334 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VIII., No. 193 



Thus should her towers be raised, — with vicinage 



Of clear bold hills, that curve her very streets, 



As if to vindicate, 'mid choicest seats 



Of Art, abiding Nature's majesty ; 



And the broad ^ea beyond, in calm or rage, 



Chainkss alike, and teaching liberty." 



But this side of the question would carry us too 

 far. What I am driving at is a humbler aim. All 

 through this statement I have been trying to in- 

 sinuate, — to suggest that the teacher should bring 

 into all his lessons on geography the maximum of 

 connection ; that he should try to make the map 

 live before his pupils ; that in education, as in a 

 statue, there should be no dead matter ; and that 

 the satisfaction of the day's curiosity, or mental 

 appetite, should be followed by the growth of a 

 stronger appetite stiU. I think that we who live 

 in this latter part of the nineteenth century may 

 congratulate ourselves on the immense amount of 

 young active intellect that has thrown itself into 

 education, and on the better methods that, with 

 this youth and activity, have been imported into 

 our schoolrooms. It is not so long ago that boys 

 were kept for years over the As in praesenti and 

 the Propria quae maribus before they were able 

 to form a first-hand acquaintance with even the 

 easiest Latin author : nowadays a boy does not 

 learn a new word or a new inflection without be- 

 ing asked at once to build his new knowledge into 

 an interesting sentence. Not long ago children 

 were taught lists of names without seeing a pic- 

 ture, a diagram, a model, or a map, and this was 

 called geography : now we have the geographical 

 societies, both of Edinburgh and of London, 

 working steadily for them, and showing them all 

 that there is of beautiful and wonderful, and 

 strange and thoughtful, in the life of man upon 

 this remarkable planet. 



Another point before I have done. The path of 

 education is the path of discovery ; it is not the 

 dead-beaten road upon which you can sow no new 

 seed, it is not the region of the second-hand, the 

 fossilized thought, the mere traditionary and repe- 

 titional idea. If. then, the teacher is to make 

 those old times live again, — those old times that 

 have left ineffaceable marks in our names of places, 

 just as the underlying rocks have left traces of 

 themselves in our soU, — he must excite the curi- 

 osity of his pupils, and set them hunting for new 

 examples of old names ; must ask them to find 

 the old in the new, and the new in the old. It is 

 as true of education as of life, — and the one is 

 only an epitome and compi-essed symbol of the 

 other, — that for us all it is 



" Glad sight whenever new and old 



Are joined through some dear home-born tie : 

 The life of all that we behold 

 Depends upon this mystery." 



The passion of hunting is the strongest passion 



in human nature : can we gratify this passion in 

 the schoolroom ? I think we can ; and geography 

 is one of the happy hunting-grounds in wliich we 

 may be able to gratify it. 



Dr. Charles A. Powers of New York con- 

 tributes an article to the Medical record, giving 

 the results of his treatment of twenty-one cases of 

 injury by the toy pistol, and states that two deaths 

 this year from this cause have come to his knowl- 

 edge. In by far the greater number of cases the 

 l^alni of the hand was the seat of the injury, al- 

 though some had i-eceived injuries to the fingers, 

 the eyelid, or the abdominal wall. The wounds 

 varied in depth from one-quarter of an inch to 

 two inches, and were due to wads from the blank 

 cartridges or to pieces of the percussion caps 

 which were blown into the tissues. The injured 

 parts became inflamed, pus formed, and in many 

 cases a septic condition of the blood followed, 

 eventuating in some cases in tetanus and death. 



— The oflflcial returns of the minister of educa- 

 tion in Prussia show that the number of students 

 in philology, philosophy, and history, in this home 

 of the philosophical sciences, has been steadily 

 declining from Michaelmas, 1881, to Easter, 1885 ; 

 the numbers for the six sessions being 2,523, 2,535, 

 2,504, 2,398, 2,311, 3,258, 2,181. In three years and 

 a half the decline in the number of philosophi- 

 cal students is thus fourteen j)er cent. 



— Instances are not infrequently recorded in 

 medical journals of the passage of needles and 

 pins from one part of the body to another. In 

 a recent case a needle one inch and a quarter 

 long, which had been swallowed some months 

 before, was removed from the arm of a brick- 

 layer. 



— A woman in Russia recently consulted a phy- 

 sician on account of a peculiar deformity from 

 which she suffered. It consisted of a projection 

 at the lower end of the spine which formed a tail 

 two inches long, and half an inch wide. It con- 

 tained two vertebrae, and these were covered with 

 fat, hair, and skin. 



— Russian newspapers state that prospects are 

 good for the speedy construction of a canal between 

 the W^hite Sea and Lake Onega, thus affording 

 water communication between the White and 

 Baltic seas. 



— John Ericsson, the well-known inventor, who 

 is now eighty-three years of age, is still hale and 

 hearty, and works as steadily, and as many hours 

 per day, as he did twenty years ago. 



