338 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
well these organs must be in good repair. A sound body is the best 
handmaid to a sound intellect. In the consentaneous cultivation of the 
physical, the mental, and the moral, the highest perfection is to be found. 
There must be a balanced progress in which no part profits or is fostered 
to the injury of the rest. Ilerbert Spencer insists that to develop the 
physical, play is better than gymnastics. The kindergarten in its work 
with little children has been called “organized play.” Frederick Froebel 
saw that this universal instinct for play in little children had a deep 
meaning, and he set himself to discover and utilize this mighty enginery 
of power and purpose. 
The kindergarten is the best agency for setting in motion the physical, 
mental, and moral machinery of the little child, that it may do its own 
work in its own way. It is the rain and dew and sun to evoke the sleeping 
germ and bring it into self-activity and growth. It is teaching the little 
child to teach himself. The kindergarten devotes itself more to ideas than 
to words ; more to things than to books. Children are taught words too 
much, while they fail to catch ideas. Give a child ideas. The world does 
not need fine rhetoric—valuable as that is—half as much as it needs prac- 
sical, useful ideas. A famous inventor’s counsel to a young man was: 
¢ Study to have ideas, my boy ; study to have ideas. I have always found 
if I had an idea I could express it on a shingle with a piece of chalk and 
let a draughtsman work it out handsomely and according to rule. I gen- 
erally had ideas enough to keep three or four draughtsmen busy. You 
can always hire dranghtsmen, but you cannot hire 7deas. Study to have 
ideas, my boy.” The man should be the master, not the slave, of his 
learning, and whether he is the one or the other depends very largely on 
the way his knowledge has been gained. It is better to be the master of 
a little knowledge, with the capacity to use it creatively, than to be the 
anproductive carrier of all the learning in the libraries. Study to have 
‘deas! Life will give no end of opportunities for using them. That is 
exactly the aim of the kindergarten—to make the mind creative, to stimu- 
late thought, to beget ideas. Habits of observation are cultivated. Observ- 
ing is more than seeing. The child in the kindergarten is taught to 
pbserve—that is, to notice with attention, to see truly. What he learns 
in the schoolroom is calculated to make him keep his eyes wide open to 
the world about him. He is taught to think, and that is the primal thing. 
One of the most noted among the disciples of the great Froebel—Miss 
Emily Shirreff, of London—says : ‘The poor man suffers wrong when his 
sducation is so defective that he cannot use his faculties aright; when his 
senses are blunted, his observation and judgment insecure. This wrong 
to the poor may be avoided by carly methodical training in the kindergar- 
ten, thus fitting him for industrial pursuits. As it is now,” she goes on to 
say, ‘“ when boys and girls leave school to go to some trade, they go with 
nands and eves absolutely uncultivated. They begin with clumsy fingers,