The manual of early English history which I have before me is a characteristically modern production. Instead of the grim old paragraphs, in alternate large and small type, on which the eye of the child nearly always gazes with reluctance, there are vivid sketches of life in successive ages. There is danger, perhaps, that the child will pass to the opposite extreme, and take the manual as a story-book, a work of ephemeral interest; at least careful guidance will be needed to enable it to select the necessary material which is to be memorised. But the chief defect still is the overloading of the pages with matter of no serious usefulness. The doings of Ethelbert and Ethelfrith and Redwald and Penda and Offa, whose very names bewilder the young mind, are compressed into a few forbidding paragraphs, instead of being relegated to the University. Later come Ethelwulf and Osburh and Ethelbald and Ethelbert; and Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf Trygvasson and Guhilda; and Rhodri and Llywelyn and Griffith ap Rees and Own Gwynedd and Egfrith and Malcolm Canmore and John Balliol. How many of us know, or need to know, a word about them, and their families, and their battles? Then the French wars are told in detail, and the pages bristle with dates and French names and genealogies; and the Wars of the Roses introduce a new series of repellent and useless names and dates. The child, in a word, is enormously overburdened with stuff which we adults would refuse to commit to memory or even to read. Yet this is a very modern manual, the last word in the adaptation of history to the mind of a child of ten or eleven. The manual of European geography, also, is one of the most modern and enlightened that a teacher can choose, but it imposes a mass of pedantic and useless knowledge. Isotherms and isobars and the freezing of the Oder and Vistula and Danube; the navigability of the Ebro and Guadalquiver, and the wheat-growing areas of France and Spain, and the industries of Lille and Roubaix and Magdeburg and Lombardy and Smyrna; in a word, fully one-third of the details in the little manual--the details which it is most difficult to remember, which tax the child's brain most, and will be forgotten soonest and with least loss--ought not to have been inserted. The whole plan is academic and pedantic: it is built on the supposition that the child must have a summary of the kind of knowledge which a geographical expert would have to master. And in later years the child must laboriously cover the whole globe with the same unnecessary attention to useless details.