TEACHERS' SCHOOL OF SCIENCE. 



TEACHERS' SCHOOL OF SCIENCE. 



BY FRANCES ZIRNGIEBEL. 



*' ~T TE who would most effectually improve school tuition must 

 -I L find out the most effectual way of improving the teachers. 

 Hence he is the greatest educational benefactor who does most to 

 raise the character and qualifications of the teachers," said John 

 D. Philbrick, late superintendent of the public schools of the city 

 of Boston, in his twenty-third semiannual report. By providing 

 teachers with the best instruction on subjects the teaching of which 

 was at the time of making this report, and is still, unsatisfactory, 

 The Teachers' School of Science of the Boston Society of Natural 

 History has for nearly three decades been a great educational bene- 

 factor. It stands unique as an institution which, while doing a 

 great work for many years, 

 has presented nothing of 

 startling nature such as would 

 attract the attention of the 

 general public, and is there- 

 fore not so widely known as 

 it deserves to be. 



During a conversation 

 held at the council room of 

 the Boston Society of Natu- 

 ral History, in 1870, between 

 Prof. Alpheus Hyatt and the 

 late Mr. John C. Cummings, 

 a Boston merchant interested 

 in natural history and curator 

 of the plant collection of the 

 society for twenty odd years, 

 the latter expressed regret 

 that the Lowell lectures for 



teachers had been discontin- ALPHEUS HYATT. 



ued. Professor Hyatt then 



suggested to him a plan for lectures for teachers exclusively. That 

 afternoon Mr. Cummings gave five hundred dollars for the com- 

 mencement of such a course, and soon after the matter was brought 

 before a committee consisting of Mr. Cummings, Professor Hyatt, 

 and Professor Niles. 



Under the direction of the committee the courses of lessons 

 were given as follows: physical geography, by Prof. William H. 

 Niles, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; mineralogy, 



