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 into a few forbidding paragraphs, instead of being relegated to the University. Later come Ethelwulf and Osburh and Ethelbald and Ethelbert; and Sweyn Forkbeard and Olaf Trygvasson and Guhilda; and Rhodri and Llywelyn and Griffith ap Rees and Own Gwynedd and Egfrith and Malcolm Canmore and John Baliol. How many of us know, or need to know, a word about them, and their families, and their battles? Then the French wars are told in detail, and the pages bristle with dates and French names and genealogies; and the Wars of the Roses introduce a new series of repellent and useless names and dates. The child, in a word, is enormously overburdened with stuff which we adults would refuse to commit to memory or even to read. Yet this is a very modern manual, the last word in the adaptation of history to the mind of a child of ten or eleven.

The manual of European geography, also, is one of the most modern and enlightened that a teacher can choose, but it imposes a mass of pedantic and useless knowledge. Isotherms and isobars and the freezing of the Oder and Vistula and Danube; the navigability of the Ebro and Guadalquiver, and the wheat-growing areas of France and Spain, and the industries of Lille and Roubaix and Magdeburg and Lombardy and Smyrna; in a word, fully one-third of the details in the little manual—the details which it is most difficult to remember, which tax the child’s brain most, and will be forgotten soonest and with least loss—ought not to have been