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that was only a mocking bird. Gen. Grant said he had known in his youth but two tunes; one was Yankee Doodle, and the other—wasn't. Look upon the varieties in dress we enjoy, and then think of the typ ical get-up of Brother Jonathan, two generations ago. Look at the wonderful start we have made in art-designs and decorations, and then view with wonder and reverence the clumsy furniture and machinery of the good olden times. Look at the absolute styleless architecture of former years, and the infinite variety now displayed everywhere -even in Philadelphia.

And thus we are changing our mode of teaching and studying. When the great influx of foreign elements ceases, the mixture in the crucible becomes clear, and the future type of the American school will have been developed. It will not be European, rest assured, neither will it be American, as that term is understood now.

The American type, as most distinctly represented by the New Englander, is very strong, and has remarkable powers of assimilation; it has the proverbial ostrich's stomach, but it is nevertheless subject to the laws of evolution. The changes it undergoes are not noticed in the East and South so much as in the great West. As the general habitus of the people here in the West is already different from that of New England, so the practices of the common school of the West are different from those of the East, and their results are incomparably better, as was shown in the New Orleans' Exposition to every unprejudiced observer.

It is devoutly to be hoped, that the pernicious per cent. system of grading pupils, immoral competition, constant testing, and soulless memorizing of the printed page, will give way to rational methods based upon the well-defined laws of growth, methods that will lead us up to an intellectual culture such as the world has never witnessed before!

OTHER ERRORS IN TEACHING.

BY J. M. GREENWOOD, SUPT. SCHOOLS, KANSAS CITY,

Introduction.

MO.

The brain is the organ of the mind, else the teaching of physiology is erroneous.

If the doctrine be accepted that the shape of the brain and the development of its convolutions indicate intelligence, then it follows that the child of seven or eight years of age, possessing a good bodily organism, is not a "little fool," and for the following reasons:

1. Dutch anatomists ascertained that the weight of the cerebrum in the new-born infant was to its weight in the adult as 96 to 157. while the weight of the cerebellum in the new-born infant was to its weight in the adult as 22 to 50; also the weight of the cerebellum to the cerebrum in the new-born infant was found to vary from one thirteenth to one twenty-sixth part, while in male adults the ratio is 1 to 8 and in females 1 to 81.

2. Drs. Boyd and Thurman ascertained from an examination of many cases that at the seventh year the brain in the male has reached of its ultimate weight, and that in the female for the same age is t of its ultimate weight.

From the rapid growth of the cerebrum to the seventh year, which is far more rapid than the growth of the body for the same period, we may infer that the brain, as well as the body, is capable of performing considerable amount of work. We know from observation what weights little children will tug about and lift when left to themselves. Frequently, a babe twelve or fifteen months old will hang on to a limb with both hands, sustaining its own weight, from thirty to sixty seconds. As the infant grows older its strength increases rapidly.

3. However, it is not contended that children are more than children in this discussion; but I will endeavor to show that, physically and mentally, healthy children are able to do much more work than educators generally give them credit for, and that in consequence of this erroneous conception, the child at school, in very many instances, is kept doing nothing laboriously, and that doing nothing laboriously is

the "dry-rot" that hangs like a blight over our schools, darkens our instruction, and benumbs the mental faculties of many children. Neither is it safe to conclude that the child's brain at the age of seven, having nearly reached its growth so far as size and shape are involved, that it is capable of performing any very great or prolonged mental effort requiring considerable expenditure of nervous energy. In fact, as an organ capable of doing work, its co-efficient must be represented by a small fraction if in normal conditions at maturity, the co-efficient be unity. At this early age those internal changes in structural development and the formation of active nerve centres with the corresponding increase in the deposition of gray matter, have not occurred, and the brain is soft and watery.

But the error, as I conceive it, is that the present educational treatment of children is weak and puerile, and that not even half credit is accorded them on their actual working power. If their brains were "wet dough," the most of the present educational diet would be too thin for them.

To maintain the proposition, I will refer to a few feasts that educational doctors have prepared for small school children, and ask you to inspect carefully the bills of fare, and then decide at your leisure.

Foolishness of Teaching.

"One thumb and one thumb are how many thumbs?" This is a weighty problem in primary arithmetic. The mental effort required by the abstract nature of the proposition for the six year old to grasp the relationship existing between one thumb and another one thumb involves at the outset otherness, plurality, and thumbship totality. This is more than a common question; it is decidedly uncommon, as a little reflection must convince any one. First, there is the idea of a thumb. A thumb may be of any conceivable kind. Thumb is the genus some species are comical and chubby in shape; others, blunt, winding, and hypothetical; not a few slender, snaky, and sinister; while many are good, solid, honest thumbs. From one thumb first comes the percept, and from an extended tour in the thumb region the general concept is obtained. But this is somewhat in advance of the real issue, which involves two thumbs only. Suppose the child knows an ordinary thumb, or even a common scrub thumb, when he sees it. This acquisition is so much positive knowledge,-a working capital, so to speak, in thumb stock. It is the initial point in thumb problems.

The mind must invariably revert to this centre and then strike out, as the spokes from a hub, in search of new percepts. But we must trace the process more minutely. One thumb! What a word "one thumb!" The pupil looks at one of his thumbs. He beholds it as a thumb, simple, naked, and perhaps-clean. Yet it is a thumb, flesh and blood. He puts it into his mouth and is not mistaken. Next he glances around. Another thumb is not hard to find. It is seized upon and, mentally speaking, it is placed in juxtaposition with thumb number one. Reduction is the third step in this tremendous process. A slight displacement of nerve-cells, a tremulous vibratory motion, a recognition of the aforesaid motion and the combustion of a very small quantity of brain fuel, and the reduction and transformation are complete, the two thumbs become double and single, the abstract form of which is one thumb+ one thumb two thumbs, whence, quod erat demonstrandum; or the proposition is completely established that somebody is otherwise. This is a great forward movement in incipient thought. It is a grand discovery in the direction of helping the child to find himself even from the ends of his thumbs to the tips of his

toes.

So far the work has been synthetic; now it is analytic. The two thumbs must be torn asunder, and each examined separately and all likenesses and differences carefully observed. This, technically, is called "clinching the nail."

Sometimes this problem assumes a more logical interpretation. Not long since, I heard a square-bodied, square-headed, red-haired youngster deliver himself of the following bit of eloquence upon the "thumbs," which was proposed to him in this form:-If you have one thumb on your right hand and one thumb on your left hand, how many thumbs have you on both hands?

SPEECH-Since I have one thumb on my right hand and one thumb on my left hand, I have as many thumbs on my right hand and on my left hand as the sum of the thumbs on both hands, which is two thumbs. Therefore, I have as many thumbs on my right hand and on my left hand as the sum of the thumbs on both hands, or two thumbs. The argument was conclusive, and the orator stuck up his thumbs as evidence of his real knowledge of the subject" on hands."

Of late years more vapid nonsense has found its way into primary arithmetical teaching than in any other branch of our common school course. Thumbs, holes, shoe-pegs, bunches of sticks, beans, grains of corn, and numerous other devices, pictures, and silly exercises, have

been resorted to as aids in this elementary work, and to cap the climax, a gang of erratic comets have darkened instruction and hobbled the children by hedging them in with over weights.

In olden times mailed knights when clad in armor were so weighted down that when thrown to the ground they were as helpless as turtles turned on their backs on a level floor. This "turtle work" is what is the matter with much of the arithmetical teaching in the schools of the present time.

The little child of six or seven summers can stand flat-footed and jump three or four feet, yet he must walk as it were with his feet tied together and wear a narrow sack-slip lest he break away from thumbs, pegs, pictures, and learn how to handle numbers. Instead of thinking and telling numbers, he must do numbers. Bosh!

Did you ever teach a little three or four year old to count? Did you ever teach arithmetic to little children? Did you ever teach them how to translate their word language into arithmetical characters, and note the length of time it required for them to make the transition? Did you then put them to their best working licks and observe how much they could do without injury to themselves? Have you looked closely into the number work so sharply outlined in school reports and little arithmetics for the sole use and benefit of little children during their first, second, and third years in school? Have you? How did it impress you? Honest Indian,—and no dodging? Have you meandered over the arithmetical charts as a second course in this mental bill of fare? How did you relish the aroma thereof? Were you a youngster again, would you like to be stall-fed on it as a regular figured diet daily for half your schoolboy life? Does not the very thought suggest woods, butterflies, fishing, swimming, and fighting "bumble-bees" in the clover fields? Is it not bitterer than " Rue-tea"?

Again, have you examined a score or more of primary arithmetics recently issued, and then wondered if it would require thirty months of childhood to absorb the contents of any one? Did the result of the examination leave an impression upon your mind that it was a very little work long drawn out? I know that nearly all these books are real pretty books, elegantly illustrated, beautifully printed, large type, but a delusion and a snare inside. The authors are not to blame. They made the books under a misapprehension of the child's ability,— a misapprehension of educational teaching which assumes a thorough acquaintance of the child on paper instead of the real child himself. Let us press this question still nearer home. Teacher, listener, how