512 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
ind toughness and other like qualities ; so that the eye sees and the 
naked palm feels weight or toughness, or the absence of the ome and 
the opposite of the other; and, according to the care and thorough- 
ress with which the training has been carried on, shades or degrees of 
qualities can be seen and felt without muscular effort. The ear, too, 
has been so trained that it hears density, brittleness, and other like 
qualities. Facts have been learned by hand, in conjunction with the 
special sense organs, until information given by the latter may be relied 
on as correct. It is largely for the accomplishment of this end that the 
work has been done at all, and for the accomplishment of it in the 
shortest time and by the most economical means, that it has been largely 
lone without tools. Without the assistance of muscles and dermal sur- 
faces the special sense organs are not trained. The special sense organs, 
oarticularly those of sight and hearing, are labor-saving machines; 
out their testimony, their registerings, are not reliable unless the organs 
rave been trained. The eye cannot be made to register distance or size 
with any degree of accuracy except by measuring and looking in con- 
junction many times. Tor the purpose of giving to these labor-saving 
machines the training they should have, manual-training exercises with 
few tools must be a part of all truly scientific primary and intermediate 
school work. I have never advocated manual training in the lower-grade 
schools for any other purpose than that of securing a correct cultivation of 
chose organs through which information and pleasure must chiefly come 
shrough life. 
This hand training, which has been shown to be advisable or necessary 
in the beginnings of all elementary work, is also required as a preparation 
for a training in the use of tools. 
Tools are artificial media whose use is acquired with great difficulty. If 
1 knowledge of the reciprocal values of muscle, dermal, and special sense 
‘mpressions is not secured before the tools are put into the child’s hand, 
nis disadvantage will be great. The learner’s first effort with tools is to 
learn to appreciate values through them. If these values are not pre- 
viously known, but are to be acquired now for the first time, he will not 
only be trying to do two things at once, but will be attempting to secure 
information and training through artificial media, which of course will be 
a slow and laborious process, and which may never be done properly. The 
values of the correlated instruction of nature’s media are best and most 
sconomically secured free-hand. 
There comes a time in the development of manual training when, to 
secure for it a permanent place in the school curriculum, reliance must be 
had on its intrinsic value as a distinct acquisition of educative effort. 1 
have tried to show that such time does not come before the sixth or sev- 
snth year of school life above the kindergarten. In my own practice I 
have assumed that it comes at the beginning of the seventh vear.