d wins the day.

There are some plays which require presence of mind, and which demand
immediate attention to what is actually going forward, in which
children, capable of the greatest degree of abstract attention, are
most apt to be defective. They have many ideas, but none of them
ready, and their knowledge is useless, because it is recollected a
moment too late. Could we, in suitably dignified language, describe
the game of "birds, beasts, and fishes," we should venture to
prescribe it as no very painful remedy for these absent and abstracted
personages. When the handkerchief or the ball is thrown, and when his
bird's name is called for, the absent little philosopher is obliged to
collect his scattered thoughts instantaneously, or else he exposes
himself to the ridicule of naming, perhaps, a fish or a beast, or any
bird but the right. To those children, who, on the contrary, are not
sufficiently apt to abstract their attention, and who are what Bacon
calls "birdwitted," we should recommend a solitary-board. At the
solitary-board they must withdraw their thoughts from all external
objects, hear nothing that is said, and fix their attention solely
upon the figure and the pegs before them, else they will never
succeed; and, if they make one errour in their calculations, they lose
all their labour. Those who are precipitate, and not sufficiently
attentive to the consequences of their own actions, may receive many
salutary lessons at the draught or chess-board--happy, if they can
learn prudence and foresight, by frequently losing the battle.

We are not quite so absurd as to imagine, that any great or permanent
effects can be produced by such slight causes as a game at draughts,
or at a solitary-board, but the combination of a number of apparent
trifles, is not to be neglected in education.

We have never yet mentioned what will probably first occur to those
who would invent employments for children. We have never yet mentioned
a garden; we have never mentioned those great delights to children, a
spade, a hoe, a rake, and a wheelbarrow. We hold all these in proper
respect; but we did not sooner mention them, because, if introduced
too early, they are useless. We must not expect, that a boy six or
seven years old, can find, for any length of time, sufficient daily
occupation in a garden: he has not strength for hard labour; he can
dig soft earth; he can weed groundsel, and other weeds, which take no
deep root in the ear