HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 219 



and we will call upon Prof. Prendergast to give ns a few words of 

 encouragement. 



REMARKS OP PROF. W. W. PENDERGAST. 



A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind. My sympathies 

 have been flowing out towards all these speakers because I 

 see they have been over the same ground I have trod my- 

 self, and as Dr. Perkins was depicting the scenes that he had 

 witnessed in schools of the eai'ly day the picture was marvellously 

 like and familiar. The object of going to school in those old times 

 among the granits hills of New Hampshire, if we boys understood 

 our business, and our minds were perfectly clear upon this point, 

 was to hate the teacher, and we did our duty faithfully all through 

 the Winter; from the beginning of school the first Monday after 

 Thanksgiving until the closing day in March. (Laughter.) It 

 must be admitted too that the teacher always gave us good cause. 

 He never failed to encourage us in our laudable understanding. I 

 remember one who, with a long alder rod would stand mid-way in 

 the school room — this was a lady — and while a class was reading 

 in front she would keep her eagle eyes glancing around into every 

 corner in search of a victim — school teachers "have eyes in the 

 backs of their heads" you know — and if an urchin looked off his 

 book down would come the rod over his shoulders. At this an- 

 other youngster would titter another too would receive a dose of 

 the same medicine and so it went on from morning till night. 

 Education, with us, was simply a drill in verbal memory. We were 

 obliged to fill our minds with certain meaningless words laid down 

 in the text book, to escape a thrashing. Our first business as I 

 have said was to hate the teacher, which we did honestly and 

 sincerely; and the second was to commit those words to memory, 

 which duty was more often honored in the breach than in the 

 observance. The questions were at the bottom of the page and as 

 the teacher would ask them, we would cudgel our brains to call to 

 mind what we had marked in the text as the proper answer. So 

 we went on cramming with such dry chaff, an educational process 

 about as sensible as the scheme of the dietist who undertook to 

 fatten himself by feeding on the east wind. 



I went into a teachers' institute of this state some time ago and 

 as the teachers were ranged on their benches in the court house, 

 the superintendent said to me "here they are waiting like so many 

 jugs to be filled." That man, it seems to me, had the same false 

 idea. Education cannot be poured from one mind to another. 

 The trees which beautify our fields and gardens do not get their 



