But the teaching of history as it has been carried on for some years, would have to travel a long way to arrive at this central point of view. As an educational subject a great deal has been done to destroy its value, by what was intended to give it assistance and stimulus. The history syllabus and requirements for University Local and other examinations have produced specially adapted text-books, in which facts and summaries have been arranged in order with wonderful care and forethought, to "meet all requirements"; but the kind intention with which every possible need has been foreseen between the covers of one text-book has defeated its own purpose, the living thing is no longer there--its skeleton remains, and after handling the dry bones and putting them in order and giving an account of them to the examining body, the children escape with relief to something more real, to the people of fiction who, however impossible to believe in, are at least flesh and blood, and have some points of contact with their own lives. "Of course as we go up for examinations here," wrote a child from a new school, "we only learn the summaries and genealogies of history and other subjects." A sidelight on the fruit of such a plan is often cast in the appreciations of its pupils. "Did you like history?" "No I hated it, I can't bear names and dates." "What did you think of so and so?" "He wasn't in my period." So history has become names and dates, genealogies and summaries, hard pebbles instead of bread. It is unfair to children thus to prejudice them against a subject which thrills with human interest, and touches human life at every turn, it is unfair to history to present it thus, it is misleading to give development to a particular period without any general scheme against which it may show in due proportion, as misleading as the old picture-books for children in which the bat on one page and the man on the other were of the same size.