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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and girls, and perhaps its use was rendered 

 more popular by the idea that it promoted 

 grace in the female form. In the year 1721 

 an aged lady left considerable property to 

 endow a school for spinning. The art was 

 practiced in England in the drawing rooms 

 and servants' halls of country houses as late 

 as 1830. Rabbit wool is spun at Aix in 

 Savoy at the present time. Statements were 

 made, after the reading of Mr. BlashilFs pa- 

 per, that the spinning wheel is still used in 

 Sutherland ; that " home-spun " is made in 

 the Isle of Lewis ; and that the Bedouins in 

 spinning use their fingers and no distaff. 



Child Training. — The child and the man 

 he is destined to become, said M. Berthelot 

 in his address on Science the Educator, are 

 not passive beings, receivers into which we 

 can arbitrarily pour a certain sum of teach- 

 ing and science, distributed more or less 

 harmoniously — matters which they will find 

 later in special schools and their whole life. 

 Far from it. We should seek to develop in 

 the child, along with memory and alertness 

 in answering the questions of the examiner, 

 aptitude for work and personal activity ; to 

 excite curiosity and the initiative in the 

 young man, and to provoke in his mind suit- 

 able elaboration, a kind of digestion of the 

 information hastily accumulated. In this 

 way only can we make individual faculties 

 and latent capacities really available. Plato 

 teaches us to study the dispositions of our 

 children and adapt our instruction to them 

 so that it shall seem less like work and more 

 like play. Hence in our first essay in instruc- 

 tion we should try to draw out the tastes and 

 aptitudes, in order to discern what they are 

 and put them to profitable use. We can 

 reach this essential result only by giving the 

 child leisure enough to develop them m the 

 special direction it prefers. But the child 

 must have to do the work. Now the tend- 

 ency of our systems of secondary education 

 is to do away with this leisure of work and 

 of personal tastes. During the years of 

 youth, perhaps the most fruitful for mental 

 evolution, we are eager to push the cliild into 

 intellectual molds. Instead of its first ob- 

 ject being science and letters in themselves, 

 or the seeking for scientific truth and literary 

 beauty, which woo the child by their intrinsic 

 attraction, reserving till afterward the more 



special determination of its inclination toward 

 some particular end, our teaching is first and 

 almost exclusively directed with reference to 

 the examination. The highest motives of the 

 mind are thus suppressed or diverted from 

 infancy. Baccalaureates and the competitions 

 of the special schools spoil the late and most 

 precious years of youth, those in which the 

 individual initiatives and vocations ought to 

 appear. 



Bounties and the Extermination of Nox- 

 ious Animals. — We are informed by Mr. T. 

 S. Palmer, of the Department of Agriculture, 

 in a paper on the extermination of noxious 

 animals by bounties, that " more than a 

 score of animals in the United States are 

 considered sufficiently injurious to require 

 radical measures for their extermination. 

 Wolves, coyotes, panthers, bears, and lynxes 

 are very destructive, but perhaps do not 

 cause greater loss than ground squirrels, 

 pocket gophers, rabbits, and woodchucks. 

 A few birds also, such as blackbirds, crows, 

 English sparrows, hawks, and owls, are some- 

 times included in the category of noxious 

 species." Remarking that the most plausible 

 and persistent demands for protection from 

 the depredations of wild animals have come 

 from owners of sheep and cattle, and many 

 of the laws offering bounties have been en- 

 acted ostensibly to encourage sheep-raising, 

 Mr. Palmer notices the curious fact that 

 while, no doubt, this industry has many claims 

 for protection, " the most urgent demands 

 for bounties in the West have come, not from 

 the farmers or owners of small flocks, but 

 from cattle and sheep men whose immense 

 herds and flocks are pastured on Government 

 lands, and who claim that the cost of protect- 

 ing their herds and flocks should be borne 

 by the county or State." In some regions 

 the losses on account of wolves and coyotes 

 are so serious as to threaten the success 

 of the sheep industry. The author further 

 shows that while bounty legislation has ex- 

 isted in the United States for two centuries 

 and a half, has called for an enormous ex- 

 penditure, and has been thoroughly tested in 

 most of the States and Territories, bounties 

 have not resulted in the extermination of a 

 single species, and have failed even in the 

 island of Bermuda, which has an area of 

 less than twenty square miles. The larger 



