harmony by learning to sing. [Sidenote: no geography, history, or reading,] This body and sense training should be the nearest approach to an intellectual training at this period. Rousseau condemns the usual unnatural practice of requiring pupils to learn so much before they have reached the proper years. In keeping with his ‘negative’ education, he asks rhetorically: “Shall I venture to state at this point the most important, the most useful, rule of all education? It is not to gain time, but to lose it.” During his childhood Emile is not to study geography, history, or languages, upon which pedagogues ordinarily depend to exhibit the attainments of their pupils, although these understand nothing of what they have memorized. “At the age of twelve, Emile will hardly know what a book is. But I shall be told it is very necessary that he know how to read. This I grant. It is necessary that he know how to read when reading is useful to him. Until then, it serves only to annoy him.” [Sidenote: though moral training through ‘natural consequences.’] Incidentally, however, in order to make Emile tolerable in society, for he cannot entirely escape it, he must be given the idea of property and some ideas about conduct. But this is simply because of practical necessity, and no moral education is to be given as such, for, “until he reaches the age of reason, he can form no idea of moral beings or social relations.” He is to learn through ‘natural consequences’ until he arrives at the age for understanding moral precepts. If he breaks the furniture or the windows, let him suffer the consequences that arise from his act. Do not preach to him or punish him for lying, but afterward affect not to believe him even when he has spoken the truth. If he carelessly digs up the sprouting melons of the gardener, in order to plant beans for himself, let the gardener in turn uproot the beans, and thus cause him to learn the sacredness of property. As far as this moral training is given, then, it is to be indirect and incidental. [Sidenote: In boyhood, intellectual training through curiosity concerning natural phenomena.]