tant in connection with one
of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse. An object
possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp,
or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap
in a collection or helps to complete a series. Much of the scholarly
work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and
erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship),
would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies
the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal
which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a
complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject
than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more
early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else.

The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is
fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher may
get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and
orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are mature enough, a
card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make.
Neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with
the other benefits which the possession of the collection entails. Even
such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by
the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographical and historical
information which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails
itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of
wooden implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of
course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever
became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector when
a boy.

_Constructiveness_ is another great instinctive tendency with which the
schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year
of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than
handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing,
setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for,
from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are
two names for the same manual activity. Both signify the production of
change, and the working of effects, in outward things. The result of all
this is that intimate familiarity wit