“We must leave that an open question, Mrs. Henderson; but what I do contend for is, that children have illimitable capacity for all knowledge which reaches them in some sort through the vehicle of the senses: what they _see_ and delight in you may pin endless facts, innumerable associations, upon, and children have capacity for them all: nor will they ever treat you to lack-lustre eye and vacant countenance. Believe me ‘’tis their nature to’ hunger after knowledge as a labouring man hungers for his dinner; only, the _thing_ must come in the first, the words which interpret it in the second place.” “You mean that everything they see is to lead to a sort of object lesson?” “Indeed I do not! Object lesson! talkee, talkee, about a miserable cut-and-dried scrap, hardly to be recognised by one who knows the thing. I should not wonder if it were better for a child to go without information than to get it in this unnatural way. No, let him see the thing big and living before him, behaving according to its wont. Specimens are of infinite use to the scientist whose business it is to generalise, but are misleading to the child who has yet to learn his individuals. I don’t doubt for a minute that an intelligent family out for a holiday might well cover all the ground we have sketched out, and more; but who in the world is to teach them? A child’s third question about the fowls of the air or the flowers of the field would probably floor most of us.” “That’s coming to the point. I wondered if we ever meant to touch our subject again to-night. To skim over all creation in an easy, airy way is exciting, but, from an educational standpoint, ’tis comic to the father with a young swarm at home who care for none of these things.”