=Self-selection and Self-appropriation.=—Given a bountiful repast of ideas, the process of natural selection soon begins. Tennyson with his— “Our elm tree’s ruddy-hearted blossom-flake is fluttering down,” “Ruby-budded lime,” “Black as ash-buds in the front of March,” has done more to make field botanists than ever the Science and Art Department was able to undo with its whole apparatus of lectures and examinations. Here, again, Browning gives us a poet’s impulse to a nature student:— “By boulder stones where lichens mock The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit Their teeth to the polished block.” Ideas of nature, of life, love, duty, heroism,—these children find and choose for themselves from the authors they read, who do more for their education than any deliberate teaching; just for this reason, that these vital ideas are self-selected and self-appropriated. I shall touch later upon the burning question of a curriculum which shall furnish children, not with dry bones of fact, but with fact clothed upon with the living flesh, breathed into by the vital spirit of quickening ideas. A teacher objected the other day that it was difficult to teach from Freeman’s _Old English History_, because there were so many stories; not perceiving that the stories were the living history, while all the rest was dead. =Inherited Parsimony in Lesson-Books.=—I should like to say here that a sort of unconscious, inherited parsimony, coming down to us from the days when incomes were smaller and books were fewer, sometimes causes parents to restrict their children unduly in the matter of lesson-books—living books, varied from time to time, and not thumbed over from one schoolroom generation to another until the very sight of them is a weariness to the flesh. But the subject of the intellectual sustenance of children upon ideas is so large and important that I must content myself with bald suggestions. Further considered, such subjects as the following might be useful:— (1) Children’s tastes in Fiction, in Poetry, in books of Travel and Adventure, in History, in Biography (most stimulating subject). (2) Ideas of life and conduct that children assimilate from their reading. (3) Ideas of duty assimilated in the same way. (4) Ideas of nature that children seize. (5) The leading, vitalising ideas in subjects of school study, as geography, grammar, history, astronomy, Cæsar’s Commentaries, etc., etc. Let me again refer the reader to Mr Ruskin’s description of the ‘Captain Figures’ at the head of each of the Liberal Arts, in his account of the Spanish Chapel; and conclude with a wise sentence of Coleridge’s concerning the method of Plato, which should be always present to the minds of persons engaged in the training of children:—