Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/98

 law of beauty, which is also the condition of greatest serviceableness. No child arm could project such an axe. But could there be a more useful exercise devised for children than the study (playful or otherwise) of this arm? To get, unconsciously, a right notion of its proportions is surely a good preparation for the unconscious projection of a tool that will fit it—and this is the kind of exercise that children will choose if left to themselves, and will persist in for a long time.

The meaning of this unconscious selection was not dwelt upon, or even noted perhaps, by Pestalozzi or Froebel, but it is not therefore a thing to be ignored by all who come after them.