[188] It is evident that the Gordon’s College industrial department is not a mere copy of any foreign school; on the contrary, I cannot help thinking that if Aberdeen has made that excellent move towards combining science with handicraft, the move was a natural outcome of what has been practised long since, on a smaller scale, in the Aberdeen daily schools. [189] What this school is now, I don’t know. In the first years of Alexander III.’s reign it was wrecked, like so many other good institutions of the early part of the reign of Alexander II. But the system was not lost. It was carried over to America. [190] To those readers who are really interested in the education of children, M. Leray, the French translator of this book, recommended a series of excellent little works “conceived,” he wrote, “in the very spirit of the ideas developed in this chapter. Their leading principle is that ‘in order to be soundly educative, all teaching must be objective, especially at the outset,’ and that ‘systematical abstraction, if it be introduced into the teaching without an objective (concrete) preparation, is noxious.’” M. Leray meant the series of initiations published by the French publishers, Hachette: _Initiation mathématique_, by C. A. Laisant, a book completed by the _Initiateur mathématique_, which is a game with small cubes, very ingenious and giving in a concrete form the proofs of arithmetics, the metric system, algebra and geometry; _Initiation astronomique_, by C. Flammarion; _Initiation chimique_, by Georges Darzens; _Initiation à la mécanique_, by Ch. Ed. Guillaume; and _Initiation zoologique_, by E. Brucker. The authors of these works had--it would not be just not to mention it--predecessors in Jean Mace’s _L’Arithmétique du grand-papa_, and René Leblanc, “whose excellent manual, _Les Sciences physiques à l’Ecole primaire_”--M. Leray says that from his own experience upon pupils from eleven to thirteen years old--“gives even to the dullest children the taste or even the passion for physical experiment.”