15. Negative character of early education. What is to be said of this? Is it at all practicable? Does it suggest any modification of present practice? 16. Three-fold character of the teacher's function.

17. The extent and means of control.

18. Principles of intellectual culture laid down. State them clearly and enlarge upon them.

19. Views on physical training. Manual and industrial education.

20. Moral and religious culture.

21. Things in Rousseau's system to be commended and adopted.

22. Things to be condemned and avoided.

AULD LANG-SYNE.

This extract from a letter received recently is printed, in the hope that the older brethren who "are not in their graves" may take the hint and let their names be seen on these pages. Edwards, and Lord, and Andrews, and Garfield, and Henkle, and many others, have joined the innumerable company on the other side. Cowdery, and Kingsley, and Hurty, and White, and Rickoff, and Ormsby, and Freese, and Royce, and Smyth, and Harvey, and many more, have either put off the armor, or have joined some other branch of the service. Very few cotemporaries of these veterans are still in the ranks:

Permit me to express for you a warm personal friendship, and for the MONTHLY and its readers, whom you may meet socially and in institutes, and at association meetings, especially those with whom I was acquainted, my most hearty good wishes.

"Those with whom I was acquainted," did I say? Alas! how few are left! Where are they? Surely they are not in their graves! nor the half of them. But I see their names no more on your pages. I think I could count on the fingers of one hand the names of such, that you placed on the pages of your December number; and yet the time was, when, at the annual meetings of the State Association, as I sat year after year at the table of the Treasurer, I could save the Presidents of the Association the necessity of asking the name of one who might rise to speak, with exceptions few and far between. Yours in sincere friendship,

CHAS. S. ROYCE.

}

Miss E-G—

SELF-IMPROVEMENT.

asks us to tell her, through the MONTHLY, "the best means which a teacher may use to improve herself in her profession."

The larger, stronger, and purer one is, in mind and heart, the better she is fitted for the work of teaching. Whatever tends to enlarge, strengthen and purify the teacher will be to her a means of professional improvement. This opens a field in which thought might take very wide range. We shall confine ours to a few leading points.

1. Seek to know your true relationship to God, and freely and fully acknowledge that relationship. This is fundamental. There is no true character, there is no right living without it. This relationship understood and acknowledged, look continually to God for wisdom, purity, faith and love.

2. Learn obedience-obedience to every law of your being. Bring self into complete subjection.

3. Keep mind and heart open to every good influence. Retain the Spirit of God in your heart. Seek the company of good people. Visit good schools. Attend teachers' institutes. Read the best educational journals. Keep your mind occupied with high thinking, and crowd out all unworthy thoughts.

4.

Be thoroughly in earnest. Do your best every day.

5. Spend no time in brooding over your own short-comings. When you have done wrong confess it heartily to yourself and God, and to others whom it may concern-even to your pupils, and go bravely on.

6. Be a systematic and persistent student. Study most in the direction of your greatest felt need. Study nature. Study books, especially the Bible. Study human nature, especially child-nature. We need to study children far more than we do, and we need ourselves to be child-like in simplicity and teachableness. It is Rousseau that says we are not sufficiently acquainted with childhood. "Even the most sagacious instructors apply themselves to those things which man is required to know, without considering what it is children are capacitated to learn. They are always expecting the man in the child, without reflecting what he is before he can be a man.' The greatest teachers have ever been profound students of child-nature. Does E. G. think we have set for her a large task? We know no other way.

SMOKING TEACHERS.

A college president sends us the following:

"A young lady, a pupil in one of the city high schools of Ohio, writes, 'I do not like our new principal nearly as well as I did the former one. He smokes cigarettes so much that he is scented all the time, which is very unpleasant, I think. Without taking any fanatical view, in consideration of the extent of tobacco-smoking among the youth of our cities, and its pernicious physical and mental effects as exposed by medical authorities, and the grave moral objections to it, and the acknowledged power of a teacher's example, is it right to employ such a man in one ot the most responsible educational positions in the State unless the supply of capable temperance men is exhausted?"

It has long been a matter of grief to us that some of our most valued friends among Ohio teachers are great smokers. We have difficulty in reconciling their practice in this respect with their well-known excellence of character and good sense in other respects. It is no uncommon thing for great and good men to betray, at times, weakness in some direction, but to be in perpetual bondage to this habit seems to us like submission to a very small and very mean master. We feel the more deeply on this subject, because the example of some teachers and clergymen, and other good people, has so often come in the way of our efforts against the tobacco habit, in our own family and in our school work.

We once heard a member of a city board of education give as a reason for not voting for a certain candidate for school superintendent, that he smoked. The candidate had eminent qualifications for the position, but this member gave preference to a man who was free from the stains and fumes of tobacco.

On another occasion we heard it urged against the renomination of a State officer that he kept his office so filled with the fumes of tobacco as to make it very unpleasant for one not a smoker to transact business there.

We call upon the young men of our profession to maintain their liberty. Yield obedience to no such master. Keep your bodies as well as your spirits

pure.

Now, brethren, lovers of the weed, be not offended. We love you, but we do not like tobacco nor tobacco smoke.

GREENE COUNTY.

The teachers of Greene County held their regular bi-monthly meeting at Xenia, on Saturday, Dec. 8. A report in the county papers puts the attendauce of the morning session at one hundred, and that of the afternoon at double this number. We infer from the report that the exercises were of an unusually interesting character. Superintendent Cox, of the Xenia schools, presided. Several names familiar to us appear in the report. A "Review of first three chapters of Hailman," and a report from the Reading Circles in the different townships constituted prominent features of the meeting.

We drop a tear as we think of other days in the schools of old Greene. We taught our first school in the McCroskey district. The school-house stood at the side of the high-way that leads from Jamestown (Jimtown we called it) to Cedarville. The pay was fifteen dollars a month, out of which we paid one dollar a week for board. We did so well the first term that we easily secured the school for another term, at an increased salary-sixteen dollars a month.

Our next engagement was in the Janney or Spencer district, seven miles east of Xenia, on the Jamestown turn-pike. The contract was for ten months at twenty dollars a month; but we quarreled with the directors (or they with us) and left the school at the end of four or five months. One of our younger pupils in this school is now a college president. While teaching here, we placed ten cent pictures on the walls and calico curtains on the windows, at our own expense, and planted trees and flowers on the grounds about the house. It was while teaching this school that we first read Page's Theory and Practice of Teaching, and the teacher-spirit began to grow in us.

Our next school was at Oldtown Run, about four miles east of Xenia. While teaching here we spent our out-of-school hours in studying Upham's Mental Philosophy and Wayland's Moral Science. Our immediate predecessor in this school, James Turnbull, dead long since, was very popular-probably the most popular teacher in the county at the time; and we found it very hard to get up the interest we had had in our last school. So we accepted an offer of twenty-six dollars a month to teach the winter term in the Hyslop district, on the south Jamestown road. During this winter we were interested in reading Watts on the Mind and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The latter was then appearing as a serial in the National Era. It was about this time that Josiah Hurty flourished as superintendent of the Xenia Schools-about 1851. Andrew Amyx and A. J. Nelson were popular teachers in the county at the same time. We afterwards taught in the Dallas district, on Clark's Run; and still later, in the Liggett district and the McClung district, four or five miles west of Xenia.

In the last named district we received fifty dollars a month, and had the most advanced country school we ever taught. We had a class of eight or ten choice young people who studied Ray's Higher Algebra, Davies' Legendre, and Parker's Natural Philosophy. One of these, John McClung, a most excellent young man, was left on the field, at the battle of Stone River.

We have many pleasant memories of those youthtul days; the apple-paring bees, the butter-boilings, the spelling schools and singing-schools, were occasions not to be forgotten. We remember a time when we were specially interested in the spelling-schools in the Schooley district, not far from New Jasper. On one occasion we were spelled down by the owner of a pair of bright eyes. Those eyes are now looking over our shoulder as we write, and they are still bright, though two little boys now call their owner "Grandma."

We ask pardon of our readers. We started to write a brief account of the meeting at Xenia, and this is what came of it.

SUNDAY SCHOOL GOVERNMENT.

A good deacon, belonging to a sunday school whose superintendent was an experienced public-school man and a thorough disciplinarian, was heard to say, "I do not like the crack of the public-school whip in the sunday-school." Our opinion is that an occasional crack of the public school whip would be a great benefit to many a sunday-school. The mistake which many sundayschool workers make is in thinking they have no authority to control, but that sunday-school scholars can only be persuaded or tickled into good behavior. Such a notion does great injustice to the children. They need, above all else, to be taught obedience to authority-to be trained into habits of obedience as a foundation element of good character. Besides, good control is an essential element of good teaching. Children not in subjection are not in condition to be instructed.

We do not mean that authority should be the prominent thing in the management of a sunday-school, or any other school, nor that the teacher should continually maintain the attitude of a master. By no means. Sympathy and affection should abound, and these will suffice with the greater and better part of the pupils; but there should be such a great reserve force of authority and will as to command the respect and obedience of the wayward and lawless.

"THE NEW EDUCATION."

Dear Brother Hailman, of "The Kindergarten and the New Education" deparment of the American Teacher! Don't feel so bad! We didn't mean to hit so hard; and we never thought is was you we were hitting any way! And we're so sorry, too, that good Dr. Mayo bases his statements about "the New Education" upon "superficial and narrow knowledge of its characteristics," and that he makes such a “damaging charge" against Colonel Parker! And it's such a pity for Boston, that Superintendent Seaver should say "There is probably nothing new in the methods we are using." Yes, it is all too bad! too bad entirely! There, now; cheer up, and tell us, in the "spirit" of a true kindergartner, just what is new in the "New Education." We are willing to learn,

THE READING CIRCLE AT LANCASTER.

The Lancaster branch of the Fairfield County Teachers' Reading Circle is in good working order, and meets on the first and third Tuesday evenings of each month at the home of the superintendent of schools.

It numbers thirty members, twenty-five of them being teachers in the Lancaster schools, and has invested over one hundred dollars in books.

The course of reading, selected from the works named by the State Board of Control, is Pestalozzi, Longfellow's Life and Poems, and Irving's Columbus. A "leader" is chosen for each exercise who, having two weeks' warning, makes thorough preparation upon the matter assigned, and, when the time comes, takes the stand as a teacher, conducting an oral examination.

At each meeting we have an essay upon some pertinent topic; the titles thus far being Irving, the Real Miles Standish, and the Pre-Columbian Discovery of America.

We think the O. T. R. C.. is a good thing, and are anxious for information as to the plans of the managers for its future conduct. B.

Our thanks are due to our numerous contributors to the "Notes and Queries" department. This corner, as will be seen, is well filled, and we have scarcely been able to use half the matter furnished. We feel a little inclined to suggest that questions of real practical interest in school management and methods of teaching would be more profitable than questions which can be readily answered by reference to text-books, dictionaries, or encyclopedias. We do not wish, by any means, to shut off the proposal and discussion of interesting questions in grammar, arithmetic, history, etc. Many such questions are profitable to discuss; but we think a little less of these and more of the other would be better. Correspondents would save us labor and trouble by writing what is intended for publication on one side of the paper only, and keeping business and contributions entirely separate. We may say in this connection that we are highly pleased that so many teachers of the State are disposed to aid in making of the MONTHLY what they wish it to be.

Here are some important queries, two of them from a distant State, which have been received since that department of this number was closed. We number them in order.

22. To what extent should teachers be required to adopt the superintendent's methods of discipline and instruction? Should a teacher resort to the use of the rod, against his own judgment, because the superintendent requires it? H. J. R.

23. Is it carrying "system" too far to make the recitations in primary and higher grades of same length, by ringing a gong at stated times, and requiring classes in all grades to be changed at these times and these only? H. J. R. 24. What constitutes the best foundation for slating for a blackboard? Answers to this question are especially desired. E. A. J.

A beautiful Whittier Calendar came to our sanctum on Christmas day, the gift of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., of Boston.