Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/396

382 psychology unite in crying out against the waste of the years from three to six. Says Prof. Bain, in his Education as a Science: "The brain grows with great rapidity up to seven years of age. It then attains an average weight of forty ounces in the male; from that time it grows, but at a diminishing rate, till twenty, when it has nearly attained its greatest size." It would seem pretty clear that there is some connection between intellectual power and brain-growth. Whatever it can take hold of, it can fix and ingrain with an intensity proportionate to its rate of growth, and we begin too late if we allow time to pass by when good and useful impressions could be made with perfect safety to physical and mental health, and nearly all thoughtful teachers and psychologists agree that for certain classes of impressions the first six or seven years of life are worth all the rest put together: it is at this period that curiosity to see and to know is at its intensest."

In the town of Christchurch, England, we hear of children under six put to making the delicate chains that connect the mainsprings of watches to the works, because when older their fingers are too large and clumsy; and of still smaller ones in London who are made to rub in the nitrate of silver used in dyeing sealskins, because their tiny slender fingers can pass effectively in and out among the hairs; but there can be no delight in this work to the poor child-slave, such as is felt in the kindergarten, where, seated at a table in company with others of his own age, the child plaits strips of straw or leather or colored paper, or models from clay a nest of birds and its eggs, or forms a miniature house and garden and fence, from pretty materials after a pattern of his own designing, in which his mind has passed through the natural stages of perception, observation, comparison, judgment, conclusion, and production. Then a pretty song, descriptive of some incident or process, in which all join, is followed by mild gymnastic exercises adapted to the childish frame, and thus, as the Baroness von Billow says: "In playful work or workful play the child finds a relief for, and a satisfaction of, his active impulses, and receives an elementary groundwork for all later work, whether artistic or professional." Many of the articles made are intended as special gifts for some birthday or for Christmas, or they are sold to procure the means of dressing a Christmas tree for some poor or sick child, for it is one of the fundamental principles of the system to teach the child consideration for others, and also to give him a true respect for useful work—"work which is at the same time a fulfillment of duty is the only true basis of moral culture." But it is necessary that such work should satisfy the child's instinct of love, and the object of it must be to give pleasure to others, and a system of education such as is demanded