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This is a professional

We have heard it said that the "Teacher" does not compare favorably, in interest, with the popular miscellaneous magazines. We are inclined to think this is true. But what of it? professed object is entertainment journal, and should be compared, if at all, with those of its kind. How many persons- doctors, lawyers, or others - take the "Medical and Surgical Journal" or the "Law Reporter" for light reading?

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LATIN AS A MEANS OF POPULAR EDUCATION. [Read before the Massachusetts Teachers' Association, at Worcester, December 27, 1872, by F. A. Hill, Chelsea:]

POPULAR education ends with the high school. It is desirable to know, as a practical question involved in our topic, whether all there shall study Latin; whether, in fact, Latin is so precious that a common-school education without it must be distorted and inharmonious. No one pronounces the language barren soil. To him that tills, it bears fruit. That fruit has value. But here ugly questions press for answer. What is that value? How far is it intrinsic, how far traditional? Is that worth indiscriminately great to all, or is it variable, depending on taste, mental fitness, the time at disposal, the business of life proposed? Are there not other values in this prolific world, and is this relatively greater or less?

The reverence for Latin in our systems of education is due to conditions most of which no longer exist. Wherever in Europe

Roman arms triumphed, there Roman laws, arts, literature, flourished. Latin was the universal language. The learned used it with a measure of purity; the people spoke it in a careless, slipshod way. Scholars despised what they called the bad Latin of the people, the vulgar patois that varied with country. Hence, the Roman tongues, the outgrowth of such corruption, long existed without a literature. As for English, it was taking shape with peasant and swine-herd, while Latin-French was assuming consequence in the courtly circles of their Norman masters.

Here, too, is a thought I cannot elaborate. Greece influenced Rome, owing a debt to Arabia for the volume of that influence, and Rome influenced the world. How was it done? The poets, philosophers, statesmen of Rome drank at Grecian fountains, communed with Grecian presences. Moulded thus, they naturally left Grecian imprints upon their language and works. Now, while Latin has always been prized since the Roman conquests, Greek has, at times, been wholly neglected. Even in its palmiest days, in what have been called Greek revivals, I do not understand that it ever received the attention devoted to its rival sister. Yet it is claimed, and with justice, that students of Latin for centuries, in relative or absolute ignorance of Greek,-" a language," says Professor Whitney, "possessing a higher intrinsic character and an infinitely superior cultivation," have notwith

standing felt the ennobling influences of the enlightened people that spoke it.

Consider, then, how weighty the reasons were for the overshadowing influence of Latin. It contained all learning, or was supposed to. It held the riches of two civilizations. It was not national, but international. The languages of the people were corruptions to which no scholar would dream of looking for thought, much less of making them repositories of his own. The tongues that were not Romance were in their infancy. As literary languages, they are not now old, and owe their very existence to that boldness which broke the shackles of classical régime, or that fortune which never wore them. Latin or ignorance was the alternative. The would-be scholar had positively no choice. No wonder the language was revered. No wonder institutions for its study multiplied. Rich in the hoarded treasures of the

past, it was richer in promises for the future. Had it not survived the times that gave it birth and beauty? Was it not the one thing strong, constant, unsubdued, while all else was uncertain, shifting, going to wreck and decay?

But Mandeville, translating the Latin of his travels into French. for society and into English for the people, German monks, composing in Latin and preaching in the vernacular, - Wycliffe giving us the English Bible, and Luther the German, these were events ominous of the mighty changes that have since taken place. No longer is there one language for the scholar, another for the people. Knowledge has burst its Latin barriers as anciently it did its Grecian. The influences of culture are too subtle to be confined. The spirit of beauty may tarry awhile, but cannot be chained. English and German have become classical, while the Romance tongues, like rare flowers, bloom more luxuriantly from the richness of their Latin mould. "Truly," as Taine says, "the masses form the race in the end, and generally the genius and language."

I do not dispute the power of Greece or Rome; direct it aright, it is legitimate, ennobling, mighty. I only claim that in fact it does not, and in the nature of the case it cannot, come to us in a single groove. It descends to us through many avenues, and one is nearer home than all the others, a shorter cut, less toilsome and more inviting, even our own rich language. Let the scholars of all times and lands whom taste and leisure prompt, visit those kingdoms of culture, be they never so far, but don't force the multitude there. Let the pilgrimage be one of love, not of necessity. Greater hope will there then be of returning from those delighful realms with treasures for the people, who, isolated in language, have yet abundant reasons for rejoicing that they are isolated in little else.

Another reason for paying less homage to Latin in a system of popular education, may be found in the extension of the bounds of knowledge. Ancient philosophy tolerated a system that was very unfruitful, save in words. Hasty in the assumption of premises, but rigid in the application of logic, verbal structures of vast proportions rose of necessity; or, as Carlyle strongly puts it, "Scholars swam in the boundless, bottomless,

vortices of logic." Language flourished. With the adoption of the inductive method, first the facts and then the law, progress, slow during the accumulation of data, at length became wonderfully rapid. Now, we cannot keep pace with it. The alumnus of twenty years belongs to an old school. How the topics multiply, topics, too, that must be conquered, or we go blundering through life, — topics whose right study will promote human happiness in countless ways, and stimulate the soul with new revelations of the infinite order and beauty it delights to behold!

In the first New-England schools, not one of the so-called sciences was taught. To-day optics alone demands the time all science was wont to receive a generation ago. Who that listened to Professor Tyndall recently in Boston, was not impressed at the marvellous progress that had been made in the study of light? Yet who did not feel that, after all, the explorers of light had wandered only on the shores of truth's infinite ocean, and gathered there a few more of the pebbles the rapt Newton had passed unnoticed before them?

The hiding-place of that latent heat that used to perplex us has been discovered, and from it issues a long train of revelations, passing even now.

What cannot electricity do, from ringing our door-bells to rivalling the glories of the sunset? Even the boys gather around our railroad signals, and wonder, as they hear the electric gong, or see the danger sign, what mystery it is that stands guard over the travelling public.

Chemistry, too, is so intimately connected with the food we eat and the air we breathe, the ills we suffer and the remedies we apply, our work by day and our sleep by night; it gives us so deep an insight into the system and beauty of nature, that he who is ignorant of its leading facts and principles is excluded not only from one of the most useful, but one of the most delightful fields of knowledge.

The scientific spirit is successfully invading the old, contested regions of the mind; it is making conquests along the borders of the spiritual. This spirit is affecting our notions of creation; of man, his origin, antiquity, language, growth. It questions our understanding. Our hearts quiver. Is science irreverent?

It has changed our views of Genesis. Shall we change them again at its bidding? Has it anything to say of faith, immortality, and things eternal? Can true science and true religion contend? If not, then which is in the wrong to-day? If we believe the conclusions of science, ought not our belief to be intelligent? If we disbelieve, ought we not still to know our enemy in self-defence? Friend or foe, science is mighty. Its spirit stamps the times. Ignorant of it, we might as well be out of the world. The stickler for antiquity in these times is the veriest hermit.

Pervading these and other sciences, uniting all in indissoluble bonds, is the crowning principle, the correlation of forces, the grandest scientific conception of all time. It can no more be grasped in its fulness than the universe it concerns. I conceive that they who are most familiar with it feel, as they see it reaching far out beyond their mental vision, as the susceptible soul does when it peers into the blue of heaven, and wonders what lies beyond the stars. The farther we enter the laboratory of nature, the vaster and more labyrinthine it becomes. Choose some one of its infinite paths to thread, and we go not far before we see it branching in infinite avenues more.

The exhibit of to-day is better than a generation ago, yet the masses end their schooling in the grammar classes, ignorant, except in our best schools, of even the alphabet of science. Our high schools are better off. Still, many of them pay too little attention to science and English classics, while they cling tenaciously to the exploded notion of requiring Latin of all. In these schools, science fills approximately one sixth of the course of study; mathematics, one sixth; history, one sixth; French, one sixth; Latin, one third: foreign tongues, therefore, one half; and English, the language we must use to the day of our death, the language of Shakespeare and Milton, one twelfth! Banish from this course all but Latin and mathematics, substitute Greek, and you see, in substance, what influences have come down. from the colleges above us.

But the colleges are modifying their programmes. The spell of the Middle Ages thoroughly broken, we may hope to have our preparatory course richer in English classics and not quite so