wrote for my own amusement and instruction
some of his conversation-lessons, as we may call them, with his
questions and explanations, and the answers of the children. . . .
To all who ever reflected upon education it must have occurred that
facts and experiments were wanting in this department of knowledge,
while assertions and theories abounded. I claim for my father the
merit of having been the first to recommend, both by example and
precept, what Bacon would call the experimental method in education.
If I were obliged to rest on any single point my father's credit as
a lover of truth, and his utility as a philanthropist and as a
philosophical writer, it should be on his having made this first
record of experiments in education. ... In noting anecdotes of
children, the greatest care must be taken that the pupils should not
know that any such register is kept. Want of care in this particular
would totally defeat the object in view, and would lead to many and
irremediable bad consequences, and would make the children affected
and false, or would create a degree of embarrassment and constraint
which must prevent the natural action of the understanding or the
feelings. ... In the registry of such observations, considered as
contributing to a history of the human mind, nothing should be
neglected as trivial. The circumstances which may seem most trifling
to vulgar observers may be most valuable to the philosopher; they
may throw light, for example, on the manner in which ideas and
language are formed and generalised.'

Edgeworth and his daughter Maria brought out their joint work,
Practical Education, in 1798. Maria adds: 'So commenced that
literary partnership, which for so many years was the pride and joy
of my life.' We who were born in the first half of the nineteenth
century can remember the delight of reading about Frank and
Rosamund, and Harry and Lucy, and feel a debt of gratitude to the
writers who gave us so many pleasant hours.

Edgeworth's patience in teaching was surprising, as Maria remarks,
in a man of his vivacity. 'He would sit quietly while a child was
thinking of the answer to a question without interrupting, or
suffering it to be interrupted, and would let the pupil touch and
quit the point repeatedly; and without a leading observation or
exclamation, he would wait till the steps of reasoning and invention
were gone through, and were converted into certainties. . . . The
tranquillising effect of th