=Æsthetic Appreciation.=—Æsthetic appreciation follows close upon recognition, for does he not try from very early days to catch the flower in its beauty of colour and grace of gesture with his own paintbrush? The wise mother is careful to open her child’s eyes to another kind of appreciation. She makes him look from a distance at a wild cherry-tree, or at a willow with its soft catkins, and she shows him that the picture on a Japanese screen has caught the very look of the thing, though when he comes to compare a single catkin or a single cherry blossom with those on the screen, there is no portraiture; and so he begins to learn at a very early age that to paint that which we see and that which we know to be there, are two different things, and that the former art is the more gratifying. =First-hand Knowledge.=—By-and-by he passes from acquaintance, the pleasant recognition of friendly faces, to knowledge, the sort of knowledge we call science. He begins to notice that there are resemblances between wild-rose and apple blossom, between buttercup and wood-anemone, between the large rhododendron blossom and the tiny heath floret. A suggestion will make him find out accurately what these resemblances are, and he gets the new and delightful idea of families of plants. His little bit of knowledge is real science, because he gets it at first-hand; in his small way he is another Linnæus. =Appreciative Knowledge and Exact Knowledge.=—All the time he is storing up associations of delight which will come back for his refreshment when he is an old man. With this sort of appreciative knowledge of things to begin with, the superstructure of exact knowledge, living science, no mere affair of text-books and examinations, is easily raised, because a natural desire is implanted. We might say the same of art, so far, any way, as the appreciation of art goes. The child who has been taught to see, appreciates pictures with discrimination. =How a Child sets up a New Relation.=—This is how a child goes to work to set up a new relation: a little girl of seven was handling an oar for the first time and remarked—‘What a lot of crab-water there is to-day!’ Then the next day—‘There’s not near so much crab-water to-day.’ She was asked—‘How do you know when it’s crab-water?’ ‘Oh! it’s so tough and you can’t get your oar through, and it knocks you off your seat!’ The child was all wrong, of course, but she was getting a scrap of real science and would soon get on the right track. How much better this than to learn out of a text-book, ‘the particles which constitute water have no cohesion, and may be readily separated by a solid substance.’