(Bardeen of Syracuse, New York), has lately reproduced the old book with the help of photography. § 62. And yet as instruments of teaching, these books, _i.e._ the _Vestibulum_ and the _Janua_ and even the _Orbis Pictus_ which in a great measure superseded both, proved a failure. How shall we account for this? Comenius immensely over-estimated the importance of knowledge and the power of the human mind to acquire knowledge. He took it for the heavenly idea that _man should know all things_. This notion started him on the wrong road for forming a scheme of instruction, and it needed many years and much experience to show him his error. When he wrote the _Orbis Pictus_ he said of it: “It is _a little book_, as you see, of no great bulk, yet a brief of the whole world and a whole language;” (Hoole’s trans. Preface); and he afterwards speaks of “this our _little encyclopædia_ of things subject to the senses.” But in his old age he saw that his text-books were too condensed and attempted too much (Laurie, p. 59); and he admitted that after all Seneca was right: “Melius est scire pauca et iis recté uti quam scire multa, quorum ignores usum. It is better to know a few things and have the right use of them than to know many things which you cannot use at all.” § 63. The attempt to give “information” has been the ruin of a vast number of professing educators since Comenius. Masters “of the old school” whom some of us can still remember made boys learn Latin and Greek Grammar and _nothing else_. Their successors seem to think that boys should not learn Latin and Greek Grammar but _everything else_: and the last error I take to be much worse than the first. As Ruskin has neatly said, education is not teaching people to know what they do not know, but to behave as they do not behave. It is to be judged not by the knowledge acquired, but the habits, powers, interests: knowledge must be thought of “last and least.” § 64. So the attempt to teach about everything was unwise. The means adopted were unwise also. It is a great mistake to suppose that a “general view” should come first; this is not the right way to give knowledge in any subject. “A child begins by seeing bits of everything—here a little and there a little; it makes up its wholes out of its own littles, and is long in reaching the fulness of a whole; and in this we are children all our lives in much.” (Dr. John Brown in _Horæ Subsecivæ_, p. 5.) So nothing could have been much more unfortunate than an attempt to give the young “a brief of the whole world.” _Compendia, dispendia._