without giving them a chance to fear its size or sober binding, read them with every device to catch and keep the attention, the famous description of the siege of Leyden. I once read it to three little boys, aged eight, eleven, and thirteen. They gave the most breathless attention to the very end. The starving city, the sick Prince at Rotterdam sending inspiring letters to the besieged people, the piercing of the dykes; the sea, their deliverer, rising fast over fair meadows and orchards, or slowly falling as the gaunt, despairing people watched it from the castle top, all seemed none the less thrilling to these children because told in MOTLEY'S somewhat stately language. But how find this for yourselves little ones? Now the index -not volume 1st or 2nd, one index is enough. They find it easily, and feeling independent for this and any like emergency, they will join in your ridicule at the putting in of marks to find the place again.

Now Holland is not the greatest country in the world, but we will do thorough work with it because we like to do thorough work. Let them make out again a list of names used in the Cyclopedia article, and search the indexes of all the books in their possession for Spain, WILLIAM of ORANGE, dykes, PHILIP II.

Has Holland a flag? and now for the Dictionary and Cyclopedia-do not tell them a thing. What money has Holland? Call on the little stamp and coin collectors.

We have now found out about Holland from twelve or fifteen different sources. Why not keep the references in an alphabet blank-book, written up in their own crabbed hand-writing? They will enjoy this with that innate love of order and method which most children have, and they will never know that this is the beginning of Bibliography-making, unless you are foolish enough to tell them so.

These habits they are forming will be invaluable. Soon they will cease to be afraid of the largest or dryest volumes, but will know that they can take a chapter here and there as they need it. I know schools where a great deal of reading is done, but the references are found for the pupils to the very page, and the results of this system do not seem to me satisfactory. One girl of fourteen could not use her home HILDRETH, or even find the places in it, because it was a different edition and differently paged from the one used at school.

Toward the end of the grade-teaching, books of reference in UnitedStates History, Biography, and books of Travel should be used with ease. Now they can use with profit a good library. About GEORGE III. we must learn as we did of Holland, making a list of the great men contemporary, and looking them all up. Each should give us something about GEORGE III., some new view of his times or policy. You must teach them what treasures Biography has for them. For the Reform Bill of '32, I would take a simple history, as SWINTON's Outlines, and turning to the table of 19thCentury great men, I would cull from it those who were alive in '32. Every biography of these men is worth looking through. JOHN STUART MILL'S cool opinion we find with difficulty-no index. SIR WALTER SCOTT, we find that the dear old man died in '32, bewailing the Reform Bill as the ruin of the country; DICKENS, no mention of it, he talks too entirely of himself. You can teach your scholars to be always on the alert for

the rich material to be found in Biography. They should know that they will surely find about great Englishmen in the memoirs of TICKNOR, SUMNER and PRESCOTT, men who travelled abroad, and were treated as Americans never have been since. They know that the ADAMS family were all ambassadors, and that great Europeans of their time may be noticed in their pages; the BUNSENS, always travelling and seeing great people, Miss MITFORD, FANNY KEMBLE, THE PRINCE CONSORT.—Oh, the changing, brilliant pictures we find in such pages! Is it love of learning or of gossip that makes them so attractive?

To help the young people to this wide use of books how hard we must work ourselves! If grade-teachers, we need not say we have no school work to do in the evenings. We can use this as a lever by which we ourselves rise to more scholarly attainments and habits.

Such work as this in schools must make many books and their contents somewhat familiar even to children, and remove that dread of attacking a new subject.

So extensive a use of reference books as that in the lesson on Holland, might not be best more than one or twice a term. Many teachers will think they have no time for this exercise. That will depend on the value they put on it. And we shall mistake if we ignore the child's love of variety and uncertainty. There should be days, perhaps weeks, when the teacher seems to forget this work, though it may be her dearest hobby.

It is needless to point out how the use of reference books may be extended and perfected in a High School where there are mature minds, where there is a better library and studies imperatively requiring its aid.

And so it seems to me possible to give the children a better start in using, after they go out of our schools, the best books with ease and enjoyment. How many of us were long cheated out of the heritage of ages, looking with awe and dread at the outside of books that have since become dear and familiar! How astonished were we at our first reading of the Iliad, or Prometheus Bound. "How English! we said, how easy

to understand!"

What do men and women talk of at night before their fire? The gossip or cares of the day, the little things that must be talked of but should not fill the mind.

They have neither of them had any time to read, they say. The wife says she is too tired for that when she does sit down, but she always gets through the personals in the daily paper, and her husband reads the political and business parts. They are not too tired for that, because it is done without effort. Now we know that if good reading had been made · easier by long habit, if they were on better terms with books, their literary resources would not be so narrow. Poor Mrs. BROWN would not have given up Bagehot in despair.

But they ought to do all this for themselves, you say, and not lean so helplessly on the plea, poor advantages. Doubtless; but one thing it seems to me we are working for is to make it easier to be good, easier to be wise, easier for the common minds to work on a higher intellectual level.

Ages ago the seed of a certain plant may, by some accident, have thrown out a new organ, a wing or a hook, and as this hook caught in the wool of beasts, or helped the seed along to more fertile districts and so proved its use, it became finally a permanent new organ in the plant. Just so we all know common minds, that by some mighty wrench of circumstance or influence have seemed to develop new faculties which we even hope may enter as a principle in descent and give their children and grand-children a better start.

It is a hopeful thought, and gives us courage, often when the reign of law seems too hard, and we feel a sickening certainty that the children we are working for will, after all, make the same mistakes their parents made, will settle back, after our influence is removed, to no better lives.

But good work may tell in ways we cannot trace. The companionship of great lives and thoughts in books must ever be elevating; and any efforts to make this companionship easy we may consider good work.

It being decided to postpone the discussion till after the reading of the next paper upon the program, E. O. VAILE, Principal of the CLARK School of Chicago, Ill., followed immediately with his paper which was as follows:

WHAT SHOULD WE SEEK TO ACCOMPLISH IN THE

66

READING-EXERCISE?

Remote, unfriended, melancholy slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po;
Where'er I roam, whatever relms to see,
My heart untravelled fondly turns to thee;
Stil to my Brother turns, with ceaseles pain,

And drags at each remove a lengthening chain."

Readers of BOSWELL wil recal the interesting incident which he relates connected with the first line. In a company, GOLDSMITH was once askt what he ment by the word "slow" in the opening line. Did he mean tardiness of locomotion? With a carelessnes said to be natural to the man, he answerd "yes." Dr JOHNSON happend to be present; and, in a manner quite characteristic, he broke in with this remark:-" No, Sir, you did not mean tardiness of locomotion; you ment that sluggishnes of mind which comes upon a man in solitude." I must confes it is a question in my mind whether or not the Doctor was right. But whether right or wrong, the familiar anecdote servs to point the question,—What is a good reader? Of course, when that question is answerd, we know what ends we seek in the reading exercise.

In the common enumeration of the thre fundamental R's, reading is justly put first. It is the foundation of all school work. It is the sub-soil of intelligence. In its tru sense it is the sum and substance of education. A failure in teaching reading means failure in this day in teaching everything. Reading is an all-comprehensiv term in text-book work. To develop the power and the habit of reading in the real sense is the highest function of the school; yes, it is the only function of the school. For

that means the development of the understanding! All objectiv teaching is but an effort to prepare the child's intelligence for succesful reading; the succesful grasping and obtaining of thots without the intervention of objects.

The use of text-books is one of the main objects of school training. But what ar all your text-books worth, and the memorizing of them, without a full and generous power of understanding them? But how far apart ar the extreme acts and processes which this word reading covers! It is all reading, from the feebl efforts of the littl child to the work of the poet or filosofer. Everything is cald reading that involvs the calling of words without reference to the comprehension, or amount of mental activity exerted. What degree, or, in homeopathic language, what potency, of this acquirement should be aimd at in our schools, is a question seldom discust. Probably it is understood that we should aim to do the best we can. But this does not help us at all to any clearer conception of what good reading is. It does seem id to ask what we really hav in mind when we speak of teaching a child to read. And yet for the great mas of teachers, it is an exceedingly-pertinent question. They fail to recognize the fact that the word reading is made to do doubl duty; that it is a term applied to two distinct arts. Reading, in one sense, is the art of receiving impressions; of comprehending another person's thot. We speak of reading a person's character, of reading a piece of scripture, a drawing, or a picture. When applied to books it means the art of getting ideas from the printed page; of grasping another's thot as conveyd by type or pen. In another sense, reading is one of the arts of expression; a means of conveying thot or sentiment from one soul to another, the same as music, or sculpture, or painting. In this last sense reading is a constituent of language; it is the means of giving to the writer, in the expression of his mind, all the benefits of a present, living soul. For convenience the first of these may be cald mental or mind reading, that is the reading or comprehending of another's mind as he projects it upon the page. The other art may be cald oral reading, that is the expression by means of the voice of what we hav receivd from an author's printed words.

It is tru that these two arts ar closely related: but the possession of either power does not necessarily indicate the possession of the other power in an equal extent. We hav all known ministers who, from their intellectual capacity, we wer bound to believ had considerabl ability as mental readers, but who, by the reading of their hymns and sermons gave us excruciating evidence of their lack of skil in expressing their own or another's thots orally. And we hav all known children who, wel drilled in matters of articulation and utterance, past for "fine readers" as the frase goes, but who, by a littl adroit questioning, hav betrayd the fact that they possest a very inadequate, if not erroneous, conception of what they red.

In practice, whatever it might be in theory, it is generally mere oral reading that teachers hav in view when at work in the school-room. It is assumed that the practice of reading can hav no primary object other than to impart elocutionary skil; to cultivate facility and power of

oral expression. The universal question is not, Do our pupils understand what they read? but How distinctly and fluently can they call off the words? They ar drild daily from six to sixteen, and yet they cannot read. They pas over that which to them is intelligibl and that which is not intelligibl alike, without the least discrimination. Words, words ar all they read.

Professors of elocution and special teachers of reading ar in high repute, and their services in demand, but they do not impart the power we need. In fact they seem to think we hav no need except need of their tricks. It is a serious question if the whole guild, with few exceptions, ought not to be indicted as a public nuisance. There hav been instances in teachers' institutes in which they hav certainly done more harm than good. They magnify mere trifles of form and manner beyond all reason. They do not seem evn to suspect that mental culture, the power to grasp and appreciate another's thot must exist as the foundation of all genuin teaching in the art of elocution. As a consequence the innocent teacher goes back to his school-room fully imbued with the idea that to teach reading in the most approved and succesful way his boys and girls must be traind to imitate the tricks and graces, the noise and bluster, of the institute elocutionist. The teacher is more imprest than ever with the idea that oral reading is the high and the important end, and that in the matter of reading he has nothing else to think of.

It is not the purpose of this paper to depreciate the valu of a weltraind voice and a good delivery. But it is its purpose, while conceding the valu and beauty of this accomplishment, to assert that there is a power which our children need that is of infinitly greater importance to them, but which is entirely neglected in our school training. Within the proper and legitimate sfere of ordinary school work, the paramount object of the reading-exercise should be to develop the power of obtaining from the printed page, and by means of the eye, emotions and ideas clearly and quickly. All other work in reading should be strictly subordinate to this.

A person who has not givn considerabl thot to this matter cannot realize how completely our schools fail in this respect. But the fact is beginning to impress itself. It has been alluded to on several occasions

in papers read before this body. The Superintendent of a thriving Ohio town gave this as an illustration of his experience. The senior clas of his high school came into his hands for the study of Chemistry in February;-only five months before their graduation, and after at least ten years of faithful instruction in a set of first-clas graded schools. He put into their hands what he considerd a good book;-not one however on the regulation text-book plan with crystallized statements and formulas. It was simpl, and the design was to hav it red and summarized. After a few weeks he found that no substantial hed way had been made. At first the troubl was charged to the book; and then to want of effort on the part of pupils. But these did not prove satisfactory solutions of the difficulty. At last, to use his own words, he became convinced that his clas did not know how to read. They could memorize and recite the words of the book when the amount to be committed was not too great; but they