The sniff of green leaves, and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-coloured sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn.”
—The American poet has, perhaps, done more than any other to express the pleasure to be found in odours. This is one direction in which much remains to be done; we have not yet arrived even at a scale of odours, as of sound and of colour.
Flavour, again, offers a wide range for delicate discrimination. At first sight it would appear difficult to cultivate the sense of flavour without making a child more or less of a gourmand, but the fact is, that the strong flavours which titillate the palate destroy the power of perception. The young child who lives upon milk-foods has, probably, more pleasure in flavour than the diner-out who is au fait with the confections of a cordon bleu. At the same time, one would prefer to make flavour a source of interest rather than of sensuous pleasure to children: it is better that they should try to discern a flavour with their eyes shut, for example, than that they should be allowed to think or say that things are “nice” or “nasty.” This sort of fastidiousness should be cried down. It is not well to make a child eat what he does not like, as that would only make him dislike that particular dish always; but to let him feel that he shows a want of self-control and manliness when he expresses distaste for wholesome food is likely to have a lasting effect.
We have barely touched on the sorts of object lessons, appealing now to one sense and now to another, which should come incidentally every day in the family. We are apt to regard an American Indian as a quite uneducated person; he is, on the contrary, highly educated in so far as that he is able to discriminate sensory impressions, and to take action upon these in a way which is bewildering to the book-learned European. It would be well for parents to educate a child, for the first half-dozen years of his life at any rate, on “Red Indian” lines. Besides the few points we have mentioned, he should be able to discriminate colours and shades of colour; relative degrees of heat in woollen, wood, iron, marble, ice; should learn the use of the thermometer; should discriminate objects according to their degrees of hardness; should have a cultivated eye and touch for texture; should, in fact, be able to get as much information about an object from a few minutes’ study, as to its form, colour, texture, size, weight, qualities, parts, characteristics, as he could learn out of many pages of a printed book. We approach the subject by the avenue of the child’s senses rather than by that of the objects to be studied, because just now we have in view the occasional test exercises, the purpose of which is to give thorough culture to the several senses. An acquaintance with nature and natural objects is another thing, and is to be approached in a slightly different way. A boy who is observing a beetle does not consciously apply his several senses to the beetle, but lets the beetle take the initiative, which the boy reverently follows: but the boy who is in the habit of doing daily sensory gymnastics will learn a great deal more about the beetle than he who is not so trained.
Definite object lessons differ from these incidental exercises in that an object is in a manner exhausted by each of the senses in turn and every atom of information it will yield got out of it. A good plan is to make this sort of a lesson a game, pass your object round—piece of bread, for example—and let each child tell some fact that he discovers by touch, another round by smell, again by taste, and again by sight. Children are most ingenious in this kind of game, and it affords opportunities to give them new words, as friable, elastic, when they really ask to be helped to express some discovery they have made. The children learn to think with exactitude too, to distinguish between friable and brittle, for example, and any common information that is offered to them in the course of these exercises becomes a possession for ever. A good game in the nature of an object lesson, suitable for a birthday party, is to have a hundred small objects arranged on a table, unknown to the children, then lead the little party into the room, allow them three minutes to walk round the table, and then, when they have left the room, let them write, or tell in a corner, the names of all the objects they recollect. Some children will easily get fifty or sixty.
No doubt the best and happiest exercise of the senses springs out of a loving familiarity with the world of nature, but the sorts of gymnastics we have indicated render the perceptions more acute and are greatly enjoyed by children. That the sensations should not be permitted to minister unduly to the subjective consciousness of the child is the great point to be borne in mind.
CHAPTER XVIII
SENSATIONS AND FEELINGS
Part II
“These beauteous forms,