Time was, not very long ago, when the belief in creative design. was supreme. Even those who were sapping its authority were wont to pay it a formal homage, fearing to shock the public conscience by denying it. Now the revolution is so complete that a great philosopher uses it as a reductio ad absurdum, and prefers to believe that which can neither be demonstrated in detail nor imagined, rather than run the slightest risk of such a heresy.

I quite accept the professor's dictum that if natural selection is rejected we have no resource but to fall back on the mediate or immediate agency of a principle of design. In Oxford, at least, he will not find that argument is conclusive, nor, I believe, among scientific men in this country generally, however imposing the names of some whom he may claim for that belief. I would rather lean to the conviction that the multiplying difficulties of the mechanical theory are weakening the influence it once had acquired. I prefer to shelter myself in this matter behind the judgment of the greatest living master of natural science among us, Lord Kelvin, and to quote as my own concluding words the striking language with which he closed his address from this chair more than twenty years ago. "I have always felt," he said, "that the hypothesis of natural selection does not contain the true theory of evolution, if evolution there has been in biology. ... I feel profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been greatly too much lost sight of in recent zoological speculations. Overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through Nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living things depend on one everlasting Creator and Ruler."

LAST year, Garden and Forest says, the Genesee Valley Forestry Association of Rochester, N. Y., offered prizes to the children of the public schools for gathering the cocoons of caterpillars, and had encouraging success. This year, in addition to the other prizes, a special prize of ten dollars was offered to all who would bring a larger number than was brought in 1893 by any one pupil (44,900). Sixty-five pupils gained and received this prize, and five dollars each were given to the two boys who had the largest count. Eight million, eight hundred thousand and two hundred cocoons were gathered, and the city was relieved of that number of destroyers of vegetation and nuisances.

PRIZES are offered by the Revue Suisse de Photographie, Geneva, for the best photograph of a falling drop of water. The drops are to be of distilled water, issuing from a tube, the internal and external diameters of which are measured, with no special conditions as to the size of the picture, but with preferences for something near the natural size. Three prizes of medals will be given and three honorable mentions.

THE

MANUAL TRAINING.

BY DR. C. HANFORD HENDERSON,

PRINCIPAL OF THE NORTHEAST MANUAL TRAINING SCHOOL, PHILADELPHIA,

I.

HE editor of The Popular Science Monthly has always taken a warm interest in the question of manual training. On two occasions he has been kind enough to allow me to speak to his readers in the columns of the magazine. I have much valued these opportunities. The first article appeared in August, 1889, and was entitled The Spirit of Manual Training. It dealt with the general aspect of the subject, and more especially emphasized the ethical significance of well-performed action. The second article appeared in May, 1894, under the title of Cause and Effect in Education. It contained no direct reference to manual training. It was intended, however, to serve as an introduction to the two articles which the editor now asks me to write. It did this by illustrating the main proposition upon which manual training rests its educational claim, the very simple and undeniable proposition that we can only attain a rational education by setting in operation adequate causes. I am referring to these previous articles in order to avoid repetition. In the present paper it is my purpose to speak of the outward aspect of manual training, and in the succeeding paper, of its inner content.

It must be borne in mind at the very outset that manual training is not a complete and separate system of education, excluding other branches of human culture, and only administered during a definite period of boyhood. On the contrary, it is but one branch out of the many which make up the sum of education, and as such is applicable in every grade of school life. One must dismiss the idea that a manual training school is a "peculiar" institution which has parted company with the older avenues of culture, and has struck out in a new and somewhat erratic path of its own. It is quite possible that its early advocates held some such conception of its mission, but the view is certainly not shared by those who are trying to give manual training daily expression in the schools. A more modest conception prevails. Manual training is held to be a part of culture, not culture itself.

Curiously, manual training effected its entrance into the curriculum at both ends of the educational sequence-in the kindergarten and in the scientific departments of the universities. From the bottom and from the top it has been steadily pushing its way toward the center, until now the two frontiers are within plain sight of each other. The manual activities of the kindergarten,

the weaving, modeling, and building, are succeeded by the sloyd of the primary school, while the technical work of the universities. and scientific schools is now being preceded by the systematic wood and metal work of the manual-training high schools. The unoccupied territory lies between, in the elementary schools. It is, however, not entirely unoccupied. Already the simpler forms of wood work and clay modeling are being introduced into many of these schools, and the frontiers are disappearing.

This dual start is responsible for what would otherwise be a curious conflict of motif in the development of the manual training idea. The kindergarten has always in view the thought of the child. Its activities have but one purpose, and that is development. The things produced have in themselves no value whatever. The whole operation is a process. Its importance is subjective. One might, I think, sum up the ideal of the kindergarten in saying that its end is the cultivation of perception, and its method is the self-activity of the child.

It is far otherwise in the technical schools of the universities. Seldom have processes called educational been so oblivious of the material upon which they work. Men are taught to analyze iron and copper ores, because these analyses are needed in the industrial world; to survey fields and farms, because of the social necessity of emphasizing the difference between meum and tuum; to file and fit and turn, because only by such operations can machines be built; and to do a hundred other things whose end is objective. The work has regard only to itself. It is needed in the great outer world of enterprise and action. The worker is a part of the productive mechanism, and is now a means. Observe the contrast. In the kindergarten, the work was the means and the worker the end.

We thus find, at the two extremes of the educational line, parallel activities but opposite motives. So long as the frontier of the intermediate schools remained between the two, there was little conflict of ideals. Different sets of people were interested in each, and, as the interests were in both cases large, they prevented a too critical examination of the distant activity to which they were opposed. Thus became possible the spectacle of a father sacrificing himself to some industrial end, working beyond the point of fatigue, exceeding the bounds of sanity, while his children in the kindergarten were engaged in activities which were purely, though unconsciously, self-regarding; and no one appears to have found the spectacle so inconsistent as to be distressing.

But when manual training moved from its extreme positions and progressed along the line toward the center, it carried its motives with it-the educational motive upward, the technical motive downward. In the secondary schools the two have met

VOL. XLVI.-4

and are in daily conflict. Sometimes this conflict of ideals is between different schools of presumably the same grade and intent. In one, manual training is followed as an educational process, and in the other as an industrial end. The outer world-if it be discriminating enough to really get at what the schools are aboutsees two institutions of similar name and curriculum, and interprets the school according to the one it happens to visit. Very frequently the conflict is a civil war, having its seat in one and the same school, a part of the faculty working in one spirit and a part in the other. But most perplexing of all, one sees the conflict going on even in the same individual, the educational idea uppermost at one moment, and the love of technical perfection dominant at another. There are few teachers of manual training who do not at some time find themselves dangling between these two poles of thought.

Now I am restating these opposing motives in the development of the manual training idea at so much length and with so much emphasis because this is to-day the vital issue in the whole movement. And the restatement is the more necessary because the direct work of teaching manual training must rest for some time to come in the hands of men drawn from the artisan class rather than from the cultured classes, and is, therefore, in the greater danger of being regarded merely as the work of teaching a handicraft.

Moreover, this is only another aspect of the same issue which is now at stake in the universities. One can not move in the inner circles of collegiate life and thought without being constantly aware of the fact that the old breach between the classical party, the upholders of the humanities, and the newer faction representing the scientific and technical training, has never been closed. However pronounced the amenities of daily intercourse, the antagonism, at best, is only latent. When the wisdom and graciousness of humanity were all stored up in Latin and Greek, it was a prerequisite of culture to know these languages. It was early discovered that the act of acquisition was itself a most helpful intellectual gymnastic. The study thus came to have a dual value, as an end in itself, and as of high disciplinary power. This is undeniable. It is quite as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago when the classics were synonymous with culture. But the problem is now complicated by the necessary introduction of other considerations. The humane spirit of Greece is reflected more or less perfectly in the renascent spirit of modern times. The best of Greece and Rome is a heritage already ours. Further, those who would drink at the direct literary fountains can do so on the average far more perfectly in the admirable translations now available than in any translations they could make for themselves.

So far as the content of this literature is concerned, the human spirit may be as wise and as gracious without the study of the dead languages, as with it. The issue really hangs, then, upon the value of the discipline. This, too, is as great as ever, but it must be remembered that a discipline may be good-may, indeed, be the best at any one time-and yet with the progress of events become relatively poor. This, it seems to me, is the case with the classics. We are working for intellectual power. There was a time when the classics offered the best means of attaining this end. But such studies appeal only to a limited set of faculties. The best discipline is undeniably one which appeals to the fullest set of faculties, for this will mean the largest amount of brain development, and consequently the greatest intellectual power.

The objection which the classicists hold against our modern science culture as a substitute for the ancient languages is, I take it, that we have made this culture an end in itself, and have valued the facts above their effect upon the human spirit. So far as this objection is true it is a valid one. But the same spirit. which once made the study of Latin and Greek the acknowledged means of culture is even more applicable in science. Like the content of Latin and Greek in the middle ages, the content of science at the present time is something greatly to be desired in and for itself as adding immeasurably to the wisdom and graciousness of life; while the process of gaining this content-a process which employs every sense and every faculty, and from its necessities evolves new senses and new faculties-represents a discipline of the highest possible value.

The classicists have preserved the spirit of true culture-a profound appreciation of the subjective value of learning.

The scientists have reached the right method-the employment and development of all the senses and faculties.

The proper reconciliation between these contending friends of culture is very simple. It consists in cherishing the spirit of the one and adopting the method of the other.

Now I believe that a similar reconciliation is possible as regards manual training. The great thing is the human spirit, the sum of human faculty. The end of education is the unfolding and perfecting of the spirit. All other ends are secondary to this. It is the great thing in the kindergarten, in the elementary schools, in the high schools, in the universities. It is also the great thing, and we are much too apt to forget this, in the conduct of mature life. We are working for power. We are after a certain quality in organized matter, a complexity of structure and a sensitiveness in the gray and white of the brain. We can accomplish this purpose, we can gain this power, we can evolve this quality of complexity and sensitiveness only by very