We are aware that parents, for the most part, enthusiastically testify that their children enjoy the kindergarten very much; but may it not be possible for children, as well as their elders, to like what is not altogether for their good? We do not consider that we can safely follow all a child's likes and dislikes in the matter of diet, or companionship, or hours for going to bed and rising. Sensible people do not think that everything children crave should be given to them, or that more than a limited number of excitements should be thrown in their way. It is one of the drawbacks to wealth that the possessors of it can hardly refrain from half burying their children beneath a profusion of toys, and crowding upon them such a multitude of distractions, in the way of travel, shows of all kinds, and society, that all chance of development from within is well-nigh destroyed. It has been remarked by many that the children of to-day who rarely read a story that is not illustrated, have much less imagination than the children of former days, who in reading had to make and did make their own mental pictures. Yet what pampered child ever said he or she was pampered too much? What overflattered child ever asked for a surcease of flattery? What child suffering from an excessive amount of social excitement ever requested that it might have less of such unhealthy stimulation? The inference we draw is that it does not settle the question finally in favor of the kindergarten to say that children enjoy it. If Miss Carter's experience is to be depended on, the result at least of some kindergarten training is to stimulate the vanity of the little ones and give them a quite undue sense of their self-importance. They would enjoy that while it lasted, poor little things! but it would be a bad preparation for the subsequent work of education. One broad fact stares the educational world in the face, and that is that the average child has to-day, at a given age, a less capacity for learning than the average child of twenty-five or thirty years ago. What share the kindergarten may have had in this retardment of intellectual development is a question which deserves investigation. Messrs. McLellan and Dewey, in their work on The Psychology of Number (International Education Series), say (page 154): "We have known the seven-year-old 'head boy' of a kindergarten, conducted by a noted kindergarten teacher, who could not recognize a quantity of three things without counting them by ones.... There is surely something lacking either in the kindergarten as a preparation for the primary school, or in the primary school as a continuation of the kindergarten, when a child, after full training in the kindergarten, together with two years' work in the primary school, is considered able to undertake nothing (in arithmetic) beyond the number twenty." These authors enter into a very elaborate analysis of the number concept, and lay down with extreme care what they conceive to