"jolly," "beastly," etc., used in season and out of season, soon lose all their meaning.

To use words of Saxon rather than of Latin origin whenever it is possible to do so, thus gaining terseness and vigor rather than a large number of syllables with diminished force.

To use the words "man" and "woman" in many instances where formerly one would have said "lady" and "gentlemen," the latter words having lost their significance from excessive use- -or abuse. The phrase "Mrs. Ames is a charming woman" would be preferred to "Mrs. Ames is a charming lady."-New York Commercial Advertiser.

NOTES FROM MY JOURNAL.

BY MRS. C. F. MENNINGER.

Dec. 16.-The end of another week has come! Sometimes I am glad for the stop, so that I may rest or play; then again I am sorry, because I am just half through some subject I am trying to teach, and want very much to go on to the end. To-day I was glad. I thought I had a hard time, and said so to another teacher. She immediately replied: "I think Fridays are always hard days." I have thought about it, and don't believe it. Often it has been most charming. Children, as do grown people, work best in the morning; so I believe in learning new words, drilling on numbers and writing in the morning, and reading, with writing and spelling of the words learned, in the afternoon. There are so many pretty things to do in reading, that one can interest children in it even when they are tired, while spelling admits of such variety, it need not grow wearisome.

On Friday afternoons I like to have the best readers step to the front and read an entire lesson; to have the best spellers see how many words they can spell in two or three minutes, or, perhaps, spell until they miss a word; to have all the pupils who can learn a piece speak it. Such things encourage the brighter ones, and put glimpses of the possible into the slower ones. For several years I have allowed story books to be brought to school on every Friday, when we spend fifteen minutes just looking at pictures. It keeps the books away on other days, and is a treat to be looked and watched

for. I think I like Friday best of all the days. I get closer to my children, and there are so many things outside of regular work, that you are glad for a place in which to teach them.

Dec. 19.-We had three visitors to-day. People who visit schools are like everybody else. Some are restful and some are tiresome. No. I came with a smile and a bow, including a patronizing air, and anounced that "I have heard so much about you that I was anxious to see you." How grateful I should have been! I asked if she would like to see anything in particular, but she said,

Oh, no; just proceed with your usual programme." Before we were half through a fifteen-minute lesson, she asked me, "How far do you go in numbers ?" Can your children read well?" "Do you use any helps ?" The pupils did the best they could, but only one thing at a time can be truly successful. At recess our visitor concluded to go elsewhere.

No. 2 was a prim little old maid with a note-book and pencil. She sat perfectly stiff and still just where I placed her. She responded to all my questions with a polite "yes" or "no," but allowed her presence to be as neutral as if she had been made of wood or stone. She left in the evening, with as polite a bow as she entered, but nothing more. Her face and her actions were expressionless, and I have no means of knowing that a single inspiration came to her that would be a help in the work that must make her so

cheerless.

No. 3 came at recess. She entered into the spirit of our work; she looked at our slates, and into our eyes; she smiled when our work was nice, and told us she thought we were trying hard and doing well. What an inspiration she was! a real, live sunbeam! She asked us to sing for her, and every child would gladly have remained any length of time to work for our pleasant visitor. Visitors like No. 3 are welcome in my schoolroom any hour of the day. No. I can be tolerated in the morning only-if I may choose--but relatives of No. 2 are never welcome.

Dec. 20. It is real interesting to have such distinct types of visitors about the same time. To-day we had an electrical The great rolling eyes seemed to send a current of restlessness through every individual in the room in less than

one.

two minutes. She was very decided as to what she wanted to see, and how long the seeing was to continue. When she had seen for a few minutes she would ask questions until everybody was stirred up. She wanted to find out and learn so many things, and her time was so short and valuable. In vain did I try to rest the children in song, gymnastics, and marching. Everything fell and tumbled, even to the children themselves, until five minutes of noon, when our visitor left us completely worn out and uncomfortable. It is wicked in grown-up people to abuse children so.

one

Dec. 21.-For some time I have felt that we were doing well in all of our regular work. The class is even, and I have felt pleased with results. In every lesson we review as much of the old as we can. In spelling, most of the class would get 100 every day. In numbers, no wholly failed-and why should I not feel encouraged? This being Christmas week, and really only three days long, I thought I would take a review of the entire work gone over since the beginning of the year. It was: altogether discouraging. Lessons that once were read beautifully were hesitated upon; some words were forgotten. Little ones who never miss in regular work missed, and only two in the twenty could spell all the words. I wanted to feel a little blue about it, but then it occurred to me that children always do better in what they do than older people, and we allow ourselves to expect still more from them. How many advanced students would recite lessons of three months ago without making a blunder? It is foolish to expect sevenyear-olds to remember all you teach them, and yet they often remind you of promises you have completely forgotten.

Dec. 22.-This was a special "speaking day." We have looked forward to and prepared for it for three weeks, and we had a nice time. There were pieces, songs and drills for Santa Claus, in many styles, and with few exceptions the programme was delightfully rendered. There were about forty mothers, and a few fathers, who smiled as their babies marched to the front in their sweetest ties and dresses, and we were all happy.

After it was all over, many mothers stopped to say nice things, but the grumbler came, too. She demanded, "What did Robbie do that he wasn't in the gymnastics? All the other boys were in it.

You hurt my feelings so bad I could hardly come, and Robbie didn't want to come back to you any more!" "For pity's sake!" That is all I could say. In the first place, not half the boys were in the drill, nor were they wanted. Every mother's child is sweet enough and bright enough; but often the child is like the parent, and it would take the patience of several saints, and all the time there is, to teach them that they owe any. thing to other people, or that they must do as other people do, and when they do it, it is harassing to one's feelings to be found fault with; but "Be sure you are right, and then go ahead."-Western School Journal.

MILTON AS AN EDUCATOR.*

BY PHILLIPS BROOKS.

THE subject of which I wish to speak to you belongs to the History of Education. That is a region into which any student may enter without being an intruder-and I begin by saying how desirable it seems to me that those who are training themselves, or who are being trained for teachers, should study, as it is not usual for them to study now, the history of education. No man to-day can practice any of the higher arts to the best effect unless he knows the history of that art. Our life becomes extemporized and fragmentary unless each man taking up his work in the world not merely attaches his work to the work of those who went

before him and begins where they left off, but also knows something of the way in which his art came to reach the point at which he finds it, and so is able to make the labor which he adds a part of one consistent and intelligible progress. We want to know the blunders men have made, that we may not make them over again; we want to know the grounds of the partial successes they have achieved, that we may help to carry forward these successes toward their full result. me remind you what are some of the values that belong to the study of the

Let

*Some years before his death Phillips Brooks read before the Massachusetts Teachers' Association an address on "Milton as an Educator." The address was printed soon afterwards in the New England Journal of Educatiou, and is reprinted by the New England Magazine. We would be glad to print the whole here, but can give only a part. It is a grand paper. -ED.

1893.]

history of education. First, there is the great general value of experience. To know what other men have done in the department where you have been set to work will make it unnecessary that you should go over again what they have already done. The student of the history of education finds, to his great surprise, that many of the educational ideas of his own time, which seem to him all fresh and new, were found out long ago, were used awhile and then were lost again, only to be rediscovered at this later day. A wiser study of educational history would have made this re-discovery unnecessary, and so saved time and strength. If every generation has to begin and prove over again that two times two is four, what generation will ever get beyond the proof that ten times ten is one hundred? And then, again, to know how different studies came to be introduced would often throw great light upon the values of those studies. There can be no doubt that many studies have been introduced legitimately, for reasons which were temporary, and then have remained like ghosts haunting our schools long after their living necessity had died away. It is always hard to get any study out of our schools when it is once in. Each teacher learning it as a boy is naturally ready to teach it as a man. As John Locke says, "It is no wonder if those who make the fashion suit it to what they have, and not to what their pupils want." Here, surely, is the key to a great deal of the conservatism and traditionalism of our teaching; and the surest way to break it down and to get rid of it would be such a wise study of the history of education by those who are to teach as should show them how the studies which they find in school came there, and so help them to judge whether those studies are to be dropped as temporary necessities which have been outgrown, or to be kept forever because they are forever useful.

215

profoundly merits the study of us all. The seventeenth century is really the first thoroughly modern century of English life. The seventeenth-century Englishman is the earliest English being whom we of the nineteenth century can easily and perfectly understand. It is not so in the century before. The men and women of the Tudor times are different and distant from us. They are as little modern in their character as in their dress and houses. But with the opening of the seventeenth century, almost taking us by surprise, we come on men whom we can comprehend-whose whole look is familiar to us.

Now in the midst of this great century there stands forth in England one picturesque and typical man. The strongest ages do thus incorporate their life in some one strong representative, and hold him up before the world to tell their story. And the most typical man of English seventeenth-century life was John Milton.

He was the most typical Englishman of the most typical and strongest English time; and this might interest any one who has red English blood running in his veins. But he especially belongs to us-he has his place here among those who are interested in education, because this typical Englishman was a school master, and one of the most thoughtful and suggestive reasoners on education that the English race ever produced. He is near enough to us to let us understand him, but he is far enough away from us to let us look at him with something of romantic feeling, as we think of the greatest of Englshmen sitting with a dozen boys about him, not merely teaching them, but reasoning about their teaching, looking over their heads and seeing the distant visions of the perfect education of the future, as true a poet when he sat in the teacher's chair as when before his organ he chanted lofty hymns and told the story of eternities.

I come now to what I want to make my subject for this lecture. I want to open with you one page of that history and see something of what is written. there. I want to speak of the education, and especially of one great educator, of two centuries ago, and see if we can learn anything from him. I turn to this period❘ with special interest, not merely because it is the one which has most attracted my own study, but because it is one that so

Just think of being Milton's scholar! Every art slips down into technicalities and loses its first inspiring principles. It cannot keep the grandeur of ideas. What technical skill the great teacher of Aldersgate street may have had, what discipline he kept, how he managed his markings and rankings, we cannot know; but, at least, we are sure that in that dingy room, with the dingy London roses blooming outside the window, the ideas of teaching, the ends of scholarship, the

principles of education, never were forgotten or lost out of sight. No doubt, we should see and feel this for ourselves if it were possible for us to open the old school-room door, and go in and sit down among the scholars, where the great mas ter, waxing dimmer of sight, and getting on towards stony blindness every day, should not discover us. But this we cannot do; and so we are glad we can turn away from the mere mention of Milton's actual school-teaching, which is so unsatisfying, and find that he has written down for us what he thought and believed about school-teaching, in his famous tract on Education.

Milton's ideas about education are really reducible to three great ideas, which may be thus named: naturalness, practicalness, nobleness. These are the These are the three first necessities of education, which he is always trying to apply; and what has modern education done more than this?

It is for me to leave it to you who listen to me, the teachers of schools, men and women who know what education is among us, to judge whether these first principles of education stand to-day. With them education ripens or withers.

And once again, before I close, I urge the need of more study of the history of education. Poor, extemporized things our schools might be without our great seventeenth century educator, and men like him must not be strangers to us. Our normal scholars must not be allowed to think that education began with their teachers, or their fathers. The teacher must work out of the inspiration of a world long past.

And through it all, as we read it, we shall trace these lines-the craving for naturalness, and practicalness, and nobleness. They are nothing new, but they can never be too old. Through the gray pavement of the streets of Venice run two threads of white marble, by which the traveler, lost in the intricacy of the mighty city, cannot fail to find his way to the Rialto, where the centre of the city's business lies. So through all education run these three threads by which he who follows patiently shall come at last to where the truth is most truly and richly taught and learned.

THE SWALLOW.

"Bird Book,' as it is familiarly

phers always; they must be your anxiety now, and you must know how they are prospering in the midst of all the hubbub of experiments and theories. But for myself, certain impressions come very strongly out of the study in which we have engaged. I am struck with the simplicity of the problems of education at the bottom. They seem to change, but always they are the same; they all come at last to these first principles in every age. And I am impressed again with their difficulty. The simple is always the difficult. Reduce every problem to its fundamental principle, and then for the first time you stand face to face with its difficulty. Then you see how hard it is. When we see that that over which the philosophers have puzzled in every age has been in every age the same, then we realize that it must be no child's question to be settled in a flippant hour. And yet, again, it makes education seem more human. I cannot think of it as an art, a technical and separate thing, when I see how the great human minds have always pondered it. Clearly, the more we are true men and women, the more worthy we shall be to deal with it.

distributed very widely by the State of Pennsylvania, although frequently serving no higher purpose than to please a constituent or to adorn the centre-table in the parlor, becomes very useful in the hands of skillful teachers and intelligent parents. The State would do well to issue more books of the same general character, illustrating also our native tree and plant life, and describing our minerals, metals, rocks and soils, in such attractive manner as would cause these "reports" to be sought after and referred to in the schools and by the people generally.

A girl of ten, who is fond of drawing animals and painting them in water colors, made a copy of the barn swallow and his mate sitting on their nest, and handed it to her teacher, who always has an encouraging word in recognition of well-meant effort. Next day several borrowed specimens of stuffed swallows were brought to school and made the basis of a language lesson. The pupils went to their homes, talking of tail-feathers and wing-feathers, of bills made for catching insects and mandibles for carrying mud, of the differences between the barn swal

low, the bank swallow and the chimney swallow, and of how the flight of the swallow indicates changes in the weather.

"In clear weather," said Katie," they ascend high up into the air; in dull weather when we feel so restless at school, particularly before rains, they fly low and sail along close to the ground."

"Yes," replied Henry, "that is because during damp weather the insects on which the swallows feed hug the earth or flutter low over the streams. The teacher said that some swallows eat over six thousand insects in a day."

The arithmetic class had also made a calculation of the distance covered by the flight of a chimney swallow during its lifetime. Its life lasts ten years; it flies ten hours a day, at the rate of a mile a minute, as fast as the fastest express train, knowing no winter, because its rapid flight enables it to shift its home to sunny skies on short notice; and the answer to the problem was found to be two million one hundred and ninety thousand milesupward of eighty-seven times the circumference of the globe. The Greek Professor, who was following the little folks, and whose memory was stirred by their earnest conversation, began to repeat a translation of the thirty-third ode of Anacreon:

"Lovely swallow, once a year,

Pleased you pay your visit here;
When our clime the sunbeams gild
Here your airy nest you build;
And when bright days cease to smile
Fly to Memphis on the Nile."

At that moment the teacher of history joined the group, and, on learning the thread of conversation, related the old story of how a swallow is said to have chirped about the head of Alexander the Great while he slept, and awakened him to warn him of the machinations which his family were plotting against him.

The following Sunday at Sabbathschool several boys were inattentive and talkative. The teacher related the story of St. Francis, who, while preaching, could not make himself heard for the twittering of the swallows which at the time were building their nests. The legend tells how that he paused in his sermon and said: "My sisters, you have talked enough, it is time that I had my turn. Be silent, and listen to the word of God." They were silent immediately, and so were the talkative boys.

After Sabbath-school the two sisters,

whose heads were now full of interesting things about the swallow, were delighted to hear from the preacher's lips this Scandanavian myth:

The Scandanavians call the swallow the bird of consolation. In that bitter agony through which the sins of the world became white as snow, the swallow came and spread his wings beneath the cross to lighten the load of the Saviour; and in the last great agony which caused the very earth to shudder and hide its face in darkness, the loving bird hung with pity over the convulsed brow and softly sung, salva! salva! salva!"

On their return home their papa read from Plutarch the story of Isis and Osiris.

She

"After his return Typhon, the god of storms and cyclones, laid a plot against him, having taken seventy-two men into the conspiracy and having for a helper a queen from Ethiopia, Aso by name. secretly measured the body of Osiris, and made to size a handsome and highly ornamented coffer, which was carried into the banqueting room. And as they were all delighted with its appearance and admired it, Typhon promised in sport that whoever should lie down within it and should exactly fit, he would make him a present of the chest. After the others had tried, one by one, and nobody fitted it, then Osiris got in and laid himself down, whereupon the conspirators running up, shut down the lid and fastened it with heavy nails from the outside, and poured melted lead over them, and so carried it out to the river and let it go down the Tanaite branch into the sea; which branch on that account is hateful to the Egyptians.

"The first to discover the mischief were Pan and the Satyrs inhabiting the country around Chemnis. These gave intelligence of what had happened, causing great fear and terror to the multitudefrom which we have the word panics.