Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/291

Rh objects. As for example. He used, in his Institution at Yverdun, to assemble the scholars round a little representation of the city, and let them tell him what they observed in it; then he would take them up one of the mountains round the city, and let them see the same image in its actual proportion and relationship to the surrounding country. Pestalozzi's Institute fell to pieces after a short success; his scholars were dispersed, and he himself, half insane with sorrow, ended his days in a cottage on the Jura. His method is no longer spoken of, but like the sap, which, though unseen, circulates through all the branches of the tree, his mode of instruction, and the devotion he gave to every branch of the work of education, still continue. Many a one has to thank the fact of having come in contact with him, for the good development of their whole lives. It was in a conversation with Pestalozzi, that C. F. Bitter received the impulse which determined his subsequently noble scientific activity—and which presented to us the earth and different parts of the world, in a plastically visible and conceivable form. In many respects, the spirit of Pestalozzi was obscure, impractical, simple, and even childish, but he had mother-thoughts—(idées Mères).

Such too had Père Girard, who desired to make the influence of the mother the principal means of the child's inner development, and the mother the child's principal instructor also. No man, and no woman either, has more profoundly comprehended the