806 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the student trace the growth of progressive ideas through the 

 different ages and combine this knowledge into one organic whole ; 

 instead of becoming possessed of a chaos of unrelated facts which 

 may give general information, but can not be organized to afford 

 intelligent direction to the efforts of the student who tries to meet 

 the problems which confront him continually in his work. Surely 

 there can be no broader study for the prospective teacher than to 

 examine critically the great systems of pedagogical doctrine out 

 of which our own has grown ; such, for example, as those elab- 

 orated by Comenius, Rousseau, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Her- 

 bart, Spencer, Mann, and others, and to profit by the successes and 

 failures of these systems so far as they have been tried, and also 

 to gain inspiration and courage from their exponents. 



This in brief is what the normal school attempts to do for the 

 professional betterment of those who seek its privileges. That 

 there is great opportunity yet for growth every one admits ; but 

 no one who is in touch with the normal school will doubt that it 

 is moving forward as rapidly as the law of growth of such an in- 

 stitution, conditioned as it is by the development of the school 

 system as a whole of which it is a part, will admit ; and that it 

 is now filling a great mission (even with all its imperfections on 

 its head) in improving the present condition of our schools, and 

 pointing to higher and better things in the future, is amply shown 

 on every side by the results of its efforts. 



FUNERAL CUSTOMS OF THE WORLD. 



BY J. H. LONG. 



A WRITER on the subject of the disposal of the bodies of the 

 --- dead has said, "As there is almost nothing else so deeply 

 interesting to the living as the disposal of those whom they 

 have loved and lost, so there is perhaps nothing else so distinc- 

 tive of the condition and character of a people as the method 

 in which they treat their dead." It may be premised, then, that 

 no custom stamps the standing of a people more clearly in the 

 scale of civilization than does the care of the bodies of the de- 

 parted. " People of a low and barbarous type carelessly permit 

 the remains of the dead to lie in the way of the living, and there 

 are a few instances in which the object of artificial arrangements 

 has been to preserve a decorated portion of the body as, for ex- 

 ample, a gilded skull among the survivors." The general tend- 

 ency of mankind, however, has been to bury the dead out of the 

 sight of the living ; and various as the methods of accomplish- 

 ing this end have been, they have resolved themselves into three 



