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English tongue, "the purity and elegance of which is the chief part of the honor of our nation." One chief means to this end, is reading the best English authors, and continual practice of writing English and translating the Latin author into good readable English.

The author often and strongly enough inveighs against "the continual and terrible whipping," and quotes "Mr. Ascham's" au

thority against its necessity.

The author closes with a summary of the principal heads of these things which should be kept ever in memory, to be put in practice by the Master continually.

1. To cause all to be done with understanding.

2. To cut off all needless matters, so much as may be, and pass by that which is unprofitable.

3. To note all hard and new words: to observe matter and phrase carefully.

4. To learn and keep all things most perfectly, as they go.

5. To have few formes (classes).

6. To discourage none, but to draw on all by a desire of commendation.

7. To stir up to emulation of adversaries, and to use all good policy for one to provoke another.

8. Continual examining (which is the life of all) and chiefly posing of the most negligent.

9. Right pronunciation.

10. Some exercise of memory daily.

11. To have the best patterns for every thing; and to do all by imitation.

12. The Master to stir up both himself and his scholars to continual cheerfulness.

13. Constancy in order.

These were generally premised. To these we may add:

14. To get an Idea or short sum and general notation of every Treatise or Chapter.

15. To parallel all by examples, or to give like examples for each thing, and where they have learned them.

16. To see that they have continually all necessaries.

17. To countenance and prefer the best, to be marks for the rest to aim at, and that all may be encouraged by their example.

18. Maintaining authority, by careful execution of justice in rewards and punishments, with demonstration of love, faithfulness and painfulness in our place, with gravity; working by all means a love of learning in the Scholars, and a strift who shall excel most therein, of a conscience to do most honor and service unto the Lord, both presently and chiefly in time to come.

19. In a word, serving the Lord with constant cheerfulness, in the best courses which he shall make known unto us, we shall undoubtedly see his blessings, according to our hearts.

Mr. Ascham hath these steps to learning: First, Aptness of nature: Secondly, Love of learning: Thirdly, Diligence in right order: Fourthly, Constancy with pleasant moderation: Fifthly, Always to learn of the most learned; pointing and aiming at the best, to match or go beyond them.

Philip Melanchton also, in his Preface before Hesiod, adviseth after this manner: To strive to make Scholars exceeding cunning in every Author which they read. To do this by oft reading and construing over their Authors, causing them to note every thing worthy of observation, with some mark, to run often over those, not regarding how many the Authors are, but how exactly they learn them; chiefly all their sentences and special phrases, that the speech of the children may ever savor of them.

JO. WEBSTER.

ACADEMIARUM EXAMEN: or, THE EXAMINATIONS OF ACADEMIES. By Jo. Webster. London: 1654.

In this little treatise of 110 pages, dedicated to Rt. Hon. Major-Gen. Lambert, the author labors to interest "all who truly love the Advancement of Learning in the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and in the purging and reforming of Academies." The Contents embraces eleven chapters, as follows:

I. The general ends of erecting public Free Schools.-II. Division of Academic Learning-School Theology.-III. Humane Learning-Tongues.IV. Logic.-V. Mathematical Sciences.-VI. Scholastic Philosophy.-VII. Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, Economics, Poesie, and Oratory.-VIII. Custom and Method.-IX. Remedies in Theology, Grammar, Logic, and Mathematics.— X. Helps in Natural Philosophy.-XI. Expedients concerning their Customs and Method.

The author is very severe on the attention paid to the scholastic philosophy, and the almost utter neglect of the mathematics, "the prime and main stone of the whole fabric," and especially its many applications to astronomy, geography, navigation—“one of the most necessary employments and advantages of our nation." Logic-the art of reasoning, "not the parrot-babblement of the schools," physics, natural philosophy and chemistry should be cultivated, and anatomy and physiology should receive attention. Christian Ethics should supersede the moral philosophy of Aristotle. The colleges should vary in their subjects of instruction, and the degrees be conferred according to industry and capacity, and not for certain equal residence. The methods of Comenius and Brinsly are commended, as well as that Baconian philosophy of induction and the English language should receive more attention.

CHRISTOPHER WASE-1645-1690.

CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING FREE SCHOOLS AS SETTLED IN ENGLAND. Oxford and London: 1678.

In this essay of 112 pages, dedicated to Henry Clerke, President of Magdalene College, and Dr. Tho. Boucherier, King's Professor of the Civil Law in Oxford, the author in 43 Sections labors to show the usefulness and necessity of a larger number of Free or Endowed Public Schools of a high grade, by considerations drawn from their past history, the condition of certain professions, particularly the clerical, with suggestions for making them more efficient by augmentation of the masters' salaries, by bringing children of the gentry and townspeople into the same school, by excluding scholars who "prove untoward to learning after seven years tryal,” by judicious courses of study and the methods of master-builders (like Ascham, Hoole, and William Walker), and by "a training in the Christian religion entire and incorrupt." These schools should be subjected to regular and responsible visitation, and their ends be promoted by a good library attached to each, consisting of Dictionaries, and all the "Locks and Keys and Doors of Language," Chronological and Geographical Tables and Charts, and all Orators, Poets, Historians, and books on Common Life, Morals, and Politics. The author closes with the suggestion that arithmetic and writing should have a place in all public Free Schools.

EARLY ENGLISH SCHOOL BOOKS.

The ancient Primer was something very different from the school-books to which we ordinarily give the name. For in dames' schools of which Chaucer speaks, children were provided with few literary luxuries, and had to learn their letters off a scrap of parchment nailed on a board, and in most cases covered with a thin, transparent sheet of horn to protect the precious manuuscript. Hence the term 'hornbook' applied to the elementary books of children. Prefixed to the alphabet, of course, was the Holy Sign of the Cross, and so firm a hold does an old custom get on the popular mind, that down to the commencement of the present century, alphabets continued to preserve their ancient heading, and derived from this circumstance their customary appellation of the Christcross row,' a term so thoroughly established as to find a place in our dictionaries. The Medieval Primer is, however, best described in the language of the fourteenth century itself. The following language occurs in the introduction to a MS. poem of 300 lines, still preserved in the British Museum, each portion of which begins with a separate letter.

In place as men may se

When a childe t› schole shal sette be

A Bok is hym ybrought,

Naylyd on a bord of tre,

That men cal an A. B. Č,

Wrought is on the bok without.

V paraffys grete and stoute,

Royal in rose red.

That is set, withouten doute,

In token of Christes ded.

Red lettar in parchymyn,

Makyth a childe good and fyn

Letters to Ike and see,

By this bok men may devyne,

That Christe's body was full of pyne,
That dyed on wod tree.

After the difficulties of the primer had been overcome, a great deal of elementary knowledge was taught to the children, as in Saxon times, through the vehicle of verse. For instance, we find a versified geography, of the fourteenth century, of which the two following verses may serve as a specimen, though the second is not very creditable to our medieval geographers: This world is delvd (divided), al on thre,

Asia, Aff-ike and Eu-ro-pe.

W Ive now here of A-si-e,

How mony londers ther inne be?

The lond of Macedonie,

Egypte the lesse and Ethiope,
Syria, and the land of Judia,
These ben all in Asia.

The following grammar rules belong to the fifteenth century:

Mi lefe chyld, I kownsel the

To form thi vi tens, thou avise the,
And have mind of thi elensoune
Both of noune and pronoun,

And ilk case in plurele

How thou sal end, avise the well;

And the participels forget thou not,

And the comparison be in thi thought,
The ablative c se be in thi m'nde,
That he be saved in hys kind, &c.

There is something in the last fragment very suggestive of the rod. What would have been the fate of the unlucky grammarian, if in spite of this solemn.

counsel, he had failed to have the ablative case in his mind, we dare not conjecture. Our forefathers had strict views on the subject of sparing the rod, and spoiling the child. Thus one old writer observes of children in general: To thir pleyntes mak no grete credence,

A rodd reformeth thir insolence;

In thir corage no anger doth atyde,

Who spareth the rodd all virtue sette asyde

Yet the strictness was mingled, as of old, with paternal tenderness, and children appeared to have treated their masters with a singular mixture of familiarity and reverence. And it is pleasant to find among the same collection

of school fragments, a little distitch which speaks of peace-making:

Wrath of children son be over gon,

With an apple parties be made at one.

There is good reason for believing that schoolboys of the fourteenth century were much what they are in the nineteenth, and fully possessed of that love of robbing orchards, which seems peculiar to the race.

In the 'Pathway to Knowledge,' printed in London in 1596, occur the following verses, composed by W. P., the translator from the Dutch of 'the order of keeping a Merchant's booke, after the Italian manner of debtor and creditor :' Thirty days hath September, Aprill. June and November, Febuarie eight and twentie alone, all the rest thirtie and one.

Looke how many pence each day thou shalt gaine,

Just so many pounds, halfe pounds and groutes:

With as many pence in a yeare certaine,

Thou gettest and takest, as each wise man notes.

Looke how many farthings in a week doe amount.
In the yeare like shillings, and pence thou shalt count.

Mr. Davies, in his key to Hutton's Course quotes the following from a manuscript of the date of 1570:

Multiplication is mie vexation,
And Division is quite as bad,

The Golden Rule is mie stumbling stule,

And Practice drives me mad.

In 1600, Thomas Hylles published The Arte of Vulgar Arithmeticke, both in integrals and fractions,' to which is added Musa Mercatorum, which gives the following rule for 'the partition of a shilling into its aliquot parts.'

A farthing first findes forte eight
An halfepeny hopes for twentie foure
Three forthings seekes out 16 streight
A peny puls a dozen lower.
Dicke dandiprart drowe 8 ont dende
Twopence took 6 and went his way
Tom trip and goe with 4 is fled
But goodman grote on 3 doth stay
A testerne only 2 doth take

Moe parts a shilling can not make.

Nicholas Hunt, in 'The Hand-Maid to Arithmetick Refined,' printed in 1633, gives the rule of proof by nines as follows:

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PLANS OF PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL, NEW HAVEN, Conn.

The building erected by the city of New Haven for the accommodation of the Public High School which was opened with appropriate exercises, September 2, 1872, stands upon the lot given to the First School District, which now in cludes the whole city, by Titus Street, Esq, in 1822, as the site of the (then) new structure for the principal public school, which in 1818 had been organized on the monitorial plan of Joseph Lancaster. It was for many years the most expensive (costing $10,000), and the best school-house in the State, and yet with hardly a single feature in respect to seats and desks, ventilation, warming, and class-rooms, now considered indispensable in a structure for school purposes. Yet in this structure, and on this system as conducted by John E. Lovell, a pupil and friend of Lancaster, most of the best business men of New Haven were educated, and not a few of those who are now distinguished in professional life. A good teacher will make a good school in a barn, and will unconsciously modify any system to realize his own true aims.

The materials used are the 'Philadelphia pressed brick,' trimmed with yellow Ohio stone, on a foundation of granite. The wood-work of the interior is hard pine, unpainted, and trimmed with black walnut.

The dimensions on the ground are 100 feet on Orange street, by 70 feet on Wall. On the north end is a projection 25 feet by 9, which furnishes an entrance and stairway to each floor. In the rear is another projection 22 feet by 14, for stairways and dress-rooms for the teachers. The first story is 10 feet between the floors; the second and third stories are each 13 feet, and the fourth seventeen feet between the floors.

The width of the hall running lengthwise the building is 10 feet, and the transverse halls are 20 feet, which include stairs and dress-rooms for the pupils. On the first floor are accommodations for the Board of Education, the Secretary of the Board, and the Superintendent of the City Schools, with two class-rooms, each 28 feet by 37; on the second floor are four class-rooms, each 37 by 28 feet; and on the third floor are two class-rooms, 38 by 29, and one large room 38 by 54; and the third floor is occupied by a hall 81 feet by 69, with two ante-rooms. The seven class-rooms are designed to accommodate 400 pupils— 100 in the large, and 50 in the six smaller rooms. All the available space above the wainscoting is covered with mastic black surface, 4 ft. to 4 ft wide. Each class-room is furnished with a single desk and chair for the number of pupils which it is designed to accommodate.

All the class-rooms are in communication with the principal, by means of bells and speaking tubes.

Fresh air, heated in the winter by furnaces (seven) stationed at different points in the cellar, is carried to each room by independent pipes, and the air, vitiated by respiration, escapes by openings at the floor and ceiling, into flues, which discharge above the roof.

Water is carried to each story, and provision is made for lighting all the rooms by gas.

The cost of the building and equipments, exclusive of the ground, was about $100 000.

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