Up to the present time Nursery Schools have been provided by voluntary effort entirely, and far too little encouragement has been given to those enlightened headmistresses of Infant Schools who have tried to give to their lowest classes Nursery School conditions.  Since the passing of Mr. Fisher’s Education Bill, however, we are entitled to hope that soon, for all children in the land, there may be the opportunity of a fair start under the care of “a person with breadth of outlook and imagination,” the equivalent of Froebel’s “skilled intelligent gardener.”

In the following chapter an attempt is made to explain how it is that so many years ago Froebel reached his vision of what a child is, and of what a child needs, and the considerations on which he based his “Nursery School for Little Children” or “Self-Teaching Institution.”

CHAPTER II

THE BIOLOGIST EDUCATOR

     Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,
     Not God’s, and not the beasts’:  God is, they are,
     Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

“A large bright room, ... a sandheap in one corner, a low tub or bath of water in another, a rope ladder, a swing, steps to run up and down and such like, a line of black or green board low down round the wall, little rough carts and trolleys, boxes which can be turned into houses, or shops, or pretence ships, etc., a cooking stove of a very simple nature, dolls of all kinds, wooden animals, growing plants in boxes, an aquarium.”

Any Froebelian would recognise this as the description of a more or less ideal Kindergarten or Nursery School, and yet the writer had probably never read a page that Froebel wrote.  On the contrary, she shows her entire ignorance of the real Kindergarten by calling it “pretty employments devised by adults and imposed at set times by authority.”

The description is taken from a very able address on “Child Nature and Education” delivered some years ago by Miss Hoskyns Abrahall.  It is quoted here, because, for her conception of right surroundings for young children, the speaker has gone to the very source from which Froebel took his ideas—­she has gone to what Froebel indeed called “the only true source, life itself,” and she writes from the point of view of the biologist.

There exists at present, in certain quarters, a belief that the Kindergarten is old-fashioned, out of date, more especially that it has no scientific basis.  It is partly on this account that the ideas of Dr. Maria Montessori, who has approached the question of the education of young children from the point of view of medical science, have been warmly welcomed by so large a circle.  But neither in England nor in America does that circle include the Froebelians, and this for several reasons.  For one thing, much that the general public has accepted as new—­and in this general public must be included weighty names,