Page:Preparation of the Child for Science.djvu/76

72 many advantages over any other implement yet devised; a child can ornament cards by setting long straight stitches in a way which causes beautiful curves to grow under his hands without his knowing why or how, and without any pattern being set for him.

In the kindergarten attached to Bedales School the children generate designs suitable for tiles or carpets by the grouping and intersection of parabolas, curves of pursuit, &c. In many of these designs lines are first drawn which represent the ribs of some natural leaf; and these are then used as co-ordinates, by means of which a leaf-outline is evoked as the envelope of a system of tangents drawn in silk. Some of these designs have been noticed in the Inspector's report that he had 'found that the teaching of the calculus was leading to a most interesting evolution of design.'

The beauty of some of the designs is unquestionable; and there can be no second opinion about the value of the method, as training, from the point of view of geometry as well as from that of art. What is not quite so obvious at first sight is its bearing on the training of the unconscious mind for science. Without the slightest intellectual strain it puts the children through that normal sequence of orderly attention to classification and detail, interspersed