114 LANGUAGE AND MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN

showing a preference for something other than a story-book was
from schools where one or more first-rate specialist teachers had
succeeded in making their subject a live one. Usually they had
opened up an alluring prospect of their subject through the
gateway of romance.

A great deal may be done at the junior school stage to give
children a glimpse of the romance of the subjects they will have
to study later. Thus, in preparation for advanced work in
science they can be helped to read with pleasure such books as
Mrs Buckley's Eyes and JVb Eyes and Fairyland of Science, Mrs
Gatty's Parables from Nature, and Fabre's Book of Insects, These
will give children an attractive view of the biological field. It
is this sort of preparatory reading which boys have missed who
find at thirteen that they can get no pleasure out of books like
Founder's Wonders of Physical Science or the simpler of the published
versions of the Christmas lectures for children at the Royal
Institute,

Again the boy who has not read with enjoyment at ten or
eleven Shackleton's South: the Story of the 1914-17 Expedition,
Scott's Voyages of the "Discovery," Whymper's Scrambles amongst
the Alp$, Patterson's Man-eaters of Tsavo, or accounts of the travels
and explorations of men like Nansen, Livingstpne, and Mungo
Park, has usually missed that preparatory reading in geography

hich begins normally at seven with such stori

which begins normally at seven with such stories as Miss
Overseas Children or Miss Chance's Children in Other Lands and ends
at ten 6r eleven with the thorough enjoyment of such books as
Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Coral Island, and Martin Rattler,
As in science and geography, so in history no genuine interest
in the work in hand and no disposition to study the subject can be
counted on in the senior school unless the appetite of the children
has been whetted by the reading of the stories of the Greek
heroes and of books like Theras, the Story of an Athenian Boy\ so|
that it will find satisfaction later in Henty's stories, and in books1
like The Children of the Mew Forest and The White Company.
It is by the encouragement of wide reading in easy books that
present the romantic aspects of their subjects, by vivid oral
teaching* by the skilful use of good pictures, and by the provision
of opportunties for practical activity in connexion with what is
being learned, that the appetite of the child can best be stimulated
and his curiosity turned to good account.
22. THE PRACTICE OF NARRATION
To go back to what was 3aid earlier, we can say that an early
in teaching children to study is to provide a relatively easy'