Since the time of Rousseau the emancipation of the child has steadily advanced; in society, he has taken his place. No longer is it incumbent upon him to be seen and not heard, no longer are his answers written out for him to memorise. Mr. E. V. Lucas, in the preface to his “Forgotten Tales of Long Ago,” calls attention to one story, “Ellen and George; or, The Game at Cricket,” culled from “Tales for Ellen,” by Alicia Catherine Mant, and in a characteristically droll manner he says, “Ellen’s very sensible question (as it really was) on p. 184, ‘Then why don’t you send the cat away?’ is one of the first examples of independent--almost revolutionary--thought in a child, recorded by a writer for children in the early days.” But the chains that have fallen from one door have been threatening to shackle another. Where once children could scarcely escape the moral, their imaginations now have no room for flight. Fancy is bestrided by fact. We must give reasons for everything. When Artemus Ward was asked why the summer flowers fade, he exclaimed, “Because it’s their biz, let ’em fade.” In nature study for children the general effect leaves a deeper impression than the technical structure. We do not know whether it is necessary to have Mr. Seton’s “Story of Wahb” vouched for as to accuracy in every detail. The scientific naturalists and story-writers are constantly wrangling, but there is not so much harm done to nature after all. An author who wilfully perverts fact, who states as true for the class what he knows to be a variant in the one coming under his observation, should be called to account. Otherwise a human interest attached to animals creates a wide appeal. But to use this vehicle for exploiting the commonplace, and what properly belongs to the text-book, should be condemned by the librarian. Mr. Tudor Jenks[1] humorously declares: “We ask our little ones to weep over the tribulations of a destitute cock-roach or a bankrupt tumble-bug.” And another critic of an earlier age writes of those same children--“They are delighted, it is true, with the romantic story of ‘Peter, the wild boy,’ but they have not the slightest curiosity to know the natural history, or Linnæan nomenclature of the pig-nuts he ate.”