LE 1169 MM3 1863

Capil

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1863, by

T. 0. H. P. BURNHAM,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

UV

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON.

PREFACE.

It is in answer to a demand now become very general in this community, that I bring forward an American Kindergarten Guide. Kindergartens are springing up in all our cities. The French and English guides, and the Journals of The New Education, published in Germany and France, are expensive to import; and, besides, I think the selections I take from these sources, modified by my own views, make a book more suitable for American use than a foreign work can be.

I have persuaded my sister to give me her letters on the Moral Culture of Infancy, for an Appendix to my work, because moral culture is a twin object with physical culture in a Kindergarten; and the letters express the very spirit of Froebel, whose primary object was to give a moral and religious cast to the intelligence of healthy children.

The letters were written in the midst of the practical experiments they describe, in correspondence with Mrs. Lowell's "Letters on the Theory of Teaching," published in 1841. They could not be published at the same time, because they were so full of personal details, that the children spoken of would have been easily identified. After this lapse of time identification will not be easy. The circumstances of Mrs. Lowell's letters were imaginary, and they make a noble manual for governesses. But in both cases the letters were written for their authors' mutual under