From pictures an imaginative child will derive very strong
impressions, and mothers should be careful in their choice. It is
foolish to confuse the growth of æsthetic perceptions by presenting
children with books which depict children as grotesquely ugly beings
with goggle eyes and heads like rubber balls. Children love animals
and endow them with all their own reasoning attributes, and in
stories of the home life of rabbits, and bears, and squirrels they
take a pure delight. Books of the "Struwwelpeter" type are less to be
recommended. The faults which they are intended to eradicate become
peculiarly attractive from much familiarity. A little boy of two and a
half who resolutely refused all food for some days was in the end
detected to be playing the part of that Augustus, once so chubby and
fat, who reduced himself to a skeleton, saying, "Take the nasty soup
away; I don't want any soup to-day." Tales of naughty children who
meet with a distressing fate may either frighten the child unduly, or
else produce in a child of inquiring mind the desire to brave his fate
and put the matter to the test. Pictures should not be terrifying or
horrible. Ogres devouring children are out of place as subjects for
pictures and may cause night-terrors.

Children should be taught to be careful of books and toys. The
indestructible book, generally falsely so called, is often responsible
for the immediate dissolution of all others less protected which come
to hand. The sympathy which little children have with the sufferings
of all inanimate objects and their habit of endowing them with their
own sensations may be made of use in teaching them care and
gentleness. They are naturally prone to sympathise with the doll that
has been crushed or the book that has been torn. They will learn very
easily to be kind to a pet animal and to be solicitous for its