POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



757 



agara, the discords of the streets, the noises 

 of animals, the puffing and rush of the rail- 

 road-train, the rolling of thunder, or even 

 the tumult of a battle. 



" Edison has recently stated that his 

 best instrument will now talk so as to be 

 heard at a distance of 175 feet. The con- 

 ditions for increasing the sound are so sim- 

 ple that there can be no doubt of any de- 

 sirable extension in this direction." 



(Jiird en-Schools. The New York Acad- 

 emy of Sciences has twice had under con- 

 sideration plans of using the public parks 

 for scientific and hygienic purposes. One 

 of these purposes was the propagation of 

 febrifuge trees and plants ; the other the 

 use of part of these public grounds as gar- 

 den-schools. 



This latter project is to be commended 

 for various reasons : As education becomes 

 general, schoolhouses cannot contain all 

 the scholars. The present school-crowding 

 already necessarily generates or propagates 

 among the pupils various epidemic and 

 other diseases. The shutting of the chil- 

 dren in class-rooms when the sun shines, 

 and the air is bracing, is producing leuc- 

 semic affections. The eyesight is impaired 

 by concentration on books ; and the train- 

 ing of the mind to the exclusion of the ex- 

 ercise of the senses, and of the other active 

 functions, isolates the child from the real 

 world, and feeds him on abstractions which 

 predispose to several forms of insanity. 



On the other hand, open-air life, study, 

 and exercise, invigorate all the tissues, or- 

 gans, and functions of the body. 



The plan of such garden-schools must 

 vary, of course, for each locality. For the 

 city of New York, as presented to the Acad- 

 emy of Sciences by Dr. E. Seguin, and by 

 the Academy to the mayor, it would be 

 somewhat as follows : A part of each of the 

 small parks would be planted with speci- 

 mens of ornamental, edible, medicinal, tex- 

 tile, and other plants, where groups of chil- 

 dren could go with their teachers to breathe 

 and learn. 



In the Central Park large tracts would 

 be devoted to indigenous and exotic plants, 

 to zoology and ichthyology, mineralogy, 

 and specimen sections of American geology, 

 hydrology, etc. The public-school pupils 



would visit these places with their teachers ; 

 and, when the weather happened to be un- 

 favorable, they could find shelter in the 

 public libraries, museums of painting and 

 natural history, which fringe the park, and 

 where they could continue their studies of 

 Nature. 



In a word, the schoolhouse must be used 

 only when it cannot be helped, the rules 

 of physiological education needed by a free 

 people, being : Never to teach in-doors what 

 can be learned out-doors ; never to explain 

 in the abstract what can be demonstrated 

 in the concrete ; never to teach with books 

 what can be perceived in objects ; never to 

 teach by images when Nature itself is at 

 hand ; never to show dead Nature when 

 living Nature is obtainable ; and never to 

 require belief where seeing and understand- 

 ing are possible. New York's beautiful 

 Central Park might thus be made an edu- 

 cational establishment of the highest value. 

 In the Kew Gardens at London, seventy-five 

 acres are given up to the students, without 

 at all impairing the beauty of the landscape. 

 The same might be said of the Gardens 

 of Acclimation of London, Paris, Algiers, 

 Calcutta ; of the Botanical Gardens of Mont- 

 pellier, Brussels, Geneva, which are partly 

 schools and partly pleasure grounds. In 

 this respect we are sadly behind. Once 

 reminded that our parks have been created 

 "equally for the enjoyment of the public, 

 and for the education of the children," our 

 public authorities, it is to be hoped, will 

 realize the need of preserving them for their 

 original purposes, and so improving them 

 that they may every year become more and 

 more indispensable to our citizens. 



New Fossil Reptiles. In addition to the 

 remarkable Jurassic reptiles recently de- 

 scribed by Prof. Marsh from the Rocky 

 Mountains, several others are announced 

 by him in the March number of the Ameri- 

 can Journal of Science. One of these, a gi- 

 gantic Dinosaur (Atlantosaurus immanis), 

 was much larger than any land-animal, re- 

 cent or fossil, hitherto described. The fe- 

 mur of this monster was over eight feet 

 (2,500 millimetres) in length, and the other 

 remains preserved are equally huge. If 

 this reptile had the proportions of a croco- 

 dile, it must have been over a hundred feet 



