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is turn; and let them every evening, after all the lessons are said, give a bill to the master of their names that are absent, and theirs that have committed any disorder, and let him be very moderate in correcting, and be sure to make a difference betwixt those faults that are viciously enormous and those that are but childish transgressions. Where admonitions readily take place, it is a needless trouble to use a rod, and as for a ferule I wish it were utterly banished out of all schools.

If any one, before I conclude, should ask me, how many children I think may be well and profitably taught (according to the method already proposed) in a Petty School? I return him answer, that I conceive forty boys will be enough to thoroughly employ one man to hear every one so often as is required; and so many he may hear and benefit himself without making use of any of his scholars to teach the rest, which however may be permitted and is practiced in some schools, yet it occasioneth too much noise and disorder, and is no whit so acceptable to parents or pleasing to the children, be the work never so well done. And therefore I advise, that in a place where a great concourse of children may be had, there be more masters than one employed according to the spaciousness of the room aud the number of boys to be taught, so that every forty scholars may have one to teach them; and in case there be boys enough to be taught, I would appoint one single master to attend one single form, and have as many masters as there are forms, and then the work of teaching little ones to the height of their best improvement may be thoroughly done, especially if there were a writing-master employed at certain hours in the school, and an experienced teacher encouraged as a supervisor, or inspector, to see that the whole school be well and orderly taught and disciplined.

What I have here written concerning the teaching and ordering of a Petty School was in many particulars experienced by myself with a few little boys that I taught amongst my grammar scholars in London, and I know those of eminent worth and great learning that, upon trial made upon their own children at home and others at school, are ready to attest the ease and benefit of this method; insomuch as I was resolved to have adjoined a Petty School to my grammar school at the Token House in Lothbury, London, and there to have proceeded in this familiar and pleasing way of teaching, had I not been unhandsomely dealt with by those whom it concerned, for their own profit's sake, to have given me less discouragement. Nevertheless, I think it my duty to promote learning what I can, and to lay a sure foundation for such a goodly structure as learning is; and though (perhaps) I may never be able to effect what I desire for its advancement, yet it will be my comfort to have imparted somewhat to others that may help thereunto. I have here begun at the very groundwork, intending (by God's blessing) forthwith to publish The New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching, which doth properly belong to a grammar school.

In the meantime I entreat those into whose hands this little work may come to look upon it with a single eye, and whether they like or dislike it, to think that it is not unnecessary for men of greatest parts to bestow a sheet or two at leisure time upon so mean a subject as this seems to be. And that God which causeth immense rivers to flow from small spring-heads, vouchsafe to bless these weak beginnings in tender age, that good learning may proceed hence to its full perfection in riper years.

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 to schole shal sette be

A Bok is hym ybrought,

Naylyd on a bord of tre,

That men cal an A, B, C,

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 loke and see,

By this bok men may devyne,
That Christe's body was full of
That dyed on wod tree.

pyne,

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 mediæval geographers:

This world is delyd (divided), al on thre,

Asia, Affrike, and Eu-ro-pe.

Wol ye 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 clensoune
Both of nonne and pronoun,

And ilk case in plurele

How thou sal end, avise the well;
And the participyls forget thou not,
And the comparison be in thi thought,
The ablative case be in thi minde,
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 auger doth abyde,

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 groates:

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 fortie eight
An halfepeny hopes for twentie foure
Three furthings seekes out 16 streight
A peny puls a dozen lower.

Dicke dandiptart drewe 8 out deade
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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Cotgrave has, "La Croix de par Dieu, the Christ's-crosse-rowe, or horne-booke, wherein a child learnes it; " and Florio, ed. 1611, p. 93, "Centuruola, a childes horne-booke hanging at his girdle."

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Middlehill, are two genuine
Locke, in his "Thoughts on

In the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps, at Hornbooks of the reigns of Charles I. and II. Education," speaks of the "ordinary road of the Hornbook and Primer," and directs that "the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments he should learn by heart, not by reading them himself in his Primer, but by somebody's repeating them before he can read."

Shenstone, who was taught to read at a dame-school, near Halesowen, in Shropshire, in his delightfully quaint poem of the Schoolmistress, commemorating his venerable preceptress, thus records the use of the Hornbook:

"Lo; now with state she utters her command;

Eftsoons the urchins to their tasks repair;

Their books of stature small they take in hand,

Which with pellucid horn secured are
To save from finger wet the letters fair."

OBJECT TEACHING - PRINCIPLES AND METHODS.

[From the German of F. Busse, Principal of the Girls' High School of Berlin.*]

1.-AIMS AND PRINCIPLES.

PEDAGOGICAL authorities have the most diverse views upon objectteaching, both in regard to its position and value in general, and to its principal and subsidiary objects in particular. The reason of this is, that no other discipline embraces the individuality of the child on its physical and spiritual sides to such a degree as this does. We speak of exercise in observation, object-teaching, practice in thinking, or practice in understanding, practice in speaking or in language, just according as we are thinking more especially of the sense-organs and observation, the ability to think, the speaking a language. From the standpoint of an enlightened science of teaching, the averaging of these various views, and the uniting of these aims, is a necessity.

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Since object-teaching is the earliest teaching, and that which begins before the child is old enough to go to school (Pestalozzi, Fræbel), since it takes hold of the child in the full, undifferentiated unity of his powers, it is of importance to presuppose that the child has an inborn individuality. That clumsy view which considers that what we call individuality does not arise until it is produced by the influence of time and place, persons and circumstances, and, most of all, by education and instruction, that view, I repeat, prevails amongst those who strive to dispiritualize nature everywhere, and especially human nature, and is unworthy of an enlightened science of teaching. Just as little as instruction can form its empirical conditions—that is, mental capacity and organs of speech in the child, but, instead of that, presupposes them, just so little can it dispense with the logical conditions; namely, the I, endowed with powers of observation, discernment, feeling, and willing,—what Genesis calls "the living soul," what Solomon calls "the breath of the divine power."

No investigator has yet succeeded in drawing the wonderful boundary-line between the spiritual and the physical in human nature; but if we are trying to establish the meaning of the important idea, "intuition," we must keep the physical and spiritual sides of our being apart.

Man, as a sensibly spiritual being, has, first of all, a receptivity for impressions of that which is about him and goes on before him. This receptivity is called sense. The activities, capacities, and powers of the soul which come first into consideration are, therefore, of a purely receptive kind. It is the decidedly preponderant activity of sense. While the impressions of the exterior world are in the act of being appropriated by the soul, the first soul-formations, the sensations and perceptions, arise.

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