In the good time coming, geography will not begin with a book at all, as, in fact, it does not now with many teachers. It may end with one. It will begin with physical features in the very neighborhood in which the child lives--with brooks and lakes and hills and fields. Education should begin always with objects and phenomena. We are living in a text-book and museum age. First of all, we put our children into books, sometimes even into books that tell about the very things at the child's door, as if a book about a thing were better than the thing itself. So accustomed are we to the book-route that we regard any other route as unsystematic, unmethodical, disconnected. Books are only secondary means of education. We have made the mistake of considering them primary. This mistake we are rapidly correcting. As the book is relegated to its proper sphere, we shall find ourselves free to begin with the familiar end of familiar things. Not only are we to begin with common objects and events, but with the child's natural point of contact with them. Start with the child's sympathies; lead him on and out. We are to develop the child, not the subject. The specialists may be trusted to develop the subject-matter and to give us new truth. The child is first interested in the whole plant, the whole bug, the whole bird, as a living, grooving object. It is a most significant fact that most young children like plants, but that most youths dislike botany. The fault lies neither in the plants nor in the youths. A youth may study cells until he hates the plant that bears the cells. He may acquire a technical training in cells, but he may be divorced from objects with which he must live, and his life becomes poorer rather than richer. I have no objection to minute dissection and analysis, but we must be very careful not to begin it too early nor to push it too far, for we are not training specialists: we are developing the power that will enable the pupil to get the most from his own life. As soon as the pupil begins to lose interest in the plant or the animal itself, stop! There is still another reason for the study of the common things in variety: it develops the power to grasp the problems of the day and to make the man resourceful. A young man who has spent all his time in the schoolroom is usually hopelessly helpless when he encounters a real circumstance. I see this remarkably illustrated in my own teaching, for I have young men from the city and from farms. The farm boy will turn his hand to twenty things where the city boy will turn his to one. The farm boy has had to meet problems and to solve them for himself: this is sometimes worth more than his entire school training. Why does the farm boy make his way when he goes to the city?