“My own view,” he says, “is that we should speak in the child’s hearing only of those lesser forms of evil, physical or moral, with which it is already acquainted.” On this ground he would rule out all the cruel step-mother stories, the unnatural father stories, and so on; though, probably, most of us would make an exception in favour of Cinderella, and its charming German rendering _Aschenbrödel_. _Fables_, according to our author, should form the basis of moral instruction at the second stage; probably when children emerge from the nursery. We have all grown up on “Æsop’s Fables,” and “The Dog in the Manger,” “King Log,” “The Frog and the Stork,” have passed into the current coinage of our thought. But it is interesting to be reminded that the so-called Æsop’s fables are infinitely older than the famous Greek story-teller, and are, for the most part, of Asiatic origin. We are reminded that it is important to keep the origin of this fable before us, and exercise discrimination in our choice of those which we use to convey moral ideas to our children. Such fables as “The Oak and the Reed,” “The Brazen and the Earthen Pot,” “The Kite and the Wolf,” Mr. Adler would reject, as breathing of Eastern subserviency and fear. But possibly for the very reason that the British backbone is little disposed to bow before man or circumstances, the lessons of life culled by peoples of other habits and other thoughts may be quite specially useful to the English child. Anyway, we should lose some of the most charming fables if we cut out all that savours of the wisdom of the East. The fables Mr. Felix Adler specially commends are those which hold up virtue for our praise or evil for our censure; such as _Cowardice_, the fable of the “Stag and the Fawn;” _Vanity_, “The Peacock and the Crane;” _Greediness_, “The Dog and the Shadow.” “In the third part of our primary course, we shall use selected stories from the classical literature of the Hebrews, and later on from that of Greece, particularly the ‘Odyssey’ and the ‘Iliad.’”