the toy-stores-that one almost divine element of personal will to grasp or gather up any one or all of these, and wield them for the accomplishment of its chosen purpose.

Nor is it from text-book or rare and costly volume that the only or, it may be, the richest lessons are to be learned or the mental powers trained to their best or highest efficiency. Books are valued only as they contain the records and examples of the years that are gone, of the trials and successes, the efforts and the failures of men and women like ourselves, the legacy of their lives and their achievements, their thoughts and their imaginings. From the printed page alone are we the heirs of the ages, surrounded by the comforts and elegances, and possessed of the wisdom and the virtues of this latest and greatest of the centuries.

How to avail themselves of this rightful heritage, and take their true places in the forefront of the advancing column of enlightenment and noble purpose, is the first and still the last of the lessons due our pupils, to lead them at first by easy yet ever surer and more rapid steps, with keener desire and more elastic tread, with nicer discernment and wider vision toward those heights of transfiguration where they may commune face to face with the highest and the best.

Words should become to them in the well-wrought sentence as living things, each instinct with the life of the embodied thought, which should come to them clear and distinct in its wealth of wisdom or its beauty. Into fitly chosen and connected words, too, should they learn. to breathe their own best and worthiest thought, making their sentences the living messengers of truth and ministers to the weary and needy heart of health and happi

ness.

Not without its influence upon integrity of character

and personal worthiness is this accuracy in the expression of thought in its delicate shadings and nicer meanings, for its utterance demanding the clearness of conception which springs from the accurate perception of the real and the true in nature and in life, at which much of the teaching of the school should aim. Things as they are, in their qualities and uses, to be found out but by the seeing and the handling, in the doing and the making, are the alphabet from which the thought and the feeling of a Longfellow or a Gladstone or even a Hegel are to be read. The pupil must know what is true and beautiful ere the conception of truth and beauty can dawn upon his mental vision, must learn of the good and the right if ever goodness and righteousness shall be to him more than empty words.

The teachings of history, the story of nations and individuals, the lessons of causes and results, the revelations of the material, the mental, and the spiritual world, if rightly read, are as true as-are, indeed, words of sacred writ, and can be studied with as reverent a spirit and with the probability of as little error in the translation.

The writings upon the rocks and the hieroglyphics of the heavens are as decipherable and as worthy of regard as those in the temples of Egypt or the palaces of Nineveh.

He who discovers a new truth or makes a new application of Nature's forces for the welfare of man has opened a sacred volume and found a new interpretation of a hitherto dark and hidden passage.

Truths and facts are not, of course, of equal worth, and a wise discernment is needful in separating the metal from the dross, the kernel from the chaff, or rather should we learn to choose now this, now that, as suited to our special purpose. Without the chaff there could be no

berry, without the dross no metal. But before us should be held, as a prime purpose, the cultivation of an intellectual integrity as the basis and condition of all moral and spiritual worth.

Without the early perception of material things there can be no worthy imaginings, no sound reasonings. The mother, watching the smile of the infant in the cradle, fondly deems that it is dreaming of the angels; but the angel is in the mother's heart alone. The child has had no perceptions, no imaginings, none of "the stuff that dreams are made of,” and an angel is as far from his possibilities as a dream of Italy from the untaught Eskimos.

There can be no development or growth in the memorized repetition of another's words; no powers are called into action that constitute the elements of character. The phonograph can do as much with the addition of emphasis and intonation.

Nor is it in the desultory, haphazard learning of unconnected facts that we look for aught of value in training the pupil for a life of usefulness. Thought must be consecutive to be educative, if I may be allowed to coin a needed word, must be systematic, logical, or the knowledge gained has no informing power. The knowledge that is worthy the name of information must give the learner the power and the principles that shall enable him to advance step by step from fixed facts to definite conclusions, to see things in a clearer, broader light, or the mind is not informed or enlightened.

We need, too, to place the pupils, as far as possible, upon their own responsibility. The school trains them to punctuality, order, system, and subordination, but too often affords them little opportunity for self-control, selfguidance, and self-help, more important to their wellbeing than most of the subjects taught from the books.

Their hours are arranged, their tasks assigned, the extent of their study and reading marked out, with little room for any plan, any design, any decision of their own -any effort in any self-chosen work.

And when the pupil steps from the graduation stage, in what direction is he to move? To whom is he to look? His tasks must now be assigned by himself; the extent of his efforts and the limits of his labors determined by his own judgment, with success or defeat dependent upon his ability to discern and meet the demand. of the hour.

Hardly can we too strongly urge the need of cultivating more thoroughly that self-determining, self-directing power of a free, firm will-not that form of will, or rather dead stubbornness, which yields neither to persuasion nor argument, whose only power is found in resistance, but that faculty which can concentrate all needful energies to the performance of its chosen work.

I have no faith in the thought so often expressed, supported though it be by great names, that application is genius; but it is a grand element of success and, with a worthy aim, of usefulness, in both of which genius is often sadly lacking. With all our culture we do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles, nor will the most plodding dullard ever exhibit a spark of what we call genius. He breathes another atmosphere, and leads another life. His pathway may be bordered by the daisy and the dandelion, and his days be peace. Genius takes a loftier flight.

We should see to it that no narrowing, belittling motive be allowed to sway the minds and guide the efforts of the aspiring, earnest pupils, filling their young hearts with a restless, feverish desire for some paltry, worthless bauble of relative rank or position, withering the soul,

and ruinous alike to true scholarship and worthy character.

It is the love of good learning and the best modes of attaining it—the purposes of education—that are of more worth than any acquirements of the school-room, besides which the mere unintelligent knowledge there gained sinks into insignificance.

The school at best can give but the beginnings of a useful scholarship. Many of the best books are beyond the appreciation or enjoyment of school age, even if there were time for more than a sip at the perennial fountain. But a direction toward the sources of a true intellectual life can be given, a desire awakened for deeper and richer thoughts, and the spirit quickened, which shall not fail to impart guidance and strength for the realization of higher hopes and nobler characters.

Nor should we forget the physical part of our natures, especially in these later years, with the strong tendency of the richest life and keenest activities to the cities, filled as they are with their offices and palace stores.

It has long seemed to me a misfortune that during all the years of school-life our pupils could have nothing of the old farm and shop education of our early days, with the variety of employment which they gave-could have no productive industry.

Mere physical labor, the work of the brute, may be degrading, but the training of the mind to a better control of the hand, the ennobling of labor, of the rule of man over material things, from which spring so many of the blessings of our civilization-that ballasting of our thoughts and our otherwise unstable imagination by the substance and reality of fact-can not be passed by with a sneer and scornful smile.

Hand in hand with this intellectual life, and guided