every man born into the world has some peculiar and individual quality necessary to the well-being of the world; a quality that can only become fully operative and useful under conditions favourable to its development, and that if the man is lost to society something more is lost than a mere unit. It is the true function of education and social science to see that every man has the environment and the opportunities that will enable him to fulfil his potential capacities and the purpose of his being. To achieve that is the goal of civilization, and the ultimate purpose that gives an ethical meaning to organised society.

SCHOOL NURSERIES

NOTHING raises so directly the question as to what education really is as a discussion on the subject of the education of very young children. There is a tacit assumption on the part of the general public that education is something that provides a painful acquaintanceship with reading, writing, arithmetic, and certain other branches of learning that depend for sustenance on these main trunks. A popular saying that associates the acquisition of manners with a trifling payment seems a dim survival of a nobler conception of education as a process that maketh man. Education either makes man or unmakes man. There is to-day-at any rate in the crowded centres of civilization-no middle course. There, at any rate, the individual cannot stand idle all the day long. He is working in the school of life, and is being made or unmade. Education, as the best thinkers define that

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term, is the process by which he is made. It is a process that lasts from birth to death. It is a process that human art can hasten and glorify. But the process is not a matter of art at all. It is not reading, writing and arithmetic. Great men have been made without these arts, and notorious criminals have been made by them. It is, of course, in our present stage of civilization, essential that these arts should be known to all men. that is no reason to confound them with the term education. Such a proposition is, indeed, obvious, and there would be no reason in drawing attention to it were it not for the fact that the course of educational history in the nineteenth century, the crying need of that epoch, obscured the obvious, and made men feel that if these arts were distributed among the people all would at once become very well with the world. This idea became so deeprooted that the educational policy of the country was pledged to the process of conveying these priceless gifts even to those who were as fit to receive them as a new-born babe is

to receive into its frame the food of middle life. Consider the case of the new-born babe. Complex as are the physiological processes that are proceeding in his body and brain, he at first exhibits only one psychological phenomenon. That is physical hunger. Before long he gradually developes another form of hunger. That is mental hunger. The brain is growing far faster than the body, and the wide eyes are watching with insatiable curiosity a tolerable world. The mind is drinking in facts at an inconceivable pace. The overwhelming conceptions of time and space are assimilated in a manner that would be impossible at any later age. The trailing clouds of glory are shut out, and the twilight of three dimensions flows swiftly in. At this point one comment of vital importance is necessary. The baby from now onwards, for, perhaps, some years, is an entirely different being in one respect from the elder child. As we all know with the elder child, the educational problem is to inspire him or her with interest; to create interest in school work

and life work generally. A certain dullness, doubtless due to the manners and methods of the elder folk, falls upon the child. He creeps unwillingly to school. But with the baby, who has not learnt that life is full of artificial limitations, this is not so. He is interested in everything, everybody. His mind drinks from every fountain, eats the fruit of every tree. He is still in paradise, and feeds freely on the tree of knowledge. His body is equally unreasonable. There is nothing, sufficiently small, that he would not eat, and there are few things, in the course of the long history of man, that he has not eaten. The death rate among infants is sufficient evidence of this. It is still about nine times the death rate among adults. Here, however, we have to observe an interesting distinction. On the whole, mothers make all the efforts in their power to feed a baby as it should be fed, and they are helped by admirable merchants, who outstrip all other benefactors in the variety and the publicity of their wares. If a baby dies from mal-nutrition to-day, it is not the fault of those who make it