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 with the physical environment, that
acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really
the foundation of human _consciousness_. To the very last, in most of