I have been connected with no less than eleven schools, and my perception of the blunders of other teachers is derived mainly from the remembrance of my own. Some of my mistakes have been brought home to me by rea ling works on education, even those with which I do not in the main agree. Perhaps there are teachers who on looking through the following pages may meet with a similar ex perience.

Had the essays been written in the order in which they stand, a good deal of repetition might have been avoided, but this repetition has at least the advantage of bringing out points which seem to me important; and as no one will read the book as carefully as I have done, I hope no one will be so much alive to this and other blemishes in it.

I much regret that in a work which is nothing if it is not practically useful, I have so often neglected to mark the exact place from which quotations are taken. I have myself paid the penalty of this carelessness in the trouble it has cost me to verify passages which seemed inaccurate.

The authority I have had recourse to most frequently is Raumer (Geschichte der Pädagogik). In his first two volumes. he gives an account of the chief men connected with education, from Dante to Pestalozzi. The third volume cuntains essays on various parts of education, and the fourth is devoted to German Universities. There is an English translation, published in America, of the fourth volume only. I confess to a great partiality for Raumer—a par tiality which is not shared by a Saturday Reviewer and by other competent authorities in this country. But surely a German author who is not profound, and is almost perspicuous, has some claim on the gratitude of English readers, if he gives information which we cannot get in our own language. To Raumer I am indebted for all that I have

written about Ratke, and almost all about Basedow. Elsewhere his history has been used, though not to the same

extent.

C. A. Schmid's Encyclopädie des Erziehungs-und-Unterrichtswesens is a vast mine of information on everything connected with education. The work is still in progress. The part containing Rousseau has only just reached me. I should have been glad of it when I was giving an account of the Emile, as Raumer was of little use to me.

Those for whom Schmid is too diffuse and expensive will find Carl Gottlob Hergang's Pädagogische Realencyclopädie useful. This is in two thick volumes, and costs, to the best of my memory, about eighteen shillings. It was finished in 1847.

The best sketch I have met with of the general history of education is in the article on Pädagogik in Meyers Conversations-Lexicon.* I wish someone would translate this article ; and I should be glad to draw the attention of the editor of an educational periodical, say the Museum or the Quarterly Journal of Education, to it.

I have come upon references to many other works on the history of Education, but of these the only ones I have seen are Theodore Fritz's Esquisse d'un Système complet d'instruction et d'éducation et de leur histoire (3 vols., Strasburg, 1843), and Carl Schmidt's Geschichte der Pädagogik (4 vols.). The first of these gives only the outline of the subject. The second is, I believe, considered a standard work. It does not seem to me so readable as Raumer's history, but it is much more complete, and comes down to quite recent times.

For my account of the Jesuit schools and of Pestalozzi,

* This article is omitted in the last edition.

the authorities will be found elsewhere (pp. 34 and 383). In writing about Comenius I have had much assistance from a life of him prefixed to an English translation of his School of Infancy, by Daniel Benham (London, 1858). For almost all the information given about Jacotot, I am indebted to Mr. Payne's papers, which I should not have ventured to extract from so freely if they had been before the public in a more permanent form.

I am sorry I cannot refer to any English works on the history of Education, except the essays of Mr. Parker and Mr. Furnivall, and Christian Schools and Scholars, which are mentioned above, but we have a very good treatise on the principles of education in Marcel's Language as a Means of Mental Culture (2 vols., London, 1853). Edgeworth's Practical Education seems falling into undeserved neglect, and Mr. Spencer's recent work is not universally known even by schoolmasters.

If the following pages attract but few readers, it will be some consolation, though rather a melancholy one, that I share the fate of my betters.

INGATESTONE, ESSEX, May, 1868.

R. H. Q.

PREFACE TO EDITION OF 1890.

WHEN I was a young man (i. e., nearly forty years ago), I once did what those who know the ground would declare a very risky, indeed, a fool-hardy thing. I was at the highest point of the Gemmi Pass in Switzerland, above the

Rhone Valley; and being in a hurry to get down and overtake my party I ran from the top to the bottom. The path in those days was not so good as it is now, and it is so near the precipice that a few years afterwards a lady in descending lost her head and fell over. No doubt I was in great danger of a drop of a thousand fect or so. But of this I was totally unconscious. I was in a thick mist, and saw the path for a few yards in front of me and nothing more. When I think of the way in which this book was written three and twenty years ago I can compare it to nothing but my first descent of the Gemmi. I did a very risky thing without knowing it. My path came into view little by little as I went on. All else was hid from me by a thick mist of ignorance. When I began the book I knew next to nothing of the Reformers, but I studied hard and wrote hard, and I turned out the essays within the year. This feat I now regard with amazement, almost with horror. Since that time I have given more years of work to the subject than I had then given months, and the consequence is I find I can write fast no longer. The mist has in a measure cleared off, and I cannot jog along in comfort as I did when I saw less. At the same time I have no reason to repent of the adventure. Being fortunate in my plan and thoroughly interested by my subject, I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations in getting others to take an interest in it also. The small English edition of 500 copies was, as soon as I reduced the price, sold off immediately, and the book has been, in England, for twenty years "out of print." But no less than three publishing firms in the United States have reprinted it (one quite recently) without my consent, and, except in the edition of Messrs. R. Clarke & Co., Cincinnati, with omissions and additions made without my knowledge. It seems then that the book will live for some years yet,

B

whether I like it or not; and while it lives I wish it to be in a form somewhat less defective than at its first appearance. I have therefore in a great measure re-written it, besides filling in a gap here and there with an additional essay. Perhaps some critics will call it a new book with an old title. If they do, they will I trust allow that the new book has at least two merits which went far to secure the success of the old, Ist, a good title, and 2nd, a good plan. My plan in both editions has been to select a few people who seemed specially worth knowing about, and to tell concerning them in some detail just that which seemed to me specially worth knowing. So I have given what I thought very valuable or very interesting, and everything I thought not particularly valuable or interesting I have ruthlessly omitted. I have not attempted a complete account of anybody or anything; and as for what the examiner may "set," I have not once given his questions a thought.

As the book is likely to have more readers in the country of its adoption than in the country of its birth, I have persuaded my friend Dr. William T. Harris, the United States Commissioner of Education, to put it into "The International Education Series" which he edits. So the only authorized editions of the book are the English edition, and the American edition published by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co.

EARLSWOOD Cottage, REDHILL, SURREY, ENGLAND,

28th July, 1890.

R. H. Q.