Involuntarily the question arises: Do the children know, or do they not know, what is so well explained to them in these conversations? If the pupils know it all, then, upon occasion, in the street or at home, where they do not need to raise their left hands, they will certainly be able to tell it in more beautiful and more correct Russian than they are ordered to do. They will certainly not say that a horse is "covered" with wool; if so, why are they compelled to repeat these questions just as the teacher has put them? But if they do not know them (which is not to be admitted except as regards the suslik), the question arises: by what will the teacher be guided in what is with so much unction called the programme of questions,--by the science of zoology, or by logic? or by the science of eloquence? But if by none of the sciences, and merely by the desire to talk about what is visible in the objects, there are so many visible things in objects, and they are so diversified, that a guiding thread is needed to show what to talk upon, whereas in objective instruction there is no such thread, and there can be none. All human knowledge is subdivided for the purpose that it may more conveniently be gathered, united, and transmitted, and these subdivisions are called sciences. But outside their scientific classifications you may talk about objects anything you please, and you may say all the nonsense imaginable, as we actually see. In any case, the result of the conversation will be that the children are either made to learn by heart the teacher's words about the suslik, or to change their own words, place them in a certain order (not always a correct order), and to memorize and repeat them. For this reason all the manuals of this kind, in general all the exercises of development, suffer on the one hand from absolute arbitrariness, and on the other from superfluity. For example, in Mr. Bunákov's book the only story which, it seems, is not copied from another author, is the following: