of our educational systems is the failure to
realize its importance and to pay sufficient attention to its
development. It is well known that imagination is the creative power
of the mind which gives life to all work, so that without it Newton
would never have found the law of gravitation, nor Columbus have
discovered America. The world of make-believe is filled with delight
for the small child. He loves stories of imaginary adventure that he
can act out in his play,

"Now with my little gun I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.
I see the others far away,
As if in fire-lit camp they lay;
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about."

Cultivate his imagination by helping the child to image what he has
read. Let us play that we are sailing with Columbus in a little ship
over the great green ocean. When we look far off from the top of a
wave we see nothing but sky and white-capped water; all around us are
angry faces and angry waves.

It is easy to work on the emotions of a little child and thoughtless
persons may find it amusing but it is a serious matter, for it has an
injurious effect upon his nerves. Ghost stories and books which
inspire fear of the supernatural often do much harm to imaginative
children.

The boundless curiosity of the child may be aroused and stimulated so
that he gets to know himself and the world about him in a way that
furnishes him with constant and delightful employment. The growth of
his mind is rapid and healthful, because he is reaching out to
comprehend and verify and apply to his own purposes the knowledge that
he derives from books and that which he obtains from observation. It
is not easy to realize the ignorance of children. Dr. G. Stanley Hall
found by experiments with a large number of six-year-olds in Boston,
that 55 percent did not know that wooden things are made from trees.
The world is strange to them; they must grope their way, they are
attracted by the bright, the flashy, the sensational, and their tastes
will develop in these directions unless they are taught better.
Grown-ups estimate in terms of previous experience; the child has had
little previous experience to which to refer. Edward Thring says:

"The emptiness of a young boy's mind is often not taken into account,
at least emptiness so far as all knowledge in it bein