n the
vast expenditures for public education in all forms, in the increasing
attention paid to light, ventilation, and safety in school buildings,
in the opening of play grounds in large cities, in physical
supervision of children in schools, and the agitation against the
employment of children in factories, and in other and less obvious
ways.

Children are helpless to protect themselves and secure what they need
for health of body and mind; they are exceedingly impressionable; and
the future is always in their hands. The first and most imperative
duty of parents is to give their children the best attainable
preparation for life, no matter at what sacrifice to themselves. There
are hosts of fathers and mothers who recognize this obligation but do
not know how to discharge it; who are eager to give their children the
most wholesome conditions, but do not know how to secure them; who are
especially anxious that their children should start early and start
right on that highway of education which is the open road to honorable
success. There are many homes in which books would find abundant room
if the heads of the families knew what books to buy, or had the means
to put into the hands of the growing child the reading matter it needs
in the successive periods of its growth.

This condition of eagerness to give the best, and of ignorance of how
or where to find the best is the justification for the publication
of this set of books. The attempt has been made in a series of twelve
volumes to bring together in convenient form the fairy stories, myths,
and legends which have fed the children of many generations in the
years when the imagination is awakening and craving stimulus and
material to work upon;--that age of myth-making which is a prelude to
the more scientific uses of the mind and of immense importance in an
intensely practical age;--a group of tales of standard quality and
an interest and value which have placed them among the permanent
possessions of English literature; a careful selection of stories
of animal life; a natural history, familiar in style and thoroughly
trustworthy in fact; an account of those travels and adventures which
have opened up the earth and made its resources available, and which
constitute one of the most heroic chapters in the history of the
long struggle of men to possess the earth and make it a home for
the highest kind of civilization; a record of heroism taken from the
annals of the pa