best to have one method for all subjects of study, and that all the books should be in the same editions. The same methods will make knowledge real and sterling. Also for this purpose children must be taught as far as possible, not from books, but from heaven and earth, oaks and beeches. The studies of the whole life must be so arranged as to form an encyclopædia of knowledge. We must learn in such a way as to be able to communicate what we know. Ask much, retain what you are told, teach what you have retained. Multa roga, retine docta, retenta doce. A man who teaches another teaches himself.

To learn shortly and quickly you must pursue the following methods. Have one teacher for each class; a teacher with improved methods can teach a large number. For this purpose Comenius recommends methods many of which have become familiar to us. (1) Dividing the class into bodies of ten, each with a prefect. (2) Teaching nothing that is not heard and understood by all. (3) A previous explanation of the general subject of the teaching. (4) The teacher to be so placed that he can command the whole class. (5) Passing a question down the form from one to the other. (6) Allowing the children to ask any questions when school is over. (7) If no one answers a question to ask the whole class, and to praise the one who answers right. It is well to have uniform school books arranged in question and answer, with extracts on the walls. Comenius laid such stress on the importance of a carefully-arranged programme that in Hungary he only received scholars once a year. Primers expressed in short, simple language are useful. Combine the teaching of things with that of words, matter with style, learning with play. Avoid teaching what is useless, or matters of too special a character.

Comenius goes on to describe at length the methods

Four Classes of Schools.

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of teaching the sciences and the arts, languages, morals and piety. But it will be better to pass at once to a sketch of the arrangements of the reformed school. He contemplates when his system is complete the entire banishment of heathen writers from his curriculum. For discipline he adduces the example of the sun, which gives us light and warmth always, rain and wind often, thunder and lightning seldom. Comenius establishes four classes of schools: (1) the mother's school in every house; (2) the national school in every parish; (3) the gymnasium in every large town; (4) the university in every country or large province. In the lower grade of schools things are to be taught generally and in outline, and in the higher schools more in detail and more completely. The mother's school is to cultivate the external senses; the national school, the internal senses, imagination and memory, hand and tongue; the gymnasium, understanding and judgment; the university, the will. All children of both sexes are to attend the two first schools; the gymnasium is for those who are not destined for manual employment; the university is to train the future teachers and leaders of the community.

The mother's school is to teach the first beginnings of many things, things quite simple in themselves which we are accustomed to call by very hard names. A child in its earliest infancy will learn the simplest notions of metaphysics in the ideas, something, nothing, it is, it is not, where, when, like, and unlike; of physics, in the knowledge of water, earth, air, fire, rain, snow, ice, stones, iron, tree, plant, &c.; of optics, in the knowledge of light, darkness, shadow, colour, &c.; of astronomy, in the knowledge of heaven, sun, moon, stars, and their daily motions. In the same manner he will learn a little geography, chronology, history, arithmetic, geometry, statics, mechanics,

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dialectics, grammar, rhetoric, the art of poetry, domestic economy, a very little politics, and ethics. Moreover the child in these first six years will learn moderation, cleanliness, veneration, obedience, truthfulness, justice, love, with silence, patience, serviceableness, propriety, and religion. Comenius proposes to write a book for mothers, and a picture book for the instruction of children. The national school is to be a school of the mother tongue. It is absurd to learn a foreign language before you know your own. This school will teach reading, writing, arithmetic, measuring, singing, the Bible, history, and physical geography, and, lastly, the principal handicrafts. The course will be spread over six years, and be taught in six classes. Books are to be written for each class, the earlier containing the general principles, the later the particulars. These books are to be called by fancy names: the violet bed, the rose hedge, the grass plot. The school hours are to be four only, two before and two after the midday meal; the morning hours are to be devoted to the understanding and memory, the afternoon to the practice of the hand and voice. Nothing new is to be taught in the afternoon. The Latin school, the next stage, is to consist of six classes, and to occupy the years from twelve to eighteen. The classes are arranged in the following order: (1) grammar; (2) physics; (3) mathematics; (4) ethics; (5) dialectics; (6) rhetoric. The sciences themselves are to be taught in the morning, the history of them in the afternoon. The crown of the whole system is the university, in which all sciences are to be taught.

How striking and how powerful is the reform of education here proposed! How much more so must it have been in the age of Comenius! Many of his suggestions have become commonplaces to ourselves, but

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many of them as we read them pour a new light upon our minds, and seem to us the expression of an idea which has long been darkly sensible. The more we reflect on the method of Comenius, the more shall we see that it is replete with suggestiveness, and we shall feel surprised that so much wisdom can have lain in the path of schoolmasters for two hundred and fifty years, and that they have never stooped to avail themselves of its treasures.

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CHAPTER V.

THE NATURALISTS-RABELAIS AND MONTAIGNE.

THE kinds of education described in the two last chapters are educations of system. Their object is to make the scholar and the man of learning, although in one case the basis is clerical, in the other modern. Each of these methods would be severely criticised by the man of the world; whether a child were educated by the humanists or the realists it would appear to men of action that the schools had too much the best of it. The result in either case would rather be to form the student than the man fitted to take his part in the battle of life. We should, therefore, expect to find, side by side with these two directions of thought about education, a third, the object of which was to form the whole man, and which, although it did not neglect either letters or sciences, was inclined to believe that these might be learned without a parade of pedantic learning, and without interfering with the free growth of the man's nature. This school of educationalists may conveniently be called by the name of naturalists, not only because they professed to follow nature as much as Comenius, but because they set before themselves as the chief good the development of the entire nature, and not merely the intellect or any part of it. The principal representatives of this school are Rabelais and Montaigne. The second of these is more entirely a naturalist than the first, but they are closely connected together, and although Rabelais loads his scheme of ideal education