142 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IV., No. 81. 



The particular volumes upon which duties 

 were called for in this case, were bound volumes 

 of the Annales de dermatologie and Annales 

 des maladies de Voreille, — books which do not 

 enter into competition with any produced in 

 America, and which never can. If one wants 

 a number or volume of either of these annates, 

 he must have it, and nothing else will do ; and 

 no reproduction is possible, on account of the 

 limited demand. We have, then, one more 

 decision which interferes with American stu- 

 dents, makes their work the more expensive, 

 and in no possible way can benefit the Amer- 

 ican book-maker. Congress had granted a 

 little relief, but that little has been made less 

 by a thoughtless decision of the treasury. We 

 say ' thoughtless ; ' because it is known to but 

 few, outside those immediately interested, that 

 the apparatus and books used by the scientific 

 men of America must to a large extent be 

 bought where the} T are principally produced, in 

 Europe ; reproduction being out of the ques- 

 tion, both on account of the limited demand, 

 and, in case of apparatus, on account of an 

 instrument being to some extent a work of 

 art which only one man ma} T be capable of 

 bringing forth. 



The great question of our time is, How shall 

 we better our methods of education? The 

 main efforts to this end seem to be to better 

 the system. The real need is of better teach- 

 ers, not more painstaking or devoted teachers, 

 for in these regards there is little to be desired ; 

 but, as a class, our teachers are men and 

 women whose opportunities of culture, whose 

 means of obtaining a broad view of the sub- 

 jects they teach, are deplorably small. Year 

 by year the number of those who go to the 

 teacher's work from any thing like a univer- 

 sity training become relatively fewer. The 

 normal school is, unfortunately, taking the 

 place of the university as the place of training 

 for instructors in the primary and secondary 

 schools. These institutions are admirably 

 contrived to serve the immediate ends the}' 

 seek to attain : they make business-like but 

 slenderly provided instructors, who do their 



routine work better than those bred in schools 

 of broad learning, but who miss the best that 

 a liberal training has to give. The normal 

 school is fixed in our American s3 T stem cer- 

 tainly for fifty years to come. The practical 

 question is, What can be done to lift their 

 work to a higher level ? 



There are two ways of doing this, each of 

 which seems worthy of debate. One is to 

 move the normal schools to the seats of good 

 universities, and mingle the university teach- 

 ing with the strictly technical instruction in 

 pedagogics. The very presence at a univer- 

 sity will give a lift to the ideals of the pupils 

 in the normal school. It will cost a penny 

 more to train the youth than it does at pres- 

 ent, but this is not a question of pennies. 

 Nobody reckons pennies in war ; and this 

 work of education is the eternal war of man- 

 kind. Another, cheaper, less effective, but 

 still possibly useful plan is to give the normal- 

 school teachers an occasional year of residence 

 at a university, where they may for a time pur- 

 sue knowledge for its own sake, and widen 

 their views of their great work. Harvard uni- 

 versity now allows its teachers one year in 

 seven for private study. The state could 

 afford to do as well by its normal-school teach- 

 ers. If we lift the grade of our teachers, the 

 ' system ' will take care of itself. 



The government printing-office has recently 

 issued a catalogue of the aquatic mammals ex- 

 hibited b} T the national museum at the great 

 international fisheries exhibition in London last 

 year. It consists of a general account of the 

 more interesting seals and whales of our coast, 

 with a briefly annotated list of all the species 

 exhibited, and is prepared by Mr. F. W. True. 

 It detracts very much from its value that it was 

 not printed, and ready for sale or distribution, 

 at the time of the exhibition. To appear now, 

 when the collection is shipped to another con- 

 tinent, seems somewhat of a farce, as its whole 

 value now lies in what it contains apart from 

 the collection. Either we should revise our 

 dilatory, and at the end hast}', legislation in 



