Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/134

124 'head boy' of a kindergarten, conducted by a noted kindergarten teacher, who could not recognize a quantity of three things without counting them by ones.… There is surely something lacking either in the kindergarten as a preparation for the primary school, or in the primary school as a continuation of the kindergarten, when a child, after full training in the kindergarten, together with two years' work in the primary school, is considered able to undertake nothing (in arithmetic) beyond the number twenty." These authors enter into a very elaborate analysis of the number concept, and lay down with extreme care what they conceive to be the best lines of approach to the youthful mind in the teaching of arithmetic. It seems to us, however, that the number concept will dawn upon the youthful mind without much effort on the part of teachers when the time arrives for it to be of use. In most childish games the element of number is involved. The smallest girl with a skipping rope will get into the way of counting her skips with a more or less distinct conception of the difference between one number and another. So in the matter of "turns" in any game in which two or more are engaged: if one child wants to have more "turns" than it is entitled to, the others have to be very young indeed not to protest. In a tug-of-war with, say, four on each side, the addition of a fifth to one side without permission would make trouble in the camp. When candies are being distributed the arithmetical sense is generally keenly alive.

We conclude by commending Miss Carter's article to the careful consideration of all who are interested in educational problems. She writes with a certain tinge of vexation, and, without meaning it, may have somewhat forced the case against her kindergarten children.

The Atlantic Monthly deserves credit, we must add, for the many able and timely articles which it has lately been publishing on educational topics—articles stamped by the breadth of thought and high culture which are characteristic of our contemporary, and eminently adapted to assist in delivering our educational methods from bondage to a mechanical routine, and bringing them nearer to the simplicity and freedom of Nature.

the United States turned its ambition toward the tropics, the question as to whether its political institutions can be extended to the inhabitants there has been widely discussed. As might be expected, the philanthropic advocates of expansion have insisted that "the blessings of freedom and civilization" are not limited by latitude or longitude. Any other position would, of course, have involved them in the charge of inconsistency and hypocrisy. But certain philosophic expansionists, as they may be politely called, have taken the opposite view. "It is a cardinal fact," they say, quoting the language of a recent essay of Mr. Benjamin Kidd, "that in the tropics the white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water.… Neither physically, morally, nor politically can he be acclimatized in the tropics." Still quoting his language, they say again that "a clearer insight into the laws that have shaped the course of human evolution must bring us to see that the process which has gradually developed the energy, enterprise, and social efficiency of the race northward, and which has left less richly endowed in this respect the people inhabiting the regions where the conditions of life are easiest, is no passing accident, nor the result of circumstances changeable at will, but