TH

PUBLIC INSTRUCTION

STATE TEACHERS'
AND OF THE

ASSOCIATION.

HOSE who are possessed by the passion for doing things in a better way and for seeking better things are often content, but they are never satisfied; that which they have secured to-day only confirms them in the quest for perfection in substance and method. There are those in whom this quest is so eager and controlling that they move through life as though some divine impulse were behind them. Blessed are the dead when they compel us to believe in unselfish life!

THE Philadelphia manual training schools are institutions of high school grade, and form an integral part of the school system of the city. The Central Manual Training School was organized in September, 1885, with a class of 130 students, and so rapid was its growth that four years later the Northeast Manual Training School had to be organized to accommodate the increasing number of applicants. The schools afford an opportunity for students to pursue the usual high school course in literature, science and mathematics, and, at the same time, to receive a thorough course in drawing and in the use and application of tools. The object is the education of all the faculties and not the training of any special group, and in this respect the title is, perhaps, somewhat unfortunate, as giving rise to a misapprehension of the character of the course. Annually there are now admitted to the manual training schools about as many pupils as are admitted to the Central High School, and

No. 8.

about the same proportion of the graduates enter the University of Pennsylvania. or some other higher institution of learning, and it can be said of them that they invariably gain considerable prominence in their studies. The school work is divided into two periods, whereby half of the time is devoted to academic studies, and the other half to drawing of various kinds and laboratory and shop work.

"MEN have asked me," said Moody in one of his recent addresses, "why it is that the followers of Mahomet, who lived hundreds of years after Christ was on earth, are more numerous than the followers of Christ. It is very easy for me to answer that. Mahomet has more followers, because one may be guilty of the foulest and blackest of sins and still be a recognized follower of Mahomet, but a follower of Christ must give up sin. You see, men would like to get into heaven with their sins. They can't do it. I heard a short time ago of a child who had caught his hand in a vase. It was a very valuable vase, but he could not get his hand out. He screamed and cried, and his parents worked over him, and finally they thought they would have to break the vase. They did not want to do this because it was so valuable, and so the child's father said to him to make one last effort, straighten out all of his fingers and see if he could not pull the hand out, The little boy howled at this. 'I don't want to straighten out my fingers,' he said; 'I have got a cent in my hand.'

You laugh, but that is just what you are doing. You are trying to get loose from the bondage of the world and you are holding on to some catch sin."

AN education is the safest investment, pays the highest interest, is most readily exchanged, never depreciates in value, never suffers from over-taxation, is never in danger from thieves, never ends in a lawsuit to break the will after the owner's death, and may be gain for all eternity.

If there could be a second flood, not for humanity, but for the literature provided for young people, washing clean all the book shelves for children under fifteen, giving that line of literature another chance, would it be undesirable?-Berry.

BRING nature into the schools more and more. Throw away some of last year's collections, and invite children to replenish them. Half their value consists in the pleasure the child feels in finding and contributing to them.-Dutton.

LET the zealous seek contact and communion with those who are frozen up in indifference, and thaw off the icebergs wherein they lie imbedded. Let the love of beautiful childhood, the love of country, the dictates of reason, the admonitions of conscience, the sense of religious responsibility, be plied, in mingled tenderness and earnestness, until the obdurate and dark mass of avarice, ignorance, and prejudice, shall be dissipated by their blended light and heat.-Horace Mann.

THE following calculation on the length of time which it would take a person to count a billion recently appeared in an issue of an English periodical: What is a billion? The reply is very simple. In England a billion is a million times a million (1,000,000,000.) This is quickly written and quicker still pronounced. But no man is able to count it. You will count 160 or 170 a minute. But let us suppose that you go up as high as 200 a minute hour after hour. At that rate you would count 12,000 an hour, 288,000 a day, or 105,120,000 in a year. Let us suppose now that Adam, at the beginning of his existence, had begun to count and continued to do so, and was counting still. Had such a thing been possible, he would not yet have finished the task of counting a billion! To count a billion

would require a person to count 200 a minute for a period of 9,512 years, 342 days, 5 hours and 20 minutes, provided he should count continuously. But suppose we allow the counter twelve hours daily for rest, eating and sleeping. Then he would need 18,025 years, 319 days, 10 hours and 45 minutes in which to complete the task assigned him!

How one good act brings with it a host of noble consequenees! One act of self-denial makes the succeeding one seem almost the following of a natural inclination. One good deed is a constant incentive to others. One achievement but prepares the way for further attainments. In this sense a new and better meaning is given to the current proverb, "Nothing succeeds like success.' "A victorious army

is the most dangerous of foes to encounter unless confidence has passed over into overweening self-assurance. The converse of this proposition is likewise true. One evil act act seems but the prelude to many to follow. Facilis est descensus Averni. Discouragement waits upon the footsteps of failure, and resolution alone can elude its pursuit. How frequent it is that men bewildered by loss throw away even that which they still possess. A friendly counsel here may save and a cheery face uphold and strengthen.

THE smallest, simplest, and best protected post-office in the world is in the Straits of Magellan, and has been there for many years. It consists of a small painted keg or cask, and is chained to the rocks of the extreme cape, in a manner so that it floats free, opposite Terra del Fuego. Each passing ship sends a boat to take letters out and put others in. This curious post-office is unprovided with a post-master, and is, therefore, under the protection of all the navies of the world. Never in the history of this unique "office" have its privileges been abused by sea-faring men who come and go.

ALL are citizens with one, two, or ten talents which ought to be cultivated. Every one has a right to know all he can know, be all he can be, and do all he can do. Culture does not unfit a man for labor anywhere.-Bishop Vincent.

MUSIC hath charms not only "to soothe the savage breast," but as well to quiet the unruly members of many a boisterous

school. Music in school never means a loss of time, as many teachers are wont to give as their excuse for not having more singing. It really means more time for the study of arithmetic, history, geography and every other study. Gather up the roving, straggling thoughts of the boys and girls, and have them united into a grand chorus of cheerful singing, and begin again all together in a united effort on the difficult problems.of study. It pays to have music in the schoolroom.

As the whole duty of man is to love one another, so the whole duty of the teacher is to enhance the value of the individual, with all the elements of the environment in hand during the process of school training; in other words, to train up the child, by example and precept, to lead a clean life.-Harper.

"I AM especially pleased to know that you have adopted a specific reading course for your high school. It is not so material whether you use Ivanhoe or something from some other author. Ivanhoe is clean and pure, and plants in the mind clean-cut impressions of ideal and real life. Could I have my way I would burn three-fourths of all the books found in high school libraries. Nearly every outline for reading that comes to this office is full of trash. A few books of classic mold read many times by the same chilren-this is what we want.

Ben-Hur

read at home and then read in class at the rate of twenty-five pages a day, and afterward read again, will stamp upon the mind definite and wholesome ideals; so with 'Getting on in the World;' and these books will give a taste for solid things and a love for the good and true."

WHO invented "Child Study ?" This is too hard. Froebel and Pestalozzi knew something about it. It is said of one who lived even before these men, "And he took a little child and set it in the midst of them." It is possible that mother Eve devoted a few years to scientific child study in the early history of the race.

WHAT a comment on woman is this item! Frank M. Chapman, of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, has compiled a list of the birds which he saw on the hats of women in this city during two afternoons. Forty species were here represented, including

thrushes, warblers, shrikes, fly-catchers, tanagers, swallows, waxwings, grosbeaks, sparrows, orioles, woodpeckers, jays, owls, grouse, doves, quails, shore birds, herons, gulls, terns and grebes. In all, he saw 173 wild birds or parts of them on hats. Of these birds at least thirty-two varieties are protected by law during all or a major portion of the year. A Boston court has decided that it is unlawful to wear feathers of a bird protected by law. A similar law is proposed in New York.

IT is interesting to others than statisticians to know that the hairs of our head are numbered. Certain scientific men have laboriously calculated the number of hairs on a square inch of heads of different colors, and by estimating the total area covered have arrived at aggregate numbers, which may be taken as fairly correct. To show the well-attentioned accuracy of these calculations, a head of fair hair consists of 143,000 hairs. hair is coarser, and only totals 105,000, while those who boast a poll of red must be content with a total of 29,200. It is estimated that the hairs on a “fair head" would support the weight of 500 people.

Dark

I asked Mrs. A to give me a list of the books she read to the children, and for the benefit of other mothers, I give them here, as they are the best collection of children's books I ever saw: "Water Babies," by Charles Kingsley; "Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales ;" "Children's Pictorial History of the United States;" "Aunt Joe's Scrapbag;" by Miss Alcott; "The Story Mother Nature Told Her Children," Jane Andrews; Dickens' "Child's History of England;" Charles and Mary Lamb's "Tales From Shakespeare;" "Little Women," by Miss Alcott; "Little Men," by Miss Alcott; "Little Lord Fauntleroy," Mrs. Burnett; "The Earth in Past Ages," Sophia Herrick; "Song of Hiawatha," by Longfellow; "Madam How and Lady Why," by Kingsley; "The History of a Mouthful of Bread," by Mace; "Little Folks in Feather and Fur," by Miller; "Royal Girls at Royal Courts, " and all of Abbott's histories.

SUPT. HALL, of Washington county, made the following remarks to his teachers concerning the observance of Children's Arbor Day: "We are happy to find a large number of our teachers beautifying

their schoolrooms with pictures and flowers, sash or lace curtains, and work done by the children. Globes, charts and maps have been brought from their hiding places and are being used with good effect. Such work broadens the scope of education. Let us, teachers, continue the good work by turning our attention, at least for a day, to the school grounds. Make Children's Arbor Day one long to be remembered by the school. Appoint committees for securing tools for digging: to furnish trees, and to bring boards, nails and hammer. Convert that unsightly ash-pile in front of the door into walks. Plant trees and name them after the classes of 1898. Remove from the grounds weeds, stones and rubbish, the accumulation of years. Fasten loosened boards and straighten the stile at the front fence. Have the flag floating and sing several songs suitable for the day. Do not find an excuse to pass the day by unobserved. Arrange your programme a week ahead.”

"As is the teacher so is the school" is a maxim trite, but forever true. As is the teacher's in a given subject, so is the interest of the pupil, and so the strictly ethical effects. One of the saddest sights on earth is a half dead teacher, working upon a half dead class, the product of his own handicraft. As, on the other hand, one of the most beautiful is the inspiring teacher before a class, made sharers of his own spirit, throbbing with a certain newness of life and sense of growing power. I have seen the mere gerund-grinder, or numerical Babbage machine, monotonously laboring at a creaking crank, and turning out mechanisms the image of himself; and I have seen, too, the artist teacher, a happy union of cultured brain and loving heart, working even upon the inert product of the spiritless tradesman with results typified in the dream vision of the prophet. What a marvelous change! How soon is there a shaking of the dry bones, a movement of flesh and blood and life, a soul created under the ribs of death.-J. A. MacLellan.

A WRITER in The Atlantic Monthly speaks of the youth of America as follows:

The present generation, like the children of emigrants. has been born into a world quite unlike that in which we,college boys of the 1840's,-grew up. Railroads, steamships, telephones, electric lights, photography, huge cities full

of dwellings, crowded with costly luxuries which are not comforts, only burdensome necessities, all these are wholly apart from the lives our fathers and mothers lived. The first lesson the infant of to day learns is 'Touch a button and let something do the rest.' But I don't despair of the coming youth. I trust youth to find its way out, so long as it is youth and not premature old age. All this athletic craze is simply the young man's protest against the stigma of incapacity. He wants to do something which he cannot do without trouble and pains of his own taking. Young men seem sadly handicapped by the ease of their early lives. They will overcome this.

They

will not value that which has not been worked for, and the surfeit of ease will send them into the ranks where fighting (of some sort) is to be done."

THERE is but one thing which you have to fear in earth or heaven-being untrue to your better selves, and therefore untrue to God.-Charles Kingsley.

IN America the bitterness of religious prejudice has in great measure died out, under the softening influence of perfect freedom of conscience; but this does not mean that we are sunk or are sinking into indifference and spiritual apathy. Our history has shown far more clearly and on a far greater scale than ever had been or could have been shown before or elsewhere, that the less a man is forced by law to say he believes as to things unseen, the more he will believe in fact. so showing it has given a new hope to the world.-Catholic Standard.

And in

THE salts of the sea have fed throughout all time countless living things which have thronged its waters and whose remains now form the rocks of continents or lie spread in beds of unknown thickness over 66,000,000 square miles of the 143,000,000 square miles of the ocean's floor; they have lent their substance to build the fringing reefs of the land and all the coral islands of the sea, and there are at present, on the basis of an average salinity of 32 per cent., in the 290,700,000 cubic miles of water which make up the oceans, 90,000,000,000,coo,oco tons, or 10. 173,000 cubic miles, of salt. This is sufficient to cover the areas of all the lands of the earth with a uniform layer of salt to a depth of 1,000 feet. It seems