air neat; and probably a dozen other toilet requisites, of
which the masculine mind has no notion or is expected to affect
ignorance, will be found ready at hand to inculcate the lesson of
nursery routine.

In this ingenious way the materialistic side of life is deliberately
forced upon the attention of the child. Everything is providently
supplied that would be calculated to occupy her attention with
commonplace facts instead of with fancies. The child is not encouraged
to make a living creature of this inanimate dummy, to tell it stories,
or to exercise her imagination in some other way. She is provided with a
round of prosaic and extremely material duties, and her mind is
carefully kept within these bounds by details of soap and
feeding-bottles, which do not offer scope for any flight of imagination.

It would be far better to place a bundle of rags in the arms of a little
girl, and to tell her to imagine it to be a baby. She would, if left to
herself, with no other resource than her own invention, soon learn to
exercise her dormant powers of imagination and originality.

With the same lack of forethought boys are surrounded from earliest
infancy with objects designed to keep their minds within the narrow
limits of fact. Their playthings are ships, fire-engines, miniature
railways, water-pumps, and such-like. The imagination is allowed as
little play as possible. Interest is carefully concentrated upon the
mechanical details of spars, sails, rigging, watertight compartments,
wheels, rods, cranks, levers, and the thousand-and-one items which go to
make up a mechanical contrivance. Great care is taken in constructing
toy models to reproduce at least the chief points of the original, in
order to give them a supposititious educational value. The parents then
fondly imagine that, in stocking the nursery with these abominations,
they are largely assisting in the development of the boy's mind.

To people who do not understand children it is difficult to convey any
adequate idea of the fatal result produced upon the dawning intellect by
this introduction of materialism into the nursery. The imaginative will
at once say that the contention is too far fetched. Certainly the
pernicious effects of such toys as have been described are not easily
discernible; therein lies the insidiousness of this retarding process.
But to those who have watched, as I have done, the natural development
of an intelligent child's powers of reflec