will receive the greatest pleasure. That is because play is thus given to the muscles in a form they do not often get, and Nature-always watchful on the child's behalf-cries, We will have some more of that. It does us good. As it is with the body, so it is with the mind, and Froebel's scheme of infant education is, for both, a system of gymnastics.

He begins with the newborn infant, and demands that, if possible, it shall not be taken from its mother. He sets his face strongly against the custom of committing the child during the tenderest and most impressible period of its whole life to the care and companionship of an ignorant nursemaid, or of servants who have not the mother's instinct, or the knowledge that can tell them how to behave in its presence. Only the mother should, if possible, be the child's chief companion and teacher during at least the first three years of its life, and she should have thought it worth while to prepare herself for the right fulfilment of her duties. Instead of tambour work, or Arabic, or any other useless thing that may be taught at girls' schools, surely it would be a great blessing if young ladies were to spend some of their time in an Infant Garden, that might be attached to every academy. Let them all learn from Froebel what are the requirements of a child, and be prepared for the wise performance of what is after all to be the most momentous business of their lives.

The carrying out of this hint is indeed necessary to the complete and general adoption of the infant-garden system. Froebel desired his infants to be taught only by women, and required that they should be women as well educated and refined as possible, preferring amiable unmarried girls. Thus he would have our maidens spending some part of their time in playing with little ones, learning to understand them, teaching them to understand; our wives he would have busy at home, making good use of their experience, developing carefully and thoughtfully the minds of their children, sole teachers for the first three years of their life; afterward, either helped by throwing them among other children in an Infant Garden for two

or three hours every day, or, if there be at home no lack of little company, having Infant Gardens of their own.

Believing that it is natural to address infants in song, Froebel encouraged nursery songs, and added to their \ number. Those contributed by him to the common stock were of course contributed for the sake of some use that he had for each; in the same spirit-knowing play to be essential to a child-he invented games; and those added by him to the common stock are all meant to be used for direct teaching. It does not in the least follow, and it was not the case, that he would have us make all nursery rhymes and garden sports abstrusely didactic. He meant no more than to put his own teaching into songs and games, to show clearly that whatever is necessary to be said or done to a young child may be said or done merrily or playfully; and although he was essentially a schoolmaster, he had no faith in the terrors commonly associated with his calling.

Froebel's nursery songs are associated almost invariably with bodily activity on the part of the child. He is always, as soon as he becomes old enough, to do something while the song is going on, and the movements assigned to him are cunningly contrived so that not even a joint of a little finger shall be left unexercised. If he be none the better, he is none the worse for this. The child is indeed unlucky that depends only on care of this description for the full play of its body; but there are some children so unfortunate, and there are some parents who will be usefully reminded by those songs, of the necessity of procuring means for the free action of every joint and limb. What is done for the body is done in the same spirit for the mind, and ideas are formed, not by song only. The beginning of a most ingenious course of mental training by a series of playthings is made almost from the very first.

A box containing six soft balls, differing in colour, is given to the child. It is Froebel's "first gift." Long before it can speak the infant can hold one of these little balls in its fingers, become familiar with its spherical shape and its colour. It stands still, it springs, it rolls. As the child grows, he can roll it and run after it, watch it with sharp eyes, and compare the colour of one ball with the colour of another, prick up his ears at the songs connected with his various games with it, use it as a bond of playfellowship with other children, practise with it first

efforts at self-denial, and so forth. One ball is suspended by a string, it jumps-it rolls-here-there-over-up; turns left-turns right-ding-dong-tip-tap-falls-spins; fifty ideas may be connected with it. The six balls, three

of the primary colours, three of the secondary, may be built up in a pyramid; they may be set rolling, and used in combination in a great many ways giving sufficient exercise to the young wits that have all knowledge and experience before them.

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Froebel's "second gift is a small box containing a ball, cube, and roller (the last two perforated), with a stick and string. With these forms of the cube, sphere, and cylinder, there is a great deal to be done and learned. They can be played with at first according to the child's own humour: will run, jump, represent carts, or anything. The ancient Egyptians, in their young days as a nation, piled three cubes on one another and called them the three Graces. A child will, in the same way, see fishes in stones, and be content to put a cylinder upon a cube, and say that is papa on horseback. Of this element of ready fancy in all childish sport Froebel took full advantage. The ball, cube, and cylinder may be spun, swung, rolled, and balanced in so many ways as to display practically all their properties. The cube, spun upon the stick piercing it through opposite edges, will look like a circle, and so forth. As the child grows older, each of the forms may be examined definitely, and he may learn from observation to describe it. The ball may be rolled down an inclined plane and the acceleration of its speed observed. Most of the elementary laws of mechanics may be made practically obvious to the child's understanding.

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The third gift" is the cube divided once in every direction. By the time a child gets this to play with he is three years old-of age ripe for admission to an Infant Garden. The Infant Garden is intended for the help of children between three years old and seven. Instruction in it always by means of play-is given for only two or three hours in the day; such instruction sets each child, if reasonably helped at home, in the right train of education for the remainder of its time.

An Infant Garden must be held in a large room abounding in clear space for child's play, and connected with a garden into which the children may adjourn whenever weather will permit. The garden is meant chiefly to as

sure, more perfectly, the association of wholesome bodily exercise with mental activity. If climate but permitted, Froebel would have all young children taught entirely in the pure, fresh air, while frolicking in sunshine among flowers. By his system he aimed at securing for them bodily as well as mental health, and he held it to be unnatural that they should be cooped up in close rooms, and glued to forms, when all their limbs twitch with desire for action, and there is a warm sunshine out of doors. The garden, too, should be their own; every child the master or mistress of a plot in it, sowing seeds and watching day by day the growth of plants, instructed playfully and simply in the meaning of what is observed. When weather forbids use of the garden, there is the great, airy room which should contain cupboards, with a place for every child's toys and implements; so that a habit of the strictest neatness may be properly maintained. Up to the age of seven there is to be no book work and no ink work; but only at school a free and brisk, but systematic strengthening of the body, of the senses, of the intellect, and of the affections, managed in such a way as to leave the child prompt for subsequent instruction, already comprehending the elements of a good deal of knowledge.

We must endeavour to show in part how that is done. The third gift—the cube divided once in every direction— enables the child to begin the work of construction in accordance with its own ideas, and insensibly brings the ideas into the control of a sense of harmony and fitness. The cube divided into eight parts will manufacture many things; and, while the child is at work helped by quiet suggestion now and then, the teacher talks of what he is about, asks many questions, answers more, mixes up little songs and stories with the play. Pillars, ruined castles, triumphal arches, city gates, bridges, crosses, towers, all can be completed to the perfect satisfaction of a child, with the eight little cubes. They are all so many texts on which useful and pleasant talk can be established. Then they are capable also of harmonious arrangement into patterns, and this is a great pleasure to the child. He learns the charm of symmetry, exercises taste in the preference of this or that among the hundred combinations of which his eight cubes are susceptible.

Then follows the "fourth gift," a cube divided into eight planes cut lengthways. More things can be done

with this than with the other. Without strain on the mind, in sheer play, mingled with songs, nothing is wanted but a liberal supply of little cubes, to make clear to the children the elements of arithmetic. The cubes are the things numbered. Addition is done with them; they are subtracted from each other; they are multiplied; they are divided. Besides these four elementary rules they cause children to be thoroughly at home in the principle of fractions, to multiply and divide fractions-as real things; all in good time it will become easy enough to let written figures represent them-to go through the rule of three, square root, and cube root. As a child has instilled into him the principles of arithmetic, so he acquires insensibly the groundwork of geometry, the sister science.

Froebel's "fifth gift" is an extension of the third, a cube divided into twenty-seven equal cubes, and three of these further divided into halves, three into quarters. This brings with it the teaching of a great deal of geometry, much help to the lessons in number, magnificent accessions to the power of the little architect, who is provided, now, with pointed roofs and other glories, and the means of producing an almost infinite variety of symmetrical patterns, both more complex and more beautiful than heretofore.

The “sixth gift" is a cube so divided as to extend still farther the child's power of combining and discussing it. When its resources are exhausted and combined with those of the "seventh gift" (a box containing every form supplied in the preceding series), the little pupil-seven years old-has had his inventive and artistic powers exercised, and his mind stored with facts that have been absolutely comprehended. He has acquired also a sense of pleasure in the occupation of his mind.

But he has not been trained in this way only. We leave out of account the bodily exercise connected with the entire round of occupation, and speak only of the mental discipline. There are some other "gifts that are brought into service as the child becomes able to use them. One is a box containing pieces of wood, or pasteboard, cut into sundry forms. With these the letters of the alphabet can be constructed; and, after letters, words, in such a way as to create out of the game a series of pleasant spelling lessons. The letters are arranged upon a slate ruled into little squares, by which the eye is guided in preserving

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