But, while even in the mother school the infant was to make a beginning with geography, history, and various sciences, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and the rudiments of economics, politics, ethics, metaphysics, and religion, his attainment was not expected to be as formidable as the names of the subjects sound. It was to consist merely in understanding simple causal, temporal, spatial, and numerical relations; in distinguishing sun, moon, and stars, hills, valleys, lakes, and rivers, and animals and plants; in learning to express oneself; and in acquiring proper habits. It was, in fact, not unlike the training of the modern kindergarten. In a similar way each succeeding stage is to enlarge the body of knowledge along all these lines. “The different schools are not to deal with different subjects, but should treat the same subjects in different ways; throughout graduating the instruction to the age of the pupil and the knowledge that he already possesses. In the earlier schools everything is taught in a general and undefined manner, while in those which follow the information is particularized and exact.” Moreover, beyond the university, which, like the lower schools, was to make teaching its chief function, Comenius held it to be important that somewhere in the world there should be a ‘didactic college’ devoted to scientific investigation, in which learned men from all nations should coöperate. Such an institution would form a logical climax to his system of schools, bearing the same relation to them that the stomach does to the other members of the body by “supplying blood, life, and strength to all.” [Sidenote: Often fanciful analogies,] =The Method of Nature.=--The way in which this pansophic instruction should be given, Comenius also intended to have in full accord with sense realism. He insists that the ‘method of nature’ must be observed and followed, and then shows how nature accomplishes all things ‘with certainty, ease, and thoroughness,’ in what respects schools have deviated from the principles of nature, and how they can be rectified only by following her plans. These principles concerning the working of nature were laid down _a priori_, but it is probable that they had been previously worked out inductively from his schoolroom experience. At times, though, they were put in the form of fanciful analogies. For example, he declares that because a bird by nature hatches her young in the spring or early part of the year, schools have erred (1) in not requiring education to begin in the springtime of life, or boyhood, and (2) in not selecting the springtime of the day, or the morning hours, for study. [Sidenote: but more fully inductive elsewhere.]