nd cultural value. This is
especially true of folk-tales and folk-songs.--P.P. Claxton,
_United States Commissioner of Education_.

I. AVAILABLE TYPES OF TALES

From all this wealth of accumulated folk-material which has come down
to us through the ages, we must select, for we cannot crowd the child
with all the folk-stuff that folk-lore scientists are striving to
preserve for scientific purposes. Moreover, naturally much of it
contains the crudities, the coarseness, and the cruelties of primitive
civilization; and it is not necessary that the child be burdened with
this natural history of a past society. We must select from the past.
In this selection of what shall be presented to the child we must be
guided by two standards: First, we owe it to the child to hand on to
him his literary heritage; and secondly, we must help him to make of
himself the ideal man of the future. Therefore the tales we offer must
contribute to these two standards. The tales selected will be those
which the ages have found interesting; for the fact that they have
lived proves their fitness, they have lived because there was
something in them that appealed to the universal heart. And because of
this fact they will be those which in the frequent re-tellings of ages
have acquired a classic form and therefore have within themselves the
possibility of taking upon them a perfect literary form. The tales
selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed out, contain
the interests of children; for only through his interests does the
child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man.
They will be those tales which stand also the test of a classic, the
test of literature, the test of the short-story, and the test of
narration and of description. The child would be handicapped in life
to be ignorant of these tales.

Tales suitable for the little child may be viewed under these seven
classes of available types: (1) the accumulative, or clock story; (2)
the animal tale; (3) the humorous tale; (4) the realistic tale; (5)
the romantic tale; (6) the old tale; and (7) the modern tale.

I. The Accumulative Tale.

The accumulative tale is the simplest form of the tale. It may be:--

(1) A tale of simple repetition.

(2) A tale of repetition with an addition, incremental iteration.

(3) A tale of repetition, with variation.

Repetition and rhythm have grown out of communal conditions. The old
stories