In addition to the flowers chosen for beauty of colour, this lover of children and of gardens wants Canterbury Bells to ring, Forget-me-nots because they can stand so much watering, and “flowers with faces,” pansies, sweet-peas, lupins, snapdragons, monkey flowers, red and white dead nettles, and red clover to bring the bees.  Some of these are chosen because the child can do something with them, can find their own uses for them, can play with them.  And, speaking generally, playing with them is the child’s way of appreciating both plant and animal.  Picking feathery grasses, red-tipped daisies, sweet-smelling clover and golden dandelions; feeding snapdragons with fallen petals, finding what’s o’clock by blowing dandelion fruits, paying for dock tea out of a fairy purse, shading poppy dolls with woodruff parasols, that is how a child enjoys the beauty of colour, scent and form.  He gets not more but less beauty when he must sit in a class and answer formal questions.  “Must we talk about them before we take the flowers home?” asked a child one day; “they are so pretty.”  Clearly, the “talk” was going to lessen, not to deepen the beauty.  And animals?  The child plays with cat and dog, he feeds the chickens, the horse and the donkey, he watches with the utmost interest caterpillar, snail and spider, but he does not want to be asked questions about them—­he does want to talk and perhaps to ask the questions himself—­nor does he always want even to draw, paint or model them.  Mostly he wants to watch, and perhaps just to stir them up a little if they do not perform to his satisfaction.  He does not necessarily mean to tease, only why should he watch an animal that does nothing?  “The animals haven’t any habits when I watch them,” a little girl once said to Professor Arthur Thomson.

All children should live in the country at least for part of the year.  They should know fields and gardens, and have intercourse with hens and chickens, cows and calves, sheep and lambs; should make hay and see the corn cut.  They would still want the wisely sympathetic teacher, not to arouse interest—­that is not necessary, but to keep it alive by keeping pace with the child’s natural development.  It is not merely living in the country that develops the little child’s interest in shape and colour and scent into something deeper.  People still “spend all their time in the fields and forests and see and feel nothing of the beauties of Nature, and of their influence on the human heart”; and this, said Froebel—­and it is just what Mr. Clutton Brock is saying now—­is because the child “fails to find the same feelings among adults.”  Two effects follow:  the child feels the want of sympathy and loses some respect for the elder, and also he loses his original joy in Nature.