PREFACE IDA FREUND had been for many years before her death a naturalised British subject, but was Austrian by birth. Left an orphan while still quite young, she was brought up by her grandparents in Vienna, and received her early education at a Biirgerschule in that city. Afterwards she took the diploma of a State Training College for teachers, and the experience there gained in the study of continental methods broadened her outlook and was possibly the origin of the interest in the profession of teaching and sympathy with teachers which were to become marked characteristics of her later career. She then came to England to make her home with her uncle, the violinist Ludwig Straus, well known to music lovers as a member of the Joachim quartet. Her uncle sent her to Cambridge, where as a student of Girton College she took the complete honours course in Natural Sciences, and in 1886 was placed in the first class of the second part of the Natural Sciences Tripos for her knowledge of...