December 24, 1886. J 



SCIElSrCE. 



585 



All the parties on the transcontinental geodetic 

 work have now left the field on account of the 

 winter season ; all the parties on the Pacific coast 

 also have been withdrawn from the field on ac- 

 count of the lateness of the season. 



— The Saturday morning lectures given by Pro- 

 fessor Boyesen and Dr, Butler at Columbia college 

 last spring, proved so successful that arrange- 

 ments are making for a number of similar lectures 

 to be given during the winter and spring of 1887. 

 The lectures will be open to the public, and tickets 

 may be obtained free of charge by application to 

 the registrar at Columbia college. Among the 

 announcements definitely made are two lectures 

 by Professor Munroe Smith on Bismarck, on 

 March 12 and 19, and two on pedagogics by Dr. 

 Nicholas Murray Butler on March 26 and April 2. 

 It is also expected that Professors Boyesen and 

 C. S. Smith, and Instructors Goodnow and Scrib- 

 ner will deliver lectures. 



— Somebody has been figui-ing out the avei'age 

 salary paid to teachers in a selected list of leading 

 cities in the United States, with the following 

 results : ■ — 



San Francisco . . . S980.06 



Boston 933.08 



Cincinnati .... 728.25 



New York 707.90 



Chicago 705.66 



Dayton 698.28 



Columbus 672.71 



Washington . 

 Springfield . 

 Newark . . 

 Milwaukee 

 New Haven . 

 Minneapolis . 



671.65 

 641.64 

 638.01 

 631 94 

 614.00 

 607.40 



St. Louis . 

 Albany- 

 Brooklyn . 

 Kansas City 

 Detroit 

 Indianapolis 

 St. Paul . 

 Providence 

 Louisville 

 Buffalo . 

 Baltimore 

 Nashville . 

 Philadelphia 



$607.01 

 606.58 

 606.22 

 606.13 

 605.19 

 601.79 

 599.87 

 505.77 

 595.41 

 588.49 

 576.87 

 570.82 

 5l7,51 



— We have received from Messrs. Macmillan a 

 number of books in their Clarendon press series 

 for schools. They ai-e, as a matter of course, 

 models of book-making, and it_is a luxury to use 

 them. Abbott's ' Greek reader ' is novel, for it 

 substitutes Aesop's ' Fables,' and stories from his 

 life, for the traditional selections from the Anaba- 

 sis. Miss Buchheim's new edition of Niebuhr's 

 ' Griechische heroen-geschichten,' and Saints- 

 bury's capital edition of Racine's ' Esther,' as well 

 as his selections from Gautier, are doubly wel- 

 come, because they furnish material for placing 

 elementary modern-language instruction on a 

 higher plane. The meaningless sentences and 

 the scraps of prose literature too often forced 

 upon the young student of French and German, 

 not only fail to give him a thoi'ough and accurate 

 knowledge of the grammar, — for which purpose 

 they are presumably intended, — but they deaden 

 his interest, and blunt his literaiw sense, at an 

 age when both should be stimulated and en- 

 couraged. The use of some such books as these 

 prepared by the Clarendon press is infinitely pref- 

 erable. To Mr. Wickham's notes on selected odes 



of Horace, published in the same series, we have 

 but one observation to make, and perhaps that 

 should be addressed to the publisher ; that is, that 

 notes of this class and extent are needed within 

 the same covers as the text itself, and nothing is 

 gained, but much lost, in convenience, by binding 

 the notes separately. We believe, however, that 

 the publishers do have an edition' in which both 

 odes and notes are hound together. 



— Copenhagen has, according to the census of 

 this year, 285,700 inhabitants, an increase of 1.6 

 per cent in the last twelve months. 



— According to Professor Heim of Zurich, there 

 are 1,155 glaciers in the Alps, of which 249 are 

 more than 7,500 metres in length. The glaciers 

 are distributed as follows : in Switzerland, 471 ; 

 in Austria, 462 ; in France. 144 ; and in Italy, 78. 

 The largest glacier is the Aletsch, which stretches 

 over 24 kilometres. The total surface of the 

 glaciers is estimated at 4,000 square kilometres, of 

 which the glaciers in Switzerland alone furnish 

 1,840 square kilometres. 



— There are 510 kilometres of railway in Greece. 



— The first Siberian university has recently been 

 opened at Tomsk. 



— Khartum, which is in ruins through the 

 fortunes of war, has yielded its precedence as the 

 principal town of the eastern Soudan to Omdur- 

 man on the White Nile. 



— The correspondents in Switzerland and 

 France, of the London Journal of education, re- 

 port the following news, which is of general in- 

 terest. In Switzerland the minister of instruction 

 has taken in hand a revision of the law on higher 

 education of 1879, on the following grounds. The 

 present code is not based on sound psychological 

 principles, and ignores almost entirely the natural 

 development of the mind. Some subjects, emi- 

 nently fitted for the earlier years of the intellect- 

 ual development of the pupils, are reser\ ed for the 

 higher classes only, whUe the lower classes are 

 chiefly occupied with very indigestible matter. 

 The teaching of classics, as at present carried out, 

 has a most pernicious influence in the school. It 

 is commenced too eai ly, too much time is given 

 to it, and it is not apportioned on rational 

 grounds. Latin and Greek stand in the way of 

 many subjects of equal value with regard to men- 

 tal training, and of far greater significance in act- 

 ual life. The pupils, as a rule, take little interest 

 in their classical studies. But this is hardly to be 

 wondered at, seeing that the study of literature is 

 not begun until the fourth year in most gymnasia, 

 more than three years and a half being spent on a 

 purely grammatical course. The proposed reform 



