ish in the moat around
the house; how many fathoms long ought the line to be? I want to put
up a swing between those two trees; would four yards of rope be enough
for it? They say that in the other house our room will be twenty-five
feet square; do you think that will suit us? Will it be larger than
this? We are very hungry; which of those two villages yonder can we
reach soonest, and have our dinner?"

As the sense of sight is the one least easily separated from the
judgments of the mind, we need a great deal of time for learning how to
see. We must for a long time compare sight with touch, if we would
accustom our eye to report forms and distances accurately.

Without touch and without progressive movement, the keenest eye-sight
in the world could give us no idea of extent. To an oyster the entire
universe must be only a single point. Only by walking, feeling,
counting, and measuring, do we learn to estimate distances.

If we always measure them, however, our eye, depending on this, will
never gain accuracy. Yet the child ought not to pass too soon from
measuring to estimating. It will be better for him, after comparing by
parts what he cannot compare as wholes, finally to substitute for
measured aliquot parts others, obtained by the eye alone. He should
train himself in this manner of measuring instead of always measuring
with the hand. I prefer that the very first operations of this kind
should be verified by actual measurements, so that he may correct the
mistakes arising from false appearances by a better judgment. There
are natural measures, nearly the same everywhere, such as a man's pace,
the length of his arm, or his height. When the child is calculating
the height of the story of a house, his tutor may serve as a unit of
measure. In estimating the altitude of a steeple, he may compare it
with that of the neighboring houses. If he wants to know how many
leagues there are in a given journey, let him reckon the number of
hours spent in making it on foot. And by all means do none of this
work for him; let him do it himself.

We cannot learn to judge correctly of the extent and size of bodies
without also learning to recognize their forms, and even to imitate
them. For such imitation is absolutely dependent on the laws of
perspective, and we cannot estimate extent from appearances without
some appreciation of these laws.

Drawing.

All children, being natural imitators, try to draw. I wo