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attempt the flight. Their object was a nonstop flight to Ireland, for which the London Daily Mail had offered a prize of $50,000. Hawker and Grieve left New Foundland on Sunday, May 18, in a singlemotored Sopwith biplane, and after 15 hours in the air were forced to alight on the ocean 1,000 miles east of where they started and 900 miles from their goal. They were picked up by a Danish steamer after a few hours on the ocean and brought into port. Because of the fact that the rescuing steamer was not equipped with wireless apparatus, the safety of the aviators was in doubt for several days, and the men were received in England with a royal welcome.

The first successful trans-Atlantic nonstop flight was accomplished on Sunday, June 15, when Capt. John Alcock and Lieut. Arthur Brown, British aviators, landed on the Irish coast 16 hours and 12 minutes after leaving New foundland. The voyage was made without accident a straightaway flight of more than 1,900 miles. The flight was made in a Vickers-Vimy biplane equipped with two 350 horsepower Rolls-Royce motors. Fog interfered, and to escape this menace the aviators rose to a height of 11,000 feet, while at another time they were flying upside down only 10 feet above the water.

The ambitions of aviators ever since the first heavier-than-air machine rose from the earth have been realized. It is hard to grasp the significance of the fact that the same body of water that formerly took days to cross has been spanned by air machines in a few hours. Great credit and honor is due the men who have blazed an air trail over the Atlantic.

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INTELLECTUAL PROGRESS IN MEXICO' :·

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DUCATION based upon scientific principles was established in Mexico with the triumph of the reform movement. The men who took part in this event devoted their entire energy to the betterment of social conditions and to the tenacious struggle for liberty of conscience. These noble Jacobins, imbued with the love of right and justice, but who in their heart of hearts lacked the proper orientation, destroyed a régime notoriously lax morally only to substitute for it a generous but incomplete naturalism. They condemned scholasticism and endeavored to place in its stead a more humane system; but they did not succeed in building up other institutions to take the place of those they were bent upon destroying. At the moment in which the general state of mind was problematic an educator returned to Mexico after a protracted visit to Paris-an educator who pronounced intensely interesting generalizations based upon sound fundamentals, as was self-evident to all observers; fundamental principles capable of logical and visible demonstration. The reformers, impressed by his personality and integrity, soon became his disciples, and, with the wholeheartedness habitual in those accustomed to abnegation and self-sacrifice, renounced their dearest aspirations regardless of what had been their watchwords and standards in previous campaigns-namely, social contact, the encyclopedia, philosophical sensualism, and revolution itself and placed secondary education throughout the country in the hands of Dr. Gabino Barreda.

Dr. Barreda was a follower of the French philosopher Comte, and hence a revolutionary, but not of the temperamental school of revolutionists who go through life continually inciting men to incessant change and reform, and thus being factors in progress to be reckoned with. The master, Comte, was such a one, dynamic as a revolutionary, yet static, ever seeking to substitute for a fixed state one equally stationary, only created by himself and systematically limited.

Barreda, indeed, brought with him a new catholicism, without cruelties and anathemas, but still fanatical and less vigorous in

1 As a part of its program of diffusing knowledge of the contemporary intellectual life of the American Nations the BULLETIN takes pleasure in reproducing the above English version of a lecture given recently in the historic University of San Marcos, Lima, Peru, by Don José Vasconcellos, the distinguished Mexican scholar.

tellectually than the older catholicism. The new creed consisted of applying the laws and the science of the perceptible to all forms of activity; of making scientific truth, demonstrable and incontrovertible, the fraternal bond of union among all men.

He organized a model preparatory school in the City of Mexico, and the old schools in all the provinces were reorganized as scientific schools patterned after that of the capital; mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history, and psychology were the fundamental branches of instruction, Latin and Greek were abolished, while literature and history were relegated to secondary positions in the curriculum.

The program of these schools was simply a pedagogical application of the classification of Comte's sciences, and the same subjects were required of all students, whatever the professional branch they chose to follow. Such a requirement they justified on the ground that the school did not as its principal object prepare professional, but rather cultured useful citizens. Also it was planned to eradicate the traditional systems of teaching Latin and the canons to the halfbreed and Indian, but not one word was spoken concerning the physical laws through which the primitive industries of the country might be bettered; not a suggestion made of interpolating chemistry or botany in the courses, or even a system of reading which would train young people in clear, precise thinking, free from pedantry, to displace the old empirical habits.

In the strong scientific reaction there was also much impatience toward the authority of letters, the native dignity of certain high types of minds, though it might appear ridiculous and even prove injurious as a general basis of culture. At that time in official and university circles in Mexico the cultivation of the humanitarian branches was disappearing, and this evil, the consequences of which we are experiencing, though almost powerless to correct, ripened into maturity in a search for the eternal fountains of the spirit of Greece, producing, nevertheless, in its time a mental renovation of incalculably wholesome effect. The fashion of science and scholarship annulled the influence of the ignorant pseudo scholasticism of the garrulous class that drinks of the mire of all languages and rituals and discourses at length without having yet commenced to think.

Rhetorical redundancy disappeared from the classrooms, from the refectories, and even from the press. The period in which mathematicians believed themselves obliged to be first poets and then engineers, by the petty exigencies of life, also passed; also the time in which physicians learned more Latin than chemistry; to say nothing of the lawyers who always appropriated the rights of dominion over literature and science, and were stimulated by the Roman abuse of mistaking the arguments and conclusions of the casuists

and the trivial sorites which deceived the vulgar for genuine eloquence.

A science, while not entirely sound and still so near the previous period as to be influenced by it, replaced the insubstantial vulgarity. It appeared to be pedantic and trifling, but was possessed of such suggestive power that even the poets began to find inspiration in nature as seen through physics, chemistry, and psychology, and they made a servant of science as mathematics formerly served rhetoric. Withal the transformation was purifying in result and permitted the realization of what sociologists know as a better specialization. Every one can thus devote himself to his specific vocation-the poet to his art, free from complications, and the practical man to his applied sciences without the impediment of the spiderweb of mediocre literature.

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In spite of all in this period there flourished eminent lawyers, like Don Miguel Macedo, who employed during his professorship a logical discipline calculated to correct the digressions and the impression of the creole temperament. Macedo devoted himself not so much to the penal theories, easily found in copious and verbose Italian writers, as to rectifying minds affected by an ethnical handicap— the Iberic vice of talking and writing thoughtlessly-impelled by the rhetorical impulse or for the purpose of pursuing the sonorous effect of fixed phrases. Macedo required that every word should receive a precise connotation and that every idea should maintain its proper order and proportion in the harmonious whole of a discourse.

In the preparatory school also, owing to the educational system, to the nature of the subjects taught, and to the conscientious zeal of the majority of the teachers, the pupils learned to interest themselves through facts, to study and see them through the proper perspective, deducing the series of their antecedents by experience and in the light of consequences and results. This laborious apprenticeship was followed by an intensive study of the precise logic of the Englishman, Stuart Mill, who applies to the spiritual realm a proceeding analogous to that which the savant applies in analyzing chemical elements the method and induction which coordinates general principles, the immediate source of specific deductions; an analysis and clarifying which leaves no crevices in which superstition may lurk, as in the visionary philosophy of Comte.

From this positive school came the original, rather dazzling sociology of Don Francisco Bulnes; the amiable, transcendental causerie of Dr. Flores; the sentimental profuseness of the orthodox positivist, Don Agustín Aragón, the fearless editor of the Utilitarian Review (Revista Positiva) and of the Humanitarian Rites (Ritos de la Región de la Humanidad); and, finally, the sound and liberal but

obscure reasoning of Porfirio Parra, author of a treatise on logic published in two volumes, of philosophical discussions, of one or two novels, of didactic articles, and of a striking ode to Mathematics (“Oda a las Matemáticas").

And in the moment in which science, as absolute mistress, all but prohibited activity in any other lines there arose a group of artists who, thinking to follow the philosophic trend of the times, in reality founded an untrammeled, personal literature, fascinating because of its significance and its intrinsic beauty. The names of the new school of literati are doubtless well known to you, beginning with Gutiérrez Nájera whose wholesome influence is still felt, and followed by Urbina, Nervo, Díaz Mirón, Valenzuela, Rebolledo, Icaza, Salazar, and Tablada, who form a part of the staff of the justly famous "Revista Moderna."

To the same group might be added the eloquent de Urueta, virtually faultless in style, gracious in form, and melodious in diction, whose compositions resemble the surcharged danunziana prose.

Manuel José Othon, perhaps our greatest poet, was reared apart from the littleness of life, and grew up isolated, provincial, and strong in faith, keen, with a clear vision, at times disconsolate, filled. with the awesome grandeur of the Mexican plateau, the burthen of his song being nature, not as personified by classic bards, or nature as blinded by a science which is limited to compliance with laws and uniform rhythm, but rather nature as endowed with a conscience akin to the human, perturbed by mysterious longings, vague unrest, and fleeting illuminations-the nature which plays the leading rôle in the intense drama of Walpurgis Night, so marked in the magnificently somber "In the Desert," his latest production.

Referring to bucolic poetry I should mention the few who, in this era of extreme modernism, maintain the traditional classic culture. in legends and essays. In this group may be classed Archbishop Montes de Oca, the translator of lyric and pastoral Grecian poets; Don José María Vigil, translator of Perseus; Don Joaquín García Icazbalceta, one of the most erudite historians of Mexico; the poet and Latinist, Don Joaquín Arcadio Pagaza; Balbino Dávalos, the cultured poet and translator of English and Greek, and Don Francisco Pascual García, the Catholic writer, a humanist of the recalcitrantly Thomistic school.

Mexican thought of this era is adequately exemplified and synthesized in a man whose influence was unequalled by his contemporaries Justo Sierra, a poet in his youth and a sage in his maturity, to the brilliance and fire of whose soul his generation owes the earnestness and eagerness so notably present. Educated from early youth in strict Catholic faith, he was to master a great struggle within himself before fervently embracing the Jacobite apostleship

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