“Training of the senses, as it is not very happily called, is, if it is anything, so much intellectual exercise.… And nothing can be more absurd than to suppose it is not necessary.… By a judicious training in observation you begin to make a child think when it is five years old.… If a child is to think to any purpose, he must think as he goes on; as soon as the material he has gathered begins to oppress him he must think it into shape, or it will tend to smother intellectual life at its dawn, as a bee is drowned in its own honey, for want of cells in which to store it.” It is in describing how the little child collects pebbles, twigs, leaves, etc., that Froebel writes: “The child loves all things that enter his small horizon and extend his little world. To him the least thing is a new discovery; but it must not come dead into the little world, nor lie dead therein, lest it obscure the small horizon and crush the little world.… It is the longing for interpretation that urges the child to appeal to us … the intense desire for this that urges him to bring his treasures to us and lay them in our laps.”--_E., p. 73._ The help we are told to give at first is merely to supply the child with a name, for “through the name the form is retained in memory and defined in thought.” Later the mother is told to provide “encouragement and help, that the child may weave into a whole what he has found scattered and parted.” As a type of the help considered necessary we have: “‘Mother, are the pigeons and hens birds, for the pigeons live in pigeon-houses and the chickens don’t fly?’ ‘Have they no feathers, child; have they no wings? Haven’t they two legs like all birds?’ ‘Are the bees and butterflies and beetles birds, too: for they have wings and fly much higher.…’ ‘Look, they have no feathers, they build no nests.’”--_M., p. 56._ In another passage Froebel calls it not only advisable but necessary that the parents, without being pedantic or over-anxious, should connect the child’s doings with language, because this “increases knowledge, and awakens that judgment and reflection (die Urtheilskraft und das Nachdenken), to which man, left to Nature, does not attain sufficiently early.”--_E., p. 79._ Giving names, and helping in classification is surely a sufficient parallel to Dr. Ward’s “thinking the material into shape,” and just as the latter says that by such training you can “make a child think” when it is five years old, so Froebel in his chapter on “Man in Earliest Childhood” makes his ideal father “sum up his rule of conduct in a few words,” declaring that: “To lead children early to think, this I consider the first and foremost object of child-training.”--_E., p. 87._