on to them.

Children differ very much in their attitude towards books. One child
quite early in the second year will be happy poring over picture
books, while another will seldom glance at the contents and finds
pleasure only in turning over the pages, opening and shutting them,
and carrying them from place to place. Such differences are natural
enough and foreshadow perhaps the permanent characteristics that
divide men and women, and produce in later life men of thought and men
of action, women who are Marthas and women who are Marys.
Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that there is danger in a
training that is too one sided, and that books and toys have both
their part to play in developing the powers of the child. All the
activities of the child should be used in as varied a way as possible.
The eye is but one doorway to knowledge and understanding, the ear is
another, the hand a third.

From pictures an imaginative child will derive very strong
impressions, and mothers should be careful in their choice. It is
foolish to confuse the growth of aesthetic perceptions by presenting
children with books which depict children as grotesquely ugly beings
with goggle eyes and heads like rubber balls. Children love animals
and endow them with all their own reasoning attributes, and in
stories of the home life of rabbits, and bears, and squirrels they
take a pure delight. Books of the "Struwwelpeter" type are less to be
recommended. The faults which they are intended to eradicate become
peculiarly attractive from much familiarity. A little boy of two and a
half who resolutely refused all food for some days was in the end
detected to be playing the part of that Augustus, once so chubby and
fat, who reduced himself to a skeleton, saying, "Take the nasty soup
away; I don't want any soup to-day." Tales of naughty children who
meet with a distressing fate may either frighten the child unduly, or
else produce in a child of inquiring mind the desire to brave his fate
and put the matter to the test. Pictures should not be terrifying or
horrible. Ogres devouring children are out of place as subjects for
pictures and may cause night-terrors.

Children should be taught to be careful of books and toys. The
indestructible book, generally falsely so called, is often responsible
for the immediate dissolution of all others less protected which come
to hand. The sympathy which little children have with the sufferings
of all inanimate obje