Fortunately for the history of education, there were critics in the sixteenth century who did not conform to the dogma of linguistic discipline, and who called attention to the need of educational reform. Whatever the merits of the classical languages, protested these critics, they must derive their value ultimately from the rank they take as literature. The protest of Rabelais early in the century was not only one of the first but one of the most effective charges against contemporary practices. In his famous satire he intrusted the young giant Gargantua to the care and training of the humanist educator Tubal Holofernes, who spent five years and a quarter in teaching him to say his A B C’s backward; thirteen years on Donatus’ Latin grammar and the composition of Latin verses and sentences; thirty-four years more in the study of Latin eloquence, after which the schoolmaster dies, when, as Rabelais concluded, Gargantua had grown more ignorant, heavy, and loutish. “In this confused and ribald allegory,” says Mr. James P. Munroe,[9] “Rabelais led the way out of ancient superstition into modern science. More than this, he taught in it that the study of Nature, observation of her laws, imitation of her methods, must be at the root of every true system of education. He showed that the Nature spirit is the true spirit of good teaching. Ever since his day civilized mankind has been trying to learn this lesson of his and to apply it in the schools. For three centuries the leaders in education, under his direct inspiration, have been slowly and painfully transforming the false pedagogy of the cloister into the true pedagogy of out-of-doors. Writers and teachers, schools and universities, have been engaged in a halting and irregular struggle to transfer education from a metaphysical to a physical basis, to lead it away from the habit of deductive speculation into one of inductive research. This transfer Rabelais made boldly and at once. He did not, of course, elaborate the educational ideal of to-day, but he plainly marked out the lines upon which that ideal is framed. He taught truth and simplicity, he ridiculed hypocrisy and formalism, he denounced the worship of words, he demanded the study of things, he showed the beauty of intellectual health, of moral discipline, of real piety. Best of all, he enunciated the supreme principle of Nature, which is _ordered freedom_.”