e typewriter all day and get a pain in your back. Daddy says
he would rather shovel coal but he does not, but snow sometimes, which has
been very plentiful about here this winter, also sledding.

"When he is not working, he goes for a walk with the dogs, or tells us
most any question we should ask almost like an encikelopedia. He is very
good-natured and I love the things he writes, especially plays. Daddy has
just finished a children's book called _The Earth's Story_ about how it
began millions of years ago when there was a great many fossils, so nice
for children. Also about stone axes. My brother Fred made one but when he
was showing us how it worked the head came off and hit me on the foot and
I kicked him. So stone axes were one of the man's first weapons. Daddy
read us each chapter when it was done and we helped him except baby
brother who wrote with red crayon all over one chapter when no one was
there, and he should not have been in Daddy's office anyway. Daddy has to
draw horses and engines for him all the time. He gets tired of it but what
can he do?"

Now this is very pleasant, for here on the table is the first volume of
_The Earth's Story--The First Days of Man_ by Frederic Arnold Kummer; and
this book for children has a preface for parents in it. In that preface
Mr. Kummer says:

"In this process of storing away in his brain the accumulated knowledge of
the ages the child's mind passes, with inconceivable rapidity, along the
same route that the composite minds of his ancestors travelled, during
their centuries of development. The impulse that causes him to want to
hunt, to fish, to build brush huts, to camp out in the woods, to use his
hands as well as his brain, is an inheritance from the past, when his
primitive ancestors did these things. He should be helped to trace the
route they followed with intelligence and understanding, he should be
encouraged to know the woods, and all the great world of out-of-doors, to
make and use the primitive weapons, utensils, toys, his ancestors made and
used, to come into closer contact with the fundamental laws of nature, and
thus to lay a groundwork for wholesome and practical thinking which cannot
be gained in the classroom or the city streets.

"As has been said, the writer has tested the methods outlined above. The
chapters in _The First Days of Man_ are merely the things he has told his
own children. It is of interest to note that one of these, a boy of seven,
o