Every specimen of literature in this collection is a complete unit or is at least a section easily detached--like an Uncle Remus or an Arabian Nights story--from its original setting. This principle precluded the inclusion of extracts from such children's classics as _Gulliver's Travels_, _Robinson Crusoe_, and _Treasure Island_. No survey of children's literature is complete without an examination of such books as these; but they can easily be supplied in inexpensive editions and used as supplementary to this collection. It is evident that not every masterpiece of writing for children could be included in this volume; but it is believed that no selection has been included that is not a masterpiece. This belief is based primarily on the fact that most of the specimens have been chosen and approved by generation after generation of children, culled out from the light and worthless as by an unerring hand, through the most pragmatic of tests. The only distinct type of children's literature not represented in this collection is the drama, which is omitted because the editor was not able to find a dramatic unit that would satisfy the ideal he had in mind: that it be dramatic, that it be literary, that it be brief, yet complete within itself, and that it be an original selection, not a dramatization of some classic. For a similar reason no story of American Indian life was put into the collection, though this exclusion does not mean the omission of a type of literature. A large number of Indian stories, both of Indian folklore and myth, and of adventures with Indians, were carefully read; but not one of them, in the editor's opinion, came up to the standard of a masterpiece and was, at the same time, brief enough to be practicable for this book. Some undoubted masterpieces from literatures lying outside the recognized circle of the American child's "culture"--such, for example, as the Japanese folk stories--also have been omitted. Other splendid specimens of juvenile literature, as stories from Kipling's _Jungle Books_ and essays from Burroughs, have been omitted because of copyright restrictions. No one realizes more clearly than does the editor of this collection that no single book can include all the material that a class studying children's literature should have before it. There are dozens of children's books, for example, that a class should know or know about. An appendix has therefore been placed at the end of this collection, which lists the reading indispensable to a student of children's literature. These books should be in the school library, easily accessible to the students, and they should be considered as an integral part of the body of children's literature.