fact that no model can be made to work exactly like the living organs and tissues.

Boys and girls are by instinct comparative anatomists and physiologists, and the study of the human body offers rare opportunities to develop this instinct. Suppose your class has been studying the skeleton. If there is a natural-history museum within an hour's ride, take them there, give them a set of questions which will apply to the skeleton of any vertebrate, and set them at work on the skeleton of a giraffe, a horse, or an elephant. Unless your experience is exceptional, you will find an excited group of boys and girls plying the skeletons and you with questions as to the position and use in the specimen before them of the various bones they have studied in class.

Teeth, too, are wonderfully interesting when studied comparatively and in relation to the food which the animal eats. The school museum should contain at least the skull of a horse, a cow, a dog, and a rat or a squirrel, for these can easily be procured by the teachers or pupils. These are common animals with which every boy is familiar, and he is thoroly interested in making a study of the machinery by which these animals grind, tear, or gnaw their food. Other profitable subjects for comparative study are the various methods of locomotion employed by vertebrates and invertebrates, their methods of getting their food, the ways in which they are protected, and the sense-organs which they possess. Much of this observation can be done at home, or afield, or in zoölogical parks by the individual pupil, if once he acquires the habit of noting resemblances and differences.

If you wish to teach cleanliness most effectively, devote a half-dozen lessons to the study of bacteria. Let the pupils experiment at home with milk and with a hay infusion. Expose culture dishes containing nutrient agar to the air in the corridors before and after sweeping, and let the pupils note the growth of the colonies of bacteria day by day. Teach the boys and girls the principles of inoculation and sterilization, and if possible show them with high-power lenses the living germs under the microscope. Emphasize the filthiness and the danger of expectoration (better call it spitting) in public places, and call attention to the splendid work done by boards of health and by such men as our New York Waring and Woodbury.

Physiology, then, need not be uninteresting and unprofitable. If taught by laboratory methods, it is replete with interest. From an educational point of view it well deserves consideration as an inductive science, and in its practical bearings it is even more useful than the other sciences which are now honored in the school curriculum. As physiology teachers, however, we have much to do along the lines of choosing our subject-matter and of developing our pedagogics. When we have done this and are able to point to years of successful experience, this subject in which we are interested will be given the place in the school curriculum which it so richly deserves.

COLLEGE CHEMISTRY, AND ITS RELATION TO WORK PREPARATORY TO IT

IRA REMSEN, PRESIDENT OF JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, M.D. [AN ABSTRACT]

College courses should be elementary even in the case of those students who have had a preparatory course in the high school, for it is impossible to give the student clear ideas without going over the subject, no matter how good the student or how good the teacher. It is with chemistry as with other subjects-repetition is necessary. How much English or Latin, or any other languäge, can be taught in a year one hour a day?

One reason why language courses are so valuable pedagogically is that they involve so much drill. Day after day, year after year, the same general conceptions are dealt with and illustrated by new examples, until finally these conceptions become a part of the mental equipment of the student. The mind has received lasting benefit. On the other hand, in chemistry every day brings something entirely new and not clearly connected with what has gone before. The student cannot take any clear ideas with him. If my experience is worth anything, he rarely does, even after a year's work. He has had too many impressions. He knows about as much of chemistry or chemical phenomena as he would of a language if he had spent a year in studying its grammar and had tried to read a passage from a different author every day. No matter who the student, or who the teacher, a year's course in chemistry cannot do very much for a student. Most of the work will have to be done over again in some way, if clear ideas are to be gained. Nevertheless, this work is valuable, as it prepares the mind for subsequent work.

The ideal course in chemistry has not yet been worked out.

Indeed,

I am not sure that there is an ideally correct course. I fancy that it would be well for a student to follow different kinds of courses, so that he may look at the facts and the principles from different points of view.

In an elementary course, whether in high school or in college, I should like to see the facts emphasized, and I should always try to connect the work of the day with the experiences of everyday life. This is, I believe, sound pedagogics. It is certainly sound sense.

Theory, in my opinion, should play a subordinate part in elementary instruction, tho I do not feel that it should be excluded. The atomic theory is meaningless to one who knows nothing of the facts, and it means little to one who knows little of these facts.

Professor Agassiz said, and I am sure thinking teachers will agree with him: "One can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's previous acquaintance with particulars enables him to take it in.”

HIGH-SCHOOL CHEMISTRY IN ITS RELATION TO THE WORK OF A COLLEGE COURSE

RUFUS PHILLIPS WILLIAMS, TEACHER OF CHEMISTRY, ENGLISH HIGH SCHOOL, BOSTON, MASS.

[AN ABSTRACT]

Many of our high schools give a fairly good course in general chemistry experiments, theory, and principles-some taking two years and including qualitative analysis and a little quantitative work. Yet in a great majority of the higher institutions the work must be repeated.

To be obliged to go over again in college the preparation of oxygen, the properties of sulphur, the compounds of iron, which he has already studied experimentally and theoretically, the student regards as a useless waste of time, and reasons that if he must take the subject in college, he would better spend his time in the preparatory school on some other branch, the rudiments of which will not be repeated. Thus high-school chemistry is placed at a disadvantage in comparison with other elective subjects..

Two sets of reasons are advanced for this failure of the colleges to recognize preparatory chemistry from the fitting school. The first and chief of these is the fact that in a majority of such schools the student does not go deep enough into general chemistry to warrant his taking up at once the higher branches-quantitative or even qualitative analysis. He has not had theory enough nor practice enough. A second reason is that some students offer chemistry for admission, others do not. Hence there must be an elementary course in college for those who have not had the subject prior to entering. Into this class are also put those who have studied chemistry in the schools. Thus, side by side in the laboratory, taking also the same lecture notes, are those who do not know an element from a compound, and those who have passed the searching collegeentrance examination.

Wishing to know what is the actual practice in the higher institutions, I sent to each of the twenty-three colleges and universities contributing to the College Entrance Examination Board the following among other questions: "Are those students who have passed elementary chemistry on entrance obliged to take general chemistry again if they continue the subject, or may they go on at once with more advanced work?" The colleges belonging to this board were selected because they are united on a definite object, and are supposed to allow candidates for admission to offer chemistry. The result would probably not vary much if other colleges had been interviewed. Of twenty-three replies to this question (for everyone answered it), seventeen are to the effect that the subject must be repeated, tho a few say that, if the course has been as thoro in the high school as it

is in the particular college, the student may go on, implying at the same time that this rarely, if ever, happens. In two cases chemistry was not allowed as an entrance elective. One states unqualifiedly that students may go on; another, that they may, but that very few continue the subject. Thus the almost unanimous verdict is: Repeat. And the offense with which the high school is charged is inadequate preparation.

Wishing to get at the evidence which weighed in the minds of the judges, I put to the same twenty-three institutions this question: “In what part of the work do you find those offering chemistry most deficient?" To this question fifteen direct answers were given, and as they form the important evidence on which my client is convicted, I quote them :

1. Elementary general principles.

ANSWERS

2. A comprehension of underlying principles. Pupils acquire facts, but do not understand their relation to general principles.

3. Want of application.

4. Work is not thoro; mostly taught from books. Ground covered too great for time devoted to it.

5. Elementary logic. Students coming to college are very deficient in reasoning. 6. Equations and laboratory work.

7. Making, putting up, and using apparatus; a thoro knowledge of the non-metals; quantitative experiments.

8. Their failings will vary with the instruction they have received.

9. In general.

10. Perhaps theoretical more than descriptive.

11. Have generally "done" a large number of experiments, but are sadly deficient in chemical laws.

12. In theory and in knowledge of metals.

13. Equations and familiarity with fundamental principles.

time at high schools is wasted in trying to cover too much ground.

Three-fourths of the

14. They fail because they will not study, and I think in many cases they were never taught how to study.

15. The fifteenth and last is a venomous arraignment of high schools, untrue as it is unkind. Its author says: 'The preparatory schools are not in a position to give students anything like the comprehensive instructon in elementary chemistry. In the first place, they can rarely afford to hire a chemist to give the instruction. They only get a school-teacher who has a smattering of chemistry, and not a real chemist. In the second place, they never have much apparatus, so at best preparatory chemistry does not amount to much. The student does not get enough of it to amount to a row of pins. Now, on the other hand, the university professor begins at the beginning. He cannot skip oxygen or hydrogen or nitrogen or water or the atmosphere because the students have heard these names once or twice in school; " etc.

Such a scathing anathema, besides degrading the high-school teacher's work, and elevating to the pedestal the university professor's, shows ignorance of high-school chemistry as taught today. Hundreds of these schools have as teachers graduates in chemistry from colleges and technological schools, and scores have degree men from German and American universities who are "real chemists," and whose work compares

favorably with that done in college. Again, it is the exception that high schools now building and recently built are not well equipped with laboratories. Within ten miles of this spot there is a high-school chemical y on which there was laid out for repairs alone last year more and another high-school plant in the same city whose

-e than thirty years ago was $40,000. Two weeks ago, n a city of only 25,000 people, in another state, I visited Doratory better equipped than any college laboratory doing the same grade of work that it has been my fortune to examine. This statement might have been true twenty-five years ago; it is probably true now of some remote country high schools. That it is made by only one out of twenty-three shows that most colleges recognize the improved conditions in high-school work.

Yet from these replies of representative higher institutions there seems no doubt that preparatory schools are trying to do too much and are really doing too little. Where is the fault, and what is the remedy?

A majority of the replies state distinctly that the deficiency is in laws and general principles; that students cannot sufficiently correlate facts and theories. The teaching of laws, general principles, and chemical theory assumes, therefore, paramount importance and constitutes the great desideratum. Elsewhere I have dwelt upon the importance of theory teaching, and the verdict of these colleges is a convincing corroboration.

While the inculcation of principles and laws is acknowledged by every instructor to be the most difficult part of his work, something to be avoid d by the easy-going teacher and slothful student, yet it is recognized as the only thing that can give a broad grasp of the subject, and, with requisite experiments, yield the largest results. The tendency in some quarters to omit the application of these broad principles, to abolish the text-book, to abuse the laboratory by excessive use to the exclusion of recitation and lecture, should be viewed with only temporary alarm, for such abnormalities will finally right themselves when the ideal course is adopted.

Entering college on chemistry is a comparatively recent thing. The colleges are the pacemakers, and the high schools are trying their best to keep up.

In the elective system that subject must take the place of so much mathematics, or some ancient or modern language. To be the equivalent of any of these, a great deal of ground must be covered - the non-metals and the chief metals; laws and general principles; the chemical theory, including nomenclature, symbolization, etc. The fitting schools have tried to cover all this extensive ground, and, as most of these schools give but one year of three to five hours per week to chemistry, the result has been to borrow Mr. Morgan's phrase of "undigested securities a vast amount of undigested facts. Little wonder the students are