Provenance
Every number on this site is recounted from the extraction artefacts when the page renders. Nothing is transcribed from a run report — those are written per run and a later witness overwrites an earlier one, so the copy on disk carries the last witness deposed under a name that reads like the project’s.
The witnesses, unmerged
Each catalogue is resolved against itself only. The same apparatus appears twice below — once as Fisher names it, once as Stevens does — and nothing on this site claims they are the same object, because no pass has yet established that they are. Cross-witness resolution is a single later pass over every deposed witness at once; running it pairwise would make the catalogue depend on the order the books were read in.
| Handbook 1914 · primary | Fisher 1913 · secondary-interpreter | Stevens 1913 · secondary-interpreter | Advanced 1917 · primary | Elementary 1917 · primary | primaries Montessori’s own four volumes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| leaves with text | 157 | 148 | 255 | 368 | 416 | 1376 |
| material mentions | 355 | 135 | 140 | 58 | 931 | 1138 |
| mentions per leaf | 2.261 | 0.912 | 0.549 | 0.158 | 2.238 | 0.827 |
| leaves naming nothing | 55.4% | 56.8% | 82.0% | 95.9% | 67.3% | 73.5% |
| materials after resolution | 67 | 37 | 54 (42–54 across 4 runs) | 13 | 121 | 246 |
| materials per leaf | 0.427 | 0.250 | 0.212 | 0.035 | 0.291 | 0.179 |
| materials with a quote-verified age | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 9 |
| age assertions | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 14 |
| materials with quote-verified control of error | 3 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 2 | — |
| plate sightings | 29 | 29 | 6 | 0 | 25 | — |
| asserted orderings | 6 | 9 | 2 | 0 | 0 | — |
| pair readings | 1,584 | 540 | 1,632 | 38 | 1,304 | — |
| not asserted | 99.1% | 95.0% | 99.4% | 100.0% | 100.0% | — |
The control-of-error cell for the primary corpus is empty on purpose. That corpus was extracted under a prompt that asked for control of error with no quote check, so its count is not comparable to a quote-verified one, and no substitute is offered in its place. The plate, ordering and not-asserted rows are blank for the same reason: those passes were run against the deposed witnesses individually, not against the pooled primary corpus.
The not-asserted rate is not comparable between witnesses as a bare percentage either. Its denominator is candidate pairs, which grows with catalogue size and with how often materials are named together — Stevens lists apparatus in bulk, so it reads far more pairs from fewer orderings.
The relevance gate
A verified quote is one that occurs on the leaf. That is necessary and it is not sufficient: one sentence about children’s vision at three was filed as the readiness age of four different materials, and the quote check passed it four times. Every assertion is therefore put to a second, mechanical question — does this sentence, read in its place on this leaf, make this claim about this thing? — and a no deletes it. What follows is what the gate removed, with the reason it logged.
| witness | abstraction | control of error | order authority | ordering | readiness age | all |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Handbook 1914 | 0/40% | 6/2921% | 2/367% | 15/3148% | 2/540% | 25/7235% |
| Fisher 1913 | — | 2/1712% | 2/2100% | 27/3675% | 1/119% | 32/6648% |
| Stevens 1913 | — | 4/1233% | 1/333% | 10/1759% | 3/933% | 18/4144% |
| Advanced 1917 | — | 0/10% | 3/3100% | — | 0/20% | 3/650% |
| Elementary 1917 | 4/2715% | 3/496% | — | — | 0/30% | 7/799% |
Gate: google/gemini-3.7-flash, version handbook-relevance-v5+b277ef.s3. Calibrated 12/12 against hand-read controls before it was trusted; it was wrong twice before it was right, and both faults were caught by that suite rather than by reading the code.
Fisher’s readiness ages are 0 of 11. Every one was a general statement about children’s ages attached to whichever material the leaf happened to name — so Fisher now contributes no readiness age to this site at all, and its spine carries no age marks.
Reading arms
Each ordering question was put to two models independently over identical pages. Where they disagree the edge carries both answers and the disagreement is recorded, never resolved.
Handbook
| google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite | 8/792 | 1.0% |
| google/gemini-3.6-flash | 7/792 | 0.9% |
3 of 6 orderings carry both arms; 3 carry recorded dissent. On every witness the stronger model asserted no ordering the cheaper one did not.
Fisher
| google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite | 14/270 | 5.2% |
| google/gemini-3.6-flash | 13/270 | 4.8% |
7 of 9 orderings carry both arms; 2 carry recorded dissent. On every witness the stronger model asserted no ordering the cheaper one did not.
Stevens
| google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite | 5/816 | 0.6% |
| google/gemini-3.6-flash | 5/816 | 0.6% |
2 of 2 orderings carry both arms; 0 carry recorded dissent. On every witness the stronger model asserted no ordering the cheaper one did not.
Advanced
| google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite | 0/38 | 0.0% |
0 of 0 orderings carry both arms; 0 carry recorded dissent. On every witness the stronger model asserted no ordering the cheaper one did not.
Elementary
| google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite | 0/1304 | 0.0% |
0 of 0 orderings carry both arms; 0 carry recorded dissent. On every witness the stronger model asserted no ordering the cheaper one did not.
How each catalogue was resolved
| witness | blocked at | embedding | adjudicated by | forms rejected | prompt versions read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Handbook | 0.84 | google/gemini-embedding-001 | google/gemini-3.6-flash | 16 | handbook-edges-v1+ab394d.s2 handbook-authority-v2+b6d6cb.s2 |
| Fisher | 0.84 | google/gemini-embedding-001 | google/gemini-3.6-flash | 3 | fisher-edges-v1 fisher-authority-v2 (superseding fisher-authority-v1) |
| Stevens | 0.84 | google/gemini-embedding-001 | google/gemini-3.6-flash | 21 | stevens-edges-v1+ab394d stevens-authority-v2+b6d6cb |
| Advanced | 0.84 | google/gemini-embedding-001 | google/gemini-3.7-flash | 3 | advanced-edges-v1+ab394d.s3 advanced-authority-v2+b6d6cb.s3 |
| Elementary | 0.84 | google/gemini-embedding-001 | google/gemini-3.7-flash | 55 | elementary-edges-v1+ab394d.s3 |
Where an artefact holds more than one prompt version, the site renders the latest and says which it superseded. Fisher’s order-authority file holds both a single-leaf pass and the three-leaf pass that replaced it; showing both would mix two different questions and double-count one declaration.
Check ten at random
Unfiltered, from every quote-bearing assertion on disk across every deposed witness — orderings, readiness ages, control of error, order authority, disputed edges included. Open the page and see whether the sentence says what we say it says.
“which can be done even by a child of two and a half.”
“Here tlie child cannot help seeing his mistake in concrete form. He is perplexed, his little mind is faced with a problem which interests him intensely. Before, all the cylinders fitted, now there is one that will not fit. The little one stops, frowning, deep in thought. He begins to feel the little buttons and finds that some cylinders have too much room. He thinks that perhaps they are out of their right place and tries to place them correctly. He repeats the process again and again, and finally he succeeds.”
“Here also the control of the error is in the material, for the figure cannot be inserted perfectly except when it is put in its own place.”
“Then they verify their work by turning the discs over and reading the name.”
“If he is not sure he consults the numbered board (Fig. 33).”
“This exercise fascinates children from five years old upwards.”
“Another exercise which the child can do at the same time is to place the disc bearing the name of the note on the rectangular base of the corresponding bell, whose sound he has already learned to recognize by ear in the sensorial exercise described above.”
“The child has not actually performed a new exercise, because he had already performed all these movements when he touched the wooden plane insets.”
“After the board with the two contrasting sur- faces, the child is offered another board on which are gummed strips of paper which are rough or smooth in different degrees.”
“Let us look at the three sets of material which are presented after the exercises with the solid insets, i.e., the material for teaching size (the pink cubes), thickness (the brown prisms), and length (the green rods).”