SEED OYSTERS-WHAT THEY ARE. We must now learn more about the "seed" and its development. By "seed" is meant the "milk" or spat or sawn! which is deposited during the breeding season (in summer), and adheres to some object or other in the water of the "bed." As soon as the "milk" finds a resting-place, helped by the action of the sea-water, it begins to harden and to take form. Just as the white liquid china-clay of the pate-sur-pate china decorator in its elevations and depressions hardens upon the side of a cup or vase, and by the different thicknesses of its hardened layers forms the lovely figures we see in art collect ions; so the "milk" of the oyster grows into the shape inten ded for it by nature. Though the oyster-shell is so uncouth and rough in outline; yet what wondrous alchemy is this Nevertheless, in the oyster world, as in ours, no privilege or advantage is accorded without some attendant drawback. Hence, when the shell begins to form, the baby oyster must cease his fantastic wriggling about in the water and give careful attention to his own support. The cares of life come upon him early, but as his burdens increare he grows in strength and ability to carry them. All he asks is a good start. He is not particular as to whose hand he holds during his incipiency, provided it is clean. To him an old boot, or a dead star-fish, or the shell of a crab is as good as anything to cling to until he has sufficient courage to let go and paddle his own canoe. If they are right in his way at the moment he wants them, an old bottle, a lost anchor, an escaped dredge, or a pair of oyster-tongs will serve. In about two weeks after the spat is deposited, as one may see with the naked eye, these become bamacled all over with the enterprising young oysters.-From "The Biography of the Oyster," by Edward L. Wilson, in October Scribner. SOME GOOD TEST QUESTIONS. Upon what does the plant life of any region depend? What strait between North America and Asia? What two capes extend into it? Name the four chief tributaries of the Mississippi River? Name the Great Lakes and the waters which connect them. Name five States of the Union specially adapted to agricultural pursuits? What part of Maine is most densely populated? What sea. port has New Hampshire? Name three cities in Mohawk valley? What names are given to the great forest and the great treeless plains of South America? In what portion of the country are the great forest plains located? Name four of the principal mountain ranges of Europe and state the direction in which each trends? What two countries occupy the Scandinavian peninsula? Name three of the waters surrounding the peninsula? CIVIL GOVERNMENT. How are Representatives in Congress apportioned among the States? How many members compose the United States senate. In what case must Congress afford protection to the States? What branch of the executive department of the national government has charge of foreign affairs? Why are the accounts of the United States Treasury department published from time to time? Under what authority is the District of Columbia governed? How many members of each branch of the State legislature shall constitute a quorom? Name two county officers, their term of office, and one duty of each? THE TRUE SIMPLICITY OF CARLYLE'S LIFE. There was in Carlyle a certain arrogance of intellect that grew with years, and often asserted itself in fashions that he himself felt to be grievous. This has been mistaken for arrogance of heart. But arrogance of heart he never had. In sympathies and manner of life he remained to the end much of the simple peasant. Seldom a year passed, of the eightyfive that he lived, that he did not spend a month or two among the Scotch heath and peat bogs, in or near his humble boyhood home. There, nearer than anywhere else, his restless soul came to the attainment of that peace and composure which it was quite capable of nowhere, To the end, his own poor, toiling, uneducated kinsmen continued the dearest people on earth to him, and rarely came a payment from editor or publisher that, whatever his own necessities, he did not share it with some of them. Had they been stupid, I am not sure that he would not at times have shown them scant mercy; but their humbieness only bound them the closer His owu mode of life, for London, was hardly less frugal than theirs. He fared mainly on oatmeal and hams which he would have only out of native Annandale, the London article in his judgment partaking of the specious, quack character of its environment. His clothes, too, he would have only from an honest Dumfries tailor, who made them up in lots to last several years, and in forms that put them beyond the mutability of fashion.-E. C. Martin, in October Scribner. AN IMPORTANT MEETING. The following note explains itself: Des Moines, Iowa, September 10, 1891. The next meeting of the Department of Superintendence will be held in Brooklyn, N. Y., Februrary 16, 17, 18, 1892. This early announcement is made in order that those having charge of other educational meetings may avoid selecting the same dates. HENRY SABIN, President Dep't of Superintendence L. W. DAY, Secretary, Cleveland, Ohio. SOME PERTINENT QUESTIONS. Of what profit was the normal institute to you this year? Did you attend it because you were afraid you could not get a certificate if you did not? Did you sit a silent critic of the methods and plans presented by teachers of known ability and success and say to yourself and neighbor croaker that that sounds very nice but it would fail where you are going to teach? Did you go home regretting the time and grudg ing the expense?- Central School Journal. THE UNDERGRADUATE AND THE IDEAL UNIVERSITY. What, in the growth of higher University life, is to become of the undergraduate? Will he not be made too subordinate a being, in view of the lofty ideals of the University? As a matter of fact, the great numbers and the large significance of the undergraduates, in every university, insure and always will insure the closest attention to their needs and interests, however much the ideal of the University grow upon us, however lofty the more organic and national purposes of our academic work becme. Of the proper place of the undergraduate iu the organism of a great University I have a pretty decided notion, which I would like to express as I close. It is this: In the true University the undergraduate ought to feel himself a novice in an order of learned servants of the ideal-a novice who, if in turn he be found willing and worthy, may be admitted, after his first degree, to the toils and privileges of this order as a graduate or, still later, as a teacher; but who, on the other hand, if, as will most frequently happen, he is not for this calling, will be sent back to the world, enriched by his undergraduate years of intercourse with his fellows, and with elder men, and progressive scholars. The ideal academic life then is not organized expressly for him. And yet he will gain by the very fact that it is organized expressly for higher aims and upon more significant principles than his individual interests directly involve. It is a mistake to think first of "disciplining" the undergraduate mind, and then of higher academic purposes. First let us seek the highest, which is organized scholarship. Then let us give ample time, teachers, and oversight to the undergraduates, but let what we do for them be informed by the true University spirit; that is, let us treat them just as novices preparing to enter the higher scholarly life in some one of the multitudinous departments of modern research and let us train them as if they were all known to be worthy of such a calling. THEIR FIRST APPEARANCE. Omnibuses were first introduced in New York in 1830. The first newspaper advertisement appeared in 1652. The first copper cent was coined in New Haven in 1687. The first use of a locomotive in this country was in 1829. The first saw-maker's anvil was brought to America in 1819. Percussion arms were used in the United States army in 1830. The first almanac was printed by George Von Fusbach in 1460. The first glass factory was built in the United States in 1780. The first printing press in the United States was worked in 1620. Glass windows were first introduced into England in the eighteenth century. The first steam engine on this continent was brought from England in 1753. The first complete sewing machine was patented by Elias Howe Jr., in 1846. The first society for the promotion of christian knowledge was organized in 1698. VASSAR STUDENTS' AID SOCIETY. A scholarship of $200 is offered by the Vassar Students' Aid Society to a student who passes without conditions all the requirements for admission to the Freshman Class of Vassar College at the examinations to be held in June, 1892. This scholarship, like that awarded by the Society last June, is offered as a loan and covers one half of all charges made by Vassar College for one year's board and tuition. Examinations will be held in Chicago, Denver, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Washington, Louisville, Detroit, Omaha, San Francisco; and, if necessary, arrangements may be made for examinations in other localities. Applications for this scholarship must be made before April 1, 1892. All applications and all requests for information must be addressed to the Chairman of the Committee on the announcement of Scholarships, Miss Jessie F. Smith, South Weymouth, Mass. Envelopes were first used in 1839. BEAUTIFUL BINDING. One of the handsomest exhibitions of the bookmaker's art that this writer has lately seen is a set of "The Century" just from the bindery of Foster & Webb, this city. The beautiful paper and print, of course, is no part of their work; but the Morocco bindings are characteristic of the work done by this house as to the careful attention to detail, given by the joint head of the firm. And their promptness is not less marked than their conscientiousness and their taste. A little Detroit girl was bidding her boy playmate good-by and on this occasion her mother told her to kiss him. She offered him a roguish cheek and when the salute was gravely given began to rub it vigorously with her handkerchief. "Why, Laura," said her mother, "you're not rubbing it off?" "No, mamma," said the little maiden, demurely, "I'm rubbing it in."-Detroit Free Press. HE WORRIED ABOUT IT. ONE FOR EACH SCHOOL DAY. "The sun's heat will give out in ten million years more," And he worried about it; "It will give out then, if it doesn't before," And he worried about it; "It would surely give out, so the scientists said In all the scientifical books that he read, And the whole mighty universe then would be dead," And he worried about it. "And some day the earth would fall into the sun," And he worried about it; "Just as sure, and as straight, as if shot from a gun,” And he worried about it; "When strong gravitation unbuckles her straps, "The earth will become much too small for the race," And he worried about it; "When we'll pay thirty dollars an inch for pure space;" And he worried about it. "The earth will be crowded so much, without doubt, "The Gulf Stream will curve and New England grow torrider," And he worried about it; "Than was ever the climate of southermost Florida," And he worried about it; "The ice crop will be knocked into small smithereens, "And in less than ten thousand years, there's no doubt," And he worried about it; "Our supply of lumber and coal will give out," And he worried about it; "Just then the Ice Age will return cold and raw, Frozen men will stand stiff with arms outstretched in awe As if vainly beseeching the general thaw." And he worried about it. His wife took in washing (a dollar a day), His daughter sewed shirts, the rude grocer to pay, While his wife beat her tireless rub-dub-dub THE FREE KINDERGARTEN. Among the noble charities of Nashville that might well be adopted in less pretentious cities, is the Free Kindergarten. The Free Kindergarten Association has been organized about two years, with Mrs. L. H. McHenry, President, and Miss Martha O'Bryan corresponding Secretary. Either of these ladies would give information to persons interested. MISS S. C. BATTAILE, MISSISSIPPI. No man or woman can really be strong, gentle, pure and good, without the world being better for it.—Phillips Brooks. have any, you Give me the benefit of your convictions if but keep your doubts to yourself, for I have enough of my own.-Goethe. Let us be of good cheer; remember that the misfortunes hardest to hear are those thnt never happen.-Lowell. We scatter seeds with careless hand, And dream we ne'er shall see them more, But for a thousand years Their fruit appears In weeds that mar the land, Or healthful shore. Our echoes roll from soul to soul - Anon. -Tennyson. Lost, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.-Horace Mann. It may be possible for three persons to keep a secret, pro vided two of them are dead. The man who knows the most of himself is the best judge of his neighbors.-Uncle Esek. Only thyself can harm; Forget it not; And full of peace; As of the South wind whispered warm, Wait thou till storm and tumult cease. Celia Thaxter. That writer does the most who gives his readera the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time.-Cumberland. Nay; speak no ill; a kindly word Can never leave a sting behind, And, oh, to breathe each tale we've heard Is far beneath a noble mind. Far oft a better seed is sown By choosing thus a kinder plan, -George Elliott. He who respects his work so highly (and does It reverent. ly) that he cares little what the world thinks of it, is the man about whom the world comes at last to think a good deal.— Beecher. Music washes away from the soul the dust of every day life.-Auerbach. Run, if you like, but try and keep your breath; work like a man but don't be worked to death. -Holmes. Never give up! it is wiser and better Providence kindly has mingled the cup; What are values? That should be a child's first lesson. Make a boy feel the worth of a thing, and a hard road becomes a pathway to the stars. He feels his share in the future; he knows his place in the universe, and is its heir. Character, right ambition, character-get the value of these in a boy's mind and your road becomes easy.-R. W. Gilder. This is the fancy that thrills through me - Wm. H. Hayne. Not all who seem to fail have failed indeed What though the seed be cast by the wayside, And the birds take it—yet the birds are fed. -Charles Kingsley. A morrow must come on When I shall wake to weep, But just for some short hours, God, give me sleep! -Annie Reeve Aldrich. I sent my soul through the invisible, Some letter of that after-life to spell; And by-and by my soul returned to me, And answered, "I myself am heaven and hell!" -Omar Khayyam. The highest human intelligence and the best human wisdom are those that can interpret life aright and find the real gain that every loss involves. No loзs is irretrievable: and if we have a vital belief that a higher gain may be won from it we have taken the first and most important step in success, in happiness, and in character.-N. Y. Ledger. LOWELL AS POET AND CITIZEN. FROM AN EDITORIAL IN THE OCTOBER CENTURY. As a poet, whatever comparisons may be made with his predecessors or contemporaries, at home or abroad, whatever just criticisms may be recorded, we believe it will be found at the end that a large part of his verse has passed into literature there to remain. The originality, vitality, intensity, and beauty of the best of it are self evident. Although a true, spontaneous poet, his life had other strong interests and engrossing occupations, and the volume of his verse does not equal that of others whose careers have extended beside his own; his impression as a poet upon his time has not equaled that of others. It may, iudeed, be said that if as strongly poetic in nature as they, he would have been dominated as clusively as were they by the poetic mood. However this may be, the quality of his genius, as shown in his best work, was, we believe, quite as fine as that of any poet writing English in his day. No one can read his last volume of verse without being impressed anew by the vigor, variety and spontaneous character of Lowell's poetic gift. Even his literary faults are of such a nature as to testify to the keenness of his thought and the abundance of his intellectual equipment. ex But, after all, perhaps the most striking thing in Lowell's career was not the brilliancy of his mind, his many-sided and extraordinary ability,-but the fact that in every department of his intellectual activity was distinguished the note of the patriot. He loved letters for art's sake; he used letters for art's sake-but also for the sake of the country. His poetic fervor, his unique humor, the vehicle of his pithy and strenuous prose, his elegant and telling oratory-all these served fearlessly the cause of American democracy, of which he was the most commanding exponent in the intellectual world of our day. His keen sense of the responsibilities of citizenship added to his native genius, made him from early life in the true and undegraded sense of the word-a politician, and an effective one, as well as a statesman whose writings are an arsenal of human freedom. LOWELL ON LITERATURE. The following is an extract from Lowell's introduction to the first number of the Pioneer, reprinted in the October New England Magazine. One must admire the characteristic frankness with which Lowell puts his finger on one of the sore spots of the time-1843. A great deal of what he says, too is applicable to the criticism and literature of to-day. "We find opinions enough and to spare, but scarce any of the healthy, natural growth of our soil. If native, they are seldom more than scions of public opinion, too often planted and watered by the prejudices or ignorant judgments of individuals, to be better than an upas-tree shedding a poisonous blight on any literature that may chance to grow up un der it. Or if foreign, they are, to borrow a musical term, "recollections" of Blackwood or the quarterlies, of Wilson, Macaulay, or Carlyle-not direct imitations, but endeavors, as it were. to write with their cast-off pens freshnibbed for Cisatlantic service. The whole regiment comes one by one to our feast of letters in the same yellow domino. Criticism instead of being governed as it should by the eternal and unchanging laws of beauty which are a part of the soul's divine nature, seems rather to be striving to reduce the art to one dead level of conventional mediocrity-which only does not offend taste, because it lacks even the life and strength to pronounce any decided impression whatever. We are farthest from wishing to see what many so ardently pray for namely, a national literature, for the same mighty lyre of the human heart answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime, and any literature as far as it is national is diseased, inasmuch as it appeals to some climatic peculiarity, rather than to the universal nature. Moreover, everything that tends to encourage the sentiment of caste, to widen the boundary between the races, and so to put farther off the hope of one great brotherhood, should be steadily resisted by all good men." LOWELL ON MACAULAY. In a review of Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome" in the Pioneer, Lowell used language which for its frankness will interest readers to-day. In his after-life Lowell never expressed any change of opinion on Macaulay's merits, and probably he saw no reason to modify his opinion of 1843: Thomas Babington Macaulay is the best magazine writer of the day. Without being a learned man, he has a vast fund of information always at command, the accumulation of a quick eye and a retentive memory. Always brilliant, but never profound; witty, but not humorous; full of sparkling antithesis, polished, keen, graceful, he has more talent than any prose writer living. He is a kind of prose Pope, in whom we can find no great ideas, no true philosophy, but plenty of philosophizing, who never writes above his reader's easy comprehension, and whose sentences we always acknowledge as lucky, rather than admire as new or beautiful. He has thoughts enough but no thought. His analysis of character are like a professor's demonstrations in a dissecting-room; we see all the outward mechanism by which the spirit made itself visible and felt, but, after all, only a dead body lies before us. He galvinizes his subjects till they twitch with a seeming life, but he has not the power of calling back the spirit and making it give answers from the deep. In short, he is not a genius.-From Edwin D. Mead's Lowell's Pioneer in New England Magazine. CLIPPINGS FROM EDUCATIONAL CLASSICS. SELECTED FOR THE JOURNAL. The pupil must learn something thoroughly, and refer everything to that.—Jacotot. It is clear that in whatever it is our duty to act, those matters it is also our duty to study.-Dr. Arnold. The Master can no more think, or practice, or see for his pupil, than he can digest for him or walk for him.-Joseph Payne Knowledge of the lowest kind is un-unfied knowledge: Science is partially unified knowledge: Philosophy is completely unified knowledge."-Herbert Spencer. I believe that the first development of thought in the child is very much disturbed by a wordy system which is not adapted to his faculties or to the circumstances of his life.-Pestalozzi. Socrates saith plainly that "no man goeth about a more godlie purpose, than he that is mindful of the good bringing up both of hys owne and other men's children."-Roger Ascham. We are now by degrees becoming convinced that teachers, like everyone else who undertakes skilled labor, should be trained before they seek an engagement.-Robert Herbert Quick. I therefore advise all young men to commence their studies, as much as possible, by direct observation of facts, and not by the new inculcation of statements from books. -Dr. Blackie. I wish some good author would write a book on unpopular Truths, and show how, on some subjects, wise men go on saying the same thing in all ages and nobody listens to them. -Quick. Learning is both hindered and injured too by the ill choice of them that send young scholars to the universities, of whom must needs come all our divines, lawyers, and physicians.Roger Ascham. Two things there are, which, the more oftener and steadfastly we consider, fill the mind with an ever-new and ever rising admiration and reverence. The Starry Heaven above and the Moral Law within.—Kant. I deprecate plunging into doubtful and costly schemes of instruction, led on by the ignis fatuus that 'knowledge is power.' For where natural capacity is wasted in attaining knowledge, it would be truer to say that knowledge is weakness.Montaigne. U. S. HISTORY.-EIGTH YEAR. The following suggestions are from the Olmsted Co. (Minn) School-Room Guide: 1. ing. I. THE OBJECTS OF THE STUDY OF HISTORY ARE: To create in pupils a taste for historical study and read(This is the most important object of all. Pupils can but little history in school, but they should acquire a love for it that will make them students of the subject through life.) 2. To inform the pupils as to books to be read and as to methods of reading and study. 3. The acquisition of knowledge; (a) Which shall serve as a basis for future reading and study. (b) Which shall enable the pupil to understand historical references in general reading. II. SUGGESTIONS. 1. It is impossible to teach history with one book. Get pupils to bring in all the histories they can pick up. Furnish some yourself if possible. See that the class have access to all these different books. 2. Assign lessons by topics; not by pages. 3. Discourage verbatim recitations of the text, and require pupils to state the facts in their own language. 4. Do not teach many dates. 5. The sequence of events rather than the precise date of each is what is needed. 6. Use maps freely. 7. Compel pupils to think. 8. Be sure they understand what they recite. 9. Call special attention to great inventions and discoveries; to social and political changes; to everything that has improved the condition of the people. 10. Blackboard forms should be given embracing the important dates and events that are to be learned so they cannot be forgotten. 11. Directions should be given for studying each topic, and many questions should be asked to stimulate reference reading. 12. Daily reviews are necessary. 13. Oral and written work should be combined. |