d that application must always depend upon instinct,
tact, appreciation, as well as upon the scientific law. Even the aid
that science can contribute is given slowly; meanwhile we must work with
these children and lift them to the largest life.

It is in relation to this practical work of education that our effort to
study children gets its human value. There are always two points of
view possible with reference to life. From the standpoint of nature
and science, individuals count for little. Nature can waste a thousand
acorns to raise one oak, hundreds of children may be sacrificed that
a truth may be seen. But from the ethical and human point of view the
meaning of all life is in each individual. That one child should be lost
is a kind of ruin to the universe.

It is this second point of view which every parent and every teacher
must take; and the great practical value of our new study of children
is that it brings us into personal relation with the child world, and so
aids in that subtle touch of life upon life which is the very heart of
education.

It is therefore that certain phases of the study of child life have
a high worth without giving definite scientific results. Peculiarly
significant among these is the study of the autobiographies of
childhood. The door to the great universe is always to the personal
world. Each of us appreciates child life through his own childhood,
and though the children with whom it is his blessed fortune to be
associated. If then it is possible for him to know intimately another
child through autobiography, one more window has been opened into the
child world--one more interpretative unit is given him through which to
read the lesson of the whole.

It is true, autobiographies written later in life cannot give us the
absolute truth of childhood. We see our early experiences through the
mists, golden or gray, of the years that lie between. It is poetry as
well as truth, as Goethe recognized in the title of his own self-study.
Nevertheless the individual who has lived the life can best bring us
into touch with it, and the very poetry is as true as the fact because
interpretative of the spirit.

It is peculiarly necessary that teachers harassed with the routine of
their work, and parents distracted with the multitude of details of
daily existence, should have such windows opened through which they may
look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood.
The result