with the appeal to the imagination, evoking the sense of wonder all along the plane of the baby mind, accounts for the abiding place which these rhymes and jingles have in the literature of the nursery.
The present collection of the best known and most popular of these old-time favorites rests its claim for a place in the home and the school on the fact that here for the first time an attempt is made to group them in a natural and logical order. When they were originally collected by Newbery about 1765, they were not grouped at all, and it was not until Halliwell published his much larger collection in 1842 that any steps were taken towards arrangement. The classification of Halliwell, however, was made from the point of view of the student of folklore, and not from that of the needs of the child.
Now, however, that they have been promoted from the nursery to the school-room, some scheme of grouping them which may prove helpful alike to mother, nurse, kindergartner, and teacher would seem to be desirable. The French, justifying their proverb, "Ce qui n'est pas logique, n est pas français," have for many years arranged their collections of children's rhymes and games in a kind of psychological sequence, following to some extent the mental development of the child. The Germans, too, with their love of orderly classification and arrangement, have done the same thing with much more minuteness, in which they have been followed by the folk of Holland; but our popular editions of English Nursery rhymes have for the most part been thrown together without any attempt at orderly or intelligent classification. They have been presented in the form of an olla podrida, and the excellence of its
