EDITORIAL 



313 



of view in many a school. All over the 

 land he established missionary centers 

 in the form of Chapters and Members 

 of this grand organization. Sui)pose he 

 had had even a snrill fraction of what 

 is to be lavished npon general ednca- 

 tional interests l)v this Board. Supptjse 



HARLAN H. BALLARD, PITTSFIEr.l ), ^L\SSA• 



CHUSETTS. 



Originator of The Agassiz Association in 1875. 



his work in behalf of the teachers and 

 children had had even one-tenth of the 

 financial snpport that has been given 

 wisely and well for the protection of 

 birds or to the stopping of cruelty to 

 horses, dogs and other animals. What 

 could he not have done? 



It is a curious fact that the argu- 

 ments coming from President Eliot, 

 who is primarily not a naturalist but a 

 literary man, are practically the same 

 that came from Mr. Ballard, who is 

 primarily not a naturalist, but a learned 

 classical scholar, thoroughly imbued 

 with the spirit of literature in general, 

 and of Latin poetry in particular. He 

 is the author of a scholarly translation 

 of Virgil's Aeneid. The only trouble 

 has been that Mr. Ballard's ideals of 

 education through natural science have 



not had as direct and powerful an effect 

 upon the bank accounts of great philan- 

 thropists as they have had upon educa- 

 tional thought and practice. 



Professor Alpheus Hyatt, Curator of 

 the Boston Society of Natural History, 

 in 1888 wrote as follows of The AA : 



"That it is worthy of the support al- 

 ready received from its thousands of 

 members cannot be questioned, and this 

 is a sufficient guarantee that it would 

 be a proper and useful trustee and ad- 

 ministrator of a part of the large sums 

 annually distributed by public-spirited 

 persons to institutions having not a 

 tithe of its claims to their favorable 

 consideration. 



^ ^ :^ ^ ^ 



"The originator of this enterprise 

 has done something permanent toward 

 developing and spreading a taste for 

 self-culture in an almost new sense, 

 so far as the majority of the people are 

 concerned. He has shown that there is 

 a practicable method by which the aver- 

 age intelligence and self-reliant charac- 

 ter of the people outside of the school- 

 room, as well as in it, can be effective- 

 ly increased. He has taught thousands 

 how to work with whatever means 

 were at hand, not only for their owai in- 

 tellectual improvement, but for that 

 of their children and neighbors. This 

 must also eventually effect the curricu- 

 lum of the public schools in many 

 places, through the creation of a de- 

 mand for better and more natural me- 

 thods of instruction. If he devote the 

 remainder of his life to carrying on 

 and perfecting the system he has origi- 

 nated, he can do nothing more desirable 

 for the interests of science in this coun- 

 try, or more likely to secure future hap- 

 piness and personal satisfaction for 

 himself, as well as for many thousands 

 of his country-people of all ages and 

 both sexes." 



President Eliot's plea has been ac- 

 cepted by this wealthy General Educa- 

 tion Board, and here is what Dr. Abra- 

 ham Elexner, President of the Board, 

 proposes to do by way of experiment. 

 His suggestions have attracted column 

 after column of notice in the educa- 

 tional and the secular papers through- 

 out the country and nearly all, with 

 only a few slight modifications of what 

 he and President Eliot have said, and 

 additions to it, are amplifications of the 



