tor. Column 6 shows the advantage of the kindergarten children, without regard to nationality, over all others in a striking way. Most of the latter tested were from the charity kindergartens, so that superior intelligence of home surroundings can hardly be assumed. Many of them had attended kindergarten but a short time, and the questions were so ordered that the questioners who had a special interest in the kindergarten should not know till near the end of their tests whether or not they had ever attended it. On the other hand, a somewhat larger proportion of the children from the kindergarten had been in the country. Yet on the whole we seem to have here an illustration of the law that we really see not what is near or impresses the retina, but what the attraction is called and held to, and what interests are awakened and words found for. Of nearly thirty primary teachers questioned as to the difference between children from kindergartens and others, four saw no difference, and all the rest thought them better fitted for school-work, instancing superior use of language, skill with the hand and slate, quickness, power of observation, singing, number, love of work, neatness, politeness, freedom from the benumbing school-bashfulness, or power to draw from dictation. Many thought them at first more restless and talkative generally a trifling and transient fault.

There are many other details and more or less probable inferences, but the above are the chief. The work is laborious, involving about fifty thousand items in all; and as but few of the Berlin methods or results except statistical tables have been published, these results are it is believed to be in some degree the first opening of a new field, which should be specialized and single concept-groups subjected to more detailed study with larger numbers of children. It should also be applied to older children and youth, as the writer is already attempting to do. The difficulty is to get essential points to test for. If these are not characteristic and typical, all such work is worthless. We believe that not only practical educational conclusions of great scope and importance, may be based on or illustrated by such results, but, tho deeply sensible of many sources of inaccuracy which may limit their value, that they are of great importance for anthropology and psychology. It is characteristic of an educated man, says Aristotle in substance, not to require a degree of scientific ex

actness on any subject more than that which the subject admits. As scientific methods advance not only are increasingly complex matters subjected to them, but probabilities (which guide nearly all our acts) more and more remote from mathematical certainty are valued.

Steinthal tells an apposite story of six German gentlemen riding socially in a coupé all day, and as they approached the station where they were to separate one proposed to tell the vocation of each of the others, who were strangers to him, if they would write without hesitation an answer to the question “What destroys its own offspring?" One wrote, Vital force. “You,” said the questioner," are a biologist." Another wrote, War. "You," he said, "are a soldier." Another wrote, Kronos, and was correctly pronounced a philologist; while the publicist revealed himself by writing Revolution, and the farmer by writing She-bear. This fable teaches the law of apperception. As Don Quixote saw an army in a flock of sheep and a giant in a windmill, as some see all things in the light of politics, others in that of religion, education, etc., so the Aryan races apperceived the clouds as cows and the rain as their milk, the sun as a horse, the lightning as an arrow, and so the children apperceive rain as God pouring down water; thunder as barrels, boards falling, or cannon; heaven as a well-appointed nursery, &c., &c. They bring more or less developed apperceiving organs with them into school, each older and more familiar concept gaining more apperceptive power over the newer concepts and percepts by use. The older impressions are on the lurch, as it were, for the new ones, and mental freedom and all-sidedness depends on the number and strength of these appropriating concepts. If there are very few, as with children, teaching is, as some one has well said, like pouring water from a big tub into a small narrow-necked bottle. A teacher who acts upon the now everywhere-admitted fallacy that knowledge of the subject is all that is needed in teaching children pours at random on to more than into the children, talking to rather than with them, and gauging what he gives rather than what they receive. All now agree that the mind can learn only what is related to other things learned before, and that we must start from the knowledge that the children really have and develop this as germs, otherwise we are showing objects that

require close scrutiny only to indirect vision, or talking to the blind of color. Alas for the teacher who does not learn more from his children than he can ever hope to teach them! Just in proportion as teachers do this do they cease to be merely mechanical and acquire interest, perhaps enthusiasm, and surely an allcompensating sense of growth in their work and life.

From the above tables it seems not too much also to inferI. That there is next to nothing of pedagogic value the knowledge of which it is safe to assume at the outset of school-life. Hence the need of objects and the danger of books and wordcram. Hence many of the best primary teachers in Germany spend from two to four or even six months in talking of objects and drawing them before any beginning of what we till lately have regarded as primary-school work. II. The best preparation parents can give their children for good school-training is to make them acquainted with natural objects, especially with the sights and sounds of the country and talk about them, and send them to good and hygienic as distinct from most fashionable kindergartens. III. Every normal-school pupil should be required, as an essential part of his training, and every teacher on starting with a new class or in a new locality, to make sure that his efforts along some lines are not utterly lost, should undertake to explore carefully section by section children's 'minds with all the tact and ingenuity he can command and acquire, to determine exactly what is already known. IV. The concepts which are most common in the children of a given locality are the earliest to be acquired, while the rarer ones are later. This order may generally be assumed in teaching as a natural one, e.g. apples first and wheat last (Cf. Table I.). This order, however, varies very greatly with every change of environment, so that the results of exploration of children's minds in one place cannot be assumed to be valid for those of another save within comparatively few concept-spheres.

The writer is under special obligations, first to Mrs. Quincy Shaw, who founded and supports the comprehensive system of charity kindergartens in Boston, and also to Miss L. B. Pingree, their superintendent, and to the special questioners Miss S. E. Wiltse, Miss L. H. Symonds, Miss E. M. Parker, and Miss C. Scandlin.

G. STANLEY HALL.

T

MODERN COMEDY.

O assert that modern English comedy owes more to Molière than it does to Shakspere is likely to give a shock of surprise to the general reader. The current accounts of the course of English dramatic literature have nowhere set forth this fact fully: the ordinary critic of the English drama either ignores it or is ignorant of it; yet it is a fact, and not a paradox.

The influence of Shakspere on modern English comedy, on the comic plays acted in England during the past two centuries, is indisputable, of course, but it is less in quantity and less in quality than the influence of Molière. It would be an easy task to go through the list of the successful English comedies acted since the death of Shakspere and to pick out the plays, like Tobin's "Honeymoon" and Knowles's "Hunchback," written consciously in the imitation-however remote-of the Shaksperian manner. It would not be easy to name half of the English comedies whose form and substance had been unconsciously moulded by the example of Molière. The explanation of the seeming paradox that the comic dramatists of England have been more beholden to the greatest dramatist of France than to the greatest dramatist of England is not far to seek. Indeed, it lies in a nutshell. Modern English comedy is not made on the model of Elizabethan comic drama, and it is made-immorality apart-on the model of the Restoration comic drama. Now the comic dramatists of the Restoration-immorality apart-were the children of Molière. Between the Elizabethan Restoration was a great

dramatists and the dramatists of the gulf; they did not think alike; they did not feel alike; and the larger manner of the earlier writers was hopelessly impossible to the younger. (Dryden is an exception; and Dryden is in essen

tials a betarded Elizabethan; at times he ventured to draw from the nude, and some of the naked wildness of mankind got into his work; but he stood alone and lonely among his contemporaries, who had no feeling for the nakedness of things and whose men and women were all clothed and in their right mind.) The vigorous outline and the bold stroke of the Elizabethans were not only impossible but even repugnant to the Restoration writers, corrupted as they had been by the pseudo-classic revival at the French court. They were no longer large-minded enough to take in the greater beauty of mighty Elizabethans. Yet they were men of understanding and taste, and they could appreciate to the full the delicacy and restraint and concentration of the new French comedy, which Molière had marked with his image and superscription. Unfortunately for themselves, when they borrowed the point of view of the great Frenchman they forgot to borrow his sobriety and his self-respect. They were wholly lacking in the skill which enabled him to treat with delicacy and without offence a risky subject—and there are few subjects more risky than that of the "Amphitryon," for example. Where Molière glided gently and with skilful step, his imitators trod clumsily and crushingly; and it is small wonder that they soon found themselves in the mire. They had a keen wit and a lively humor and a fertile invention, aided when it flagged by reminiscences of France; but they had no moral taste, no decency; and their plays have decayed rapidly for want of what would keep them sweet. But as manners and morals improved, these plays of the Restoration writers began to be thrust from the stage into the closets of librarians, until there is not a single comic drama of that period holding the stage to-day. The playgoer of the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century has no chance to see acted any comedy of Etherege, Dryden, Shadwell, Congreve, Farquhar, Wycherley, or Vanbrugh; and he could hardly sit through the performance if he had.

It is true also that no play of the Elizabethan period-save Shakspere's and a single piece by a single one of his contemporaries-keeps the stage. It may be that we should be as much shocked by the brutal violence of the minor Elizabethans as by the brutal indecency of the minor Restoration writers. The fact remains that the playgoer of to-day can never hope to see acted