CULTURE OF THE OBSERVING POWERS OF CHILDREN, ESPECIALLY IN CONNECTION WITH THE STUDY OF BOT A NY. BE ELIZA A. YOUMANS, OF NEW YORK. EDITED, WITH NOTES AND A SUPPLEMENT ON THE EXTENSION OF THE PRINCIPLE TO ELEMENTARY INTELLECTUAL TRAINING IN GENERAL, BY JOSEPH PAYNE, FELLOW OF THE COLLEGE OF PRECEPTORS : AUTHOR OF ETC. Yon study Nature in the house, and when you go out of LONDON: 1872. igl. j. 57 PREFACE то THE ENGLISH EDITION. THE EDITOR'S ACQUAINTANCE with the valuable treatise which he now brings before the English public, is of recent date. He had undertaken to write a brief paper for the Leeds Meeting of the Social Science Association, on The Teaching of Elementary Science as a part of the Earliest Instruction of Children ;' and had completed the arguments and illustrations by which he endeavoured to show that, in the true order of things, the earliest formal instruction of children should be a continuation of that which they had already unconsciously received from Nature and Fact, when Dr. Youmans, of New York, put into his hands the “ First Book of Botany, and the little treatise, which is here republished, “On the Culture of the Observing Powers of Children,' written by Miss Youmans. He was at once struck with the remarkable correspondence between the views taken by Miss Youmans and those which |