to write: "Make the boy interested
in natural history, if you can; it is better than games: they
encourage it in some schools."

Besides health--and health, we must remember, is not only a bodily
matter, but depends on mental as well as bodily activity, and on the
enjoyment of the activity that comes from its being mainly
voluntary--the pursuits that we are considering can do much to train
skill of various kinds. The class-work represents the minimum that we
expect a boy to know; but there is much that necessarily lies outside
it of hardly less value. Many a boy learns as much from the hobby on
which he spends his free time as from the work he does in class.
Sometimes, indeed, such a free-time hobby reveals the bent that might
otherwise have gone undiscovered, and determines the choice of a
special line of work for the future career.

But the chief value of such interests lies rather in their influence
on other work, and on the general development of character. In giving
scope for many kinds of skill, they are helping the intellectual
training; and however ready we may be to pay lip-service to the
principle of learning by doing, and to admit the educational
importance of the hand in brain-development, in most of our school
work we still ignore these things, so far as any practical
application of them is concerned. One is sometimes tempted to wonder
if in the future there may not be so complete a reaction from our
present ideas and methods as to make what are now regarded as mere
hobbies the main matter of education, and to relegate much of the
present school course, as the writing of verses has already been
relegated, to the category of optional side-shows. At any rate these
free-time interests can supply a very useful stimulus to much of the
routine work. In these a boy may find himself for the first time, and
discover, despite his experience in class, that he is no fool. Or at
least he may find there a centre of interest, otherwise lacking, round
which other interests can group, and to which knowledge obtained in
various class-subjects can attach itself, and so get for him a meaning
and a use. And further, if we do not make the mistake of narrowing the
range of choice, and allow, at any rate at first, a succession of
interests, the very range and variety of these pursuits is an antidote
against the tendency to early specialisation, encouraged by
scholarship and entrance examinations, which is one of the dangers
ag