And, again, from the point of view of science, this study of earlier stages is useful because the simple things are often the best interpreters of more complex, the early of the late, and it is the vision of the whole in perspective to the very beginning which gives the clue to the real meaning of the latest. “Students have come to realize,” says Professor Stewart Paton (in the Popular Science Magazine 8,1912,166), “that in the ... amoeba, jelly-fish, crab or fish, is to be found the key that will eventually open the book ... (of) the most complex psychic manifestations.” This is true also of libraries—the oldest, smallest and rudest give a clue to the more complex, and it may be added, parenthetically, the library is itself in fact the most complex psychic manifestation in the objective Universe. Beginnings thus, though small, are the roots of the matter. This is so well recognized in the field of science as to have become an axiom, and in the study of any class of things nowadays the aim is to trace each kind of thing—plant, animal, idea or social institution back to its beginning. Evolution has taught us to expect a genealogical series back and back to very simple forms and the method of all science has become what is called historical or genetic. Natural science is not satisfied until the most complex animals and plants have been traced back through all their complexities to single cell origins, and, if Browning may be believed, the aim of humane and ethical science too does not rest short of the same effort “to trace love’s faint beginnings in mankind”. This study of the beginnings is, moreover, not only at the bottom of the method of modern science but of the method of modern teaching. Every man, it is said, in his life history retraces the history of his race, and the race history of man is above all things a history of developing ideas. This has two aspects significant for the method of teaching. As investigating science must trace every complex idea back to its simplest beginnings, so teaching traces the idea forward from those beginnings to its latest form. The law by which man in his individual development of ideas must retrace the history of the race applies to every idea or group of ideas and it is doubtful therefore if any one ever learns anything rightly in life unless he patiently follows the idea of it from its simplest beginnings to its latest form—the path being sometimes a steady growth in value, sometimes a rise and fall again towards extinction. The historical method of teaching, therefore, is the only method which can be called natural.