EDITORIAL 



127 



lar for that purpose where it is difficult 

 to obtain five cents to buy that girl a 

 book on birds or a field glass or a copy 

 of a magazine article that shall teach 

 and inspire her never to want a dead 

 bird on her hat. The Educational Hu- 

 mane Chapter of The Agassiz Associa- 

 tion stands for the law of love rather 

 than for the love of law. We stand for 

 love more than for pity. It is as im- 

 portant to "set" a broken point of view 

 or to heal a cancerous mental sore as it 

 is to set a broken leg or to provide for 

 a smallpox victim. There are epidem- 

 ics of evil that need remedying, that 

 need their antiseptics, but through love. 



The-e thoughts were suggested by a 

 recent remark of a prominent citizen 

 of Stamford. I solicited a small gift 

 from him to carry on the work of Ar- 

 cAdiA, telling him of the large num- 

 ber of visitors, especially teachers and 

 school children. He coldly replied, 

 "Those teachers and other men and 

 women that you tell about are able- 

 bodied. There is no trouble with them. 

 They should pay for what they get at 

 ArcAdiA, as well as anywhere else. 

 Charge them a quarter every time they 

 come, and charge the boys and girls 

 five or ten cents each, and you will 

 soon find that you will not have so 

 many visitors ; then you will not be 

 around to beg money from me." I did 

 not get a single five cents from him 

 and he is a kind-hearted man. Had I 

 solicited him for some form of suffer- 

 ing the pocketbook would have come 

 out instantly and a five or ten dollar 

 bill would have been handed to me. 



What is the trouble? Do we not 

 really believe that the greatest of these 

 is love, or do we believe it and not prac- 

 tise it? 



ditional dollar's worth of text, illustrations and 

 general improvements. 



The Microscope. By Simon Henry Gage. 

 Ithaca, New York : The Comstock Pub- 

 lishing Company. 

 This is the greatly enlarged and improved 

 edition for 1917 of a well-known standard book. 

 Professor Gage is a technical microscopist and 

 at the same time a genuine amateur. He is an 

 expert with an amateur's enthusiasm. In 

 that spirit, he makes the old-time love of mi- 

 croscopy still live in modern biological science. 

 He also knows, what to the reviewer is even 

 better, that the microscope is a thing of joy 

 forever. Its use is always a tonic and never a 

 task, if rightly viewed. 



The new retail price of "The Microscope" 

 is three dollars per copy. The former price was 

 two dollars, but the increase is not due to the 

 high cost of living, nor even to the increased 

 cost of paper, but the book contains an ad- 



Historic Places of Xew England. By Her- 

 bert F. Sherwood. Issued by the Gen- 

 eral Passenarer Department of The 

 Xew York, Xew Haven and Hartford 

 Railroad. 

 The author is well-known as an inter- 

 esting writer, lecturer and photographer. 

 The railroad company could not have se- 

 lected a writer better qualified to descri K e 

 the historic places and interests of Xew 

 England. The book is interesting and use- 

 ful. It contains valuable illustrations of 

 historic spots and many historical data. 

 Any one interested in Xew England — and 

 wdio in all the United States is not inter- 

 ested? — can obtain a copy by addressing 

 the General Passenger Department of The 

 New York, New Haven and Hartford Rail- 

 road, New Haven Connecticut. 



The Motivation of School Work. By H. B. 

 Wilson and G. M. Wilson. Boston, 

 Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Com- 

 pany. 

 This is an interesting contribution to 

 the much mooted auestion as to what ex- 

 tent children should be controlled and 

 guided and to what extent they should 

 have their liberty to follow their own will. 

 On no other phase of child psychology are 

 there =0 wide and varied opinions as on this 

 one of personal liberty and personal motive 

 on the part of the child. There are teachers 

 and parents with a widely divers-ins range 

 of view. Some say, "Let the child do as 

 he pleases." Others make the child a mere 

 machine to be operated bv the teacher: 

 still others make a mixture in varying pro- 

 portions. In reply to a personal Inter. Mr. 

 H. B. Wilson, who is Superintendent of 

 the Topeka, Kansas, Public Schools, writes 

 as follows to the editor: 



"My thought in writing this book was to 

 do as much as possible to eliminate the 

 drudgery from the lives of children in the 

 public schools. The point of view is thor- 

 oughly established in the teaching staff 

 here, and most of the work proceeds unon 

 the basis of adecuate motives in the lives 

 of the children. I acknowledge that we do 

 not see yet how to motivate all the things 

 that it is considered necessary to require 

 children to master, but we have made a long 

 step in that direction. Our attack at pre- 

 sent is upon the Problem as the Basis for 

 Teaching. Since having a problem to work 

 upon is the real basis intellectually for mo- 

 tive, we find it is giving us a bigger hold 

 on the problem of motivating the work the 

 children do." 



The authors have produced a book that 

 really gives concrete help of a fundamental 

 kind on the part of the teacher. The efforts 

 toward motivating, toward organic educa- 

 tion, the Montessori methods, with many 

 others, are all commendable, but the editor 

 believes that the truth is in none of the 

 extremes but somewhere in the middle 

 ground, the via media- "God speed to everv 

 effort that shall help to solve the problem and 

 shall train the child in his personal liberty and 

 the freedom of his will." 



