Such fine and ready recognition as that just illustrated shows not merely a penetrating observation of what is distinctive and characteristic, but also a measure of a higher power, that of seizing in one act of attention a complex or group of such marks. In truth, children’s observation, when close and methodical, as it is apt to be under the stimulus of a powerful interest, is often surprisingly full as well as exact. The boy, John Ruskin, was not the only one who could look for hours together at such an object as flowing water, noting all its changing features. A mother writes to me that her boy, when three and a half years old, received a picture-book, ‘The Railway Train,’ and looked at it almost uninterruptedly for a week, retaining it even at meals. “At the end of this time he had grasped the smallest detail in every picture.” By such occasional fits of fine exhaustive inspection, a child of the more intelligent sort will now and again come surprisingly near that higher type of observation, at once minute and comprehensive, which subserves, in somewhat different ways, scientific discovery and artistic representation. Many parents when watching these exceptional heights of childish scrutiny have indulged in fond dreams of future greatness. Yet these achievements are, alas, often limited to a certain stage of intellectual progress, and are apt to disappear when the bookish days come on, and the child loses himself hours together over his favourite stories. And in any case the germ of promise must possess a wondrous vitality if it resists all the efforts of our school-system to weed out from the garden of the mind anything so profitless as an observing faculty. Next to this work of observation we must include in the pre-conditions of childish thought at its best a lively retention of what is observed. Everybody who has talked much with little children must have been struck by the tenacity of their memories, their power of recalling after considerable intervals small features of an object or small incidents which others hardly noted, or, if they noted them at the time, have since forgotten. Stories of this surprising recollection may be obtained in abundance. A little girl when only nine months old was on a walk shown some lambs at the gate of a field. On being taken the same road three weeks later she surprised her mother by calling out just before arriving at the gate ‘Baa, baa!’ Later on children will remember through much longer intervals. A little boy aged two years and ten months when taken to Italy a second time after four or five months’ absence, remembered the smallest details, _e.g._, how the grapes were cut, how the wine was made and so forth.