and very properly so, to select for the telling miscellaneous material from the classics, from biography, nature, science, and travel, in Cleveland the selections are made only from the classics. And they have trained story-tellers there who tell the Greek Myth Cycle, the Norse Myth Cycle, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Nibelungenlied, and the King Arthur and Robin Hood legends.

TRAVELLING LIBRARIES.-The New York Free Library is rendering excellent service to the cause of education by its system of "travelling libraries." Carefully selected books are catalogued according to school grades, and any teacher in the city schools may select a list of such books and have them delivered at the school free of charge. The teacher is encouraged to accompany the loan of books to the children with personal advice both as to wise selection and advantageous use. The books must be ready for return to the Free Library within five months.

By this plan the best books are placed within reach of all; the library is made a most effective auxiliary of the school; a wise use of proper books is developed; and a love for good literature is inculcated in the lives of the young people.

DOCTOR ELIOT'S "FIVE-FOOT SHELF of Books."-It is difficult to determine the books to read in order to become familiar with what every man of culture should know. This difficulty is so commonly recognized that when Doctor Charles W. Eliot, the scholarly president of Harvard University for so many years, announced his intention of endeavoring to collate a limited but well-rounded library of liberal education, the announcement was everywhere welcomed, and announcements similar to that in the New York Times appeared in a number of American newspapers. "It is safe to say that the entire educational world, and a very considerable proportion of the reading public besides, will await with deep interest the selection of the volumes which go toward making what-for lack of a better namemay be termed "The President Eliot Library of Liberal Education."

The actual conception of the idea and its after-development are best summed up in Doctor Eliot's own words: "Some years ago, in a speech before an educational gather

ing, I chanced to say that a three-foot shelf would hold good books enough to give a liberal education to any one who would read them with devotion, even if he could give but fifteen minutes a day to the task. This remark brought me a considerable number of letters, demanding a list of those books. I made several efforts to make the list, but soon discovered that it was a serious undertaking, and that I had no time for it. Subsequently I saw reason to lengthen the shelf to five feet, but made very little progress toward a definite selection.”

Later on, Doctor Eliot found it necessary to discard the portions of the books selected that did not seem necessary for his purpose, in order "to provide the means of obtaining such a knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seems essential to the twentieth-century idea of a cultivated man" and that he might bring the material within the size he had set for himself. He also found it advisable to arrange the material selected under subject-headings rather than by authors. These changes soon suggested the publishing of the selected material in a new form and Doctor Eliot's "Five-foot Shelf of Books" became a commercial enterprise. Aside from these republished selections from many authors, there is, therefore, now no selected list of books that would meet the conditions at first conceived by Doctor Eliot.

Music as a Factor in Education.

One of the practical advantages of the teaching of music in the schools is undoubtedly the fact that children possessing musical ability are discovered and given a start. If this were the only advantage, however, it might well be argued that the number who develop special musical ability is relatively small and scarcely sufficient to justify the expense in time, money, and effort. The general moral and æsthetic effects are, however, of much greater value, because they reach practically all and are of so much more importance. But in addition to all these values we are realizing a new one whose influence is of far-reaching importance. This is the safeguarding attraction of music, which holds the life away from degrading influences.

Commenting upon this phase of the subject, the editor of the Outlook says, in the issue of March 4, 1911: "The real answer (to the supreme value of music-teaching in the schools) lies in the fact that it is quite as important to provide amusements for people of every age and condition as it is to provide food, clothing, and shelter. If the children of the ignorant and destitute poor are not taught how to provide proper and reasonable amusements for themselves, they are likely to indulge in improper and vicious amusements. It should, therefore, be a part of all educational and charitable work to teach the children of the city how to provide for themselves sane and uplifting forms of pleasure. The development of the mental, spiritual, and imaginative side of life is of the first importance, and the results of these musical entertainments (and such musical instruction) .. have shown (us) how through music the children of the people may have a quick, easy, and permanently effective means to such development."

MUSIC AS A MORAL FORCE.-George Adam Smith has well said of music: "Words are clumsy instruments for the expression of the heart, and are least efficient when they undertake to set forth moral and spiritual ideas. Music can transcend mere speech in touching the soul to fine issues, suggesting visions of things ineffable and unseen. Browning makes Abt Vogler say of the most enduring and supreme hopes that God has granted to men, ""Tis we musicians know'; but the message of music comes home with power to many who have no skill in its art." And it is well for the teacher to remember that it is not so much the ability to render good music, as it is the ability to enjoy the refining and uplifting influence of music, upon which she must rely to supplant the rude and the unworthy when she calls to her disciplinary aid this most gracious of all the arts.

AMERICAN MUSIC.-The love for good music is developing rapidly in the United States; but music as one of the greatest of the fine arts has not yet become as general in our country as it has in many of the European countries. This is not because the people of America lack in innate interest in music, but because it has generally been regarded as a mere pastime and largely as merely a graceful feminine accomplishment. But in a few of our great municipalities

serious attention is given to a study of the great masters of music just as it is to the great masters of painting and sculpture, and the results of careful study and practice are manifest in the work of bands, orchestras, opera companies, and individual performers in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other musical centres.

Although the efforts of the universities and colleges to secure serious study and analysis of the works of the great musicians have not yet met with the large success they deserve, there are scores of agencies which in a quiet way are exercising a lasting educational influence upon musical knowledge and taste. Municipalities are creating and supplying the popular demand for good music by open-air concerts; sometimes private philanthropy provides these things, as in the case of the remarkable Music School Settlement, which both teaches music and gives concerts of good music for the benefit of the people on the East Side of New York City; sometimes churches and educational institutions provide it in a series of free concerts; newspapers have also provided notable free public concerts, as in the case of the San Francisco Examiner, which on Christmas Day, 1911, gathered an audience of 100,000 people to hear Jan Kubelik and David Bispham, and the New York World, which in 1911 gave a fund of $10,000 to provide concerts of the best music in the public schools of that city. But probably the most effective agency in the rapid development of an appreciation of good music is the phonograph, which is making so many households in the land familiar with the work of the world's greatest artists and composers.

To appreciate good music one must hear it, just as to appreciate good literature one must read it. "The understanding of music depends neither upon technical knowledge nor upon convention, but upon the listener's immediate and familiar experience of it; an experience which technical knowledge and custom can, of course, aid him to acquire more rapidly, as they strengthen his memory and enable him to fix impressions by naming them." So says an Oxford writer. But he should have added that it will never be understood and appreciated as a fine art until it is known in its structure, its philosophy, and its history.

The Outlook for April 6 calls attention to the interesting fact that in America the value of music in cultural education is probably more keenly realized to-day by negro educators than it is by white. "Music plays an important part in the scheme of education at Hampton, Tuskegee, and Fisk, and the result is that the negro students of those institutions, in preserving and writing down and performing their old-time plantation or folk songs, are making the only original contribution to music that is being made, or probably can be made, by Americans." Some day a negro graduate of one of these institutions may write a great symphony based upon these themes and "do for this country what Grieg has done for the folk-songs of the Scandinavian countries, or what Sir Charles Villiers Stamford has done for his native country, Ireland, in the composition of his beautiful Irish symphony."

66

THE MUSIC SCHOOL SETTLEMENT.-Upward of eighteen years ago there was established in connection with the college settlement work in New York a music school which directly and indirectly has brightened and changed the lives of thousands of people in that great cosmopolitan city. This school is now known as the Music School Settlement, and its senior orchestra may be heard on any Sunday afternoon, in a large concert-hall on East Third Street. Although the average age of the sixty persons in the orchestra is barely fifteen, their music is good and the enjoyment of their weekly audiences keen and appreciative." The prices for the instruction in this school are extremely low and, in case of inability to pay, are covered by the free scholarships which are constantly being added to by the money gifts of generous friends of the enterprise. Although some of its graduates have gone into some of the best orchestras both in this country and in Europe, the school does not aim to prepare professional musicians. The primary purpose of the whole movement has been to encourage music as a leaven, a recreation, as discipline, and as a means of character-building."

According to the World's Work for March, 1911, this work is well accomplished by the school, for "There is a subtle difference between the boys and girls who attend these classes and the rest of the neighborhood, and all up and