nant, kindly, intellectual face; you could not pass her on the street without being conscious that you had seen a woman of great intellect, and great heart. It was she who took Theodore Parker to Italy, and did all she could to prolong his life. Her reminiscence of prominent literary people is interesting in the extreme. She knew Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Kate Field thirty years ago in Italy; she has known Cardinal Manning, Messrs. Mathew Arnold, Froude, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Mr. and Mrs. Browning, our own Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mr. James Russell Lowell. She speaks in the highest terms of Mr. Lowell, and indeed I have met many others beside Miss Cobbe who think Mr. Lowell the type of everything noble and high in American politics or letters. Parenthetically let me say that the president of a college told me that on one occasion she was present at a meeting partly scientific and partly social, where Mr. Lowell presided. The paper for the evening had been the basis for a great many slighting remarks concerning the Christian religion, and the sneer of the evening seemed to be, "We have gotten far beyond that sort of superstition," when Mr. Lowell rose, and while not reproving any one, paid a most beautiful tribute to the Christian religion, and entirely changed the tenor of the meeting. His tact, his grace and learning, were highly appreciated.

Miss Cobbe not only writes and talks against vivisection, but she expends much money in having kindness to animals taught to children. Last year she sent fifty dollars to a lady near Philadelphia, who is deeply interested in the subject of cruelty to animals, the money to be expended in literature for young people. Her work is making a lasting impression in England. A clergyman at the annual meeting said the Anti-vivisection Society had the three elements of success: First, a good cause; second, the opposition of the time; third, an able presentation of the cause. Lord Shaftsbury, before he died, said "That must be a good cause (Anti-vivisection) which brought Cardinal Manning, Miss Cobbe, and myself to work harmoniously on the same committee."

I close this article by a strong and pathetic extract from Miss Cobbe's introduction to a book called "The Woman Question in Europe." She says:

The man is not to be envied who can view the movement of women for political rights with contempt or indifference. That those struggles may not always have been guided by infallible taste and wisdom, and that they have

often been met - for lack of sensible argument—with silly derision, need not blind us to the fact that they constitute one of the bravest battles, one of the most pathetic movements the world has ever seen. Other strifes have been carried on between rival races, rival classes, rival sects, but here we have only the patient, persistent appeal of daughters to fathers, of sisters to brothers, of wives to husbands, of the women who make the charm of society to the men who call them friends.

There are no garments rolled in blood in the battle of these warriors. The combatants command neither cannon nor bayonets. They cannot even break down iron palings like the populace or London when their rights were withheld, or threaten dynamite or petroleum like Nihilists or Fenians. They have not political influence at their disposal wherewith to coerce their opponents. When the time comes to look back on the slow universal awakening of women all over the globe, on their gradual entrance into one privileged profession after another, on the attainment by them of rights of person and property, and at last to their admission to the full privileges of citizenship, it will be acknowledged that of all the decisive battles of history this has been to the moralist and philosopher the most interesting, even as it will be (I cannot doubt) the one followed by the happiest peace.

GRAPHIC WORK IN THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL.

THIS

BY LEWIS J. BLOCK, A. M.,

Principal of Douglas School, Chicago, Illinois.

HIS is the era of illustrations. No idea seems worth the scrutiny of an hour unless it yields itself to the facile pencil of the illustrator. The time is a breeder of imaginations strange and hitherto unsought. Be as realistic as you please; yet the illustrator is hard by, and the grotesque effusions of his creative genius might exceed the wonders of fairyland. The morning paper confronts you with a gallery of representations which may adorn the halls of the modern memory as no halls were ever adorned before. We illustrate everything; we make pictures of abstract ideas, and even find ways of delineating the absolute zero. Things on the earth and under the earth, the chainless and pathless air, the products of nature and the creations of mind, are all subjected to the same illuminating transfiguration, are all held up on the tablets of the illustrator, and made so plain that the poor old mystery which formerly haunted the seeker and thinker has dwindled to so mere a point that it is worse off than if it had never been.

The teacher unhappily is not always in the van of progress and

civilization. It is true that he should be there, but by those untoward strokes of destiny which too often lame the best intents of the best minds, he is thrust into the rear, and humbly imitates where he should be the introducer and forerunner. He has finally caught the inspiration which has been the atmosphere of things for some time. He has sniffed the finer ether of loftier endeavors, and a new fervor courses up and down his usually sluggish blood and nerves. Once more a universal solvent of all difficulties has been obtained. The conversion of the dullard, the product of generations of intellectual somnolence, and the heir of accumulated stupidities, is now to be accomplished by a course of pedagogical medicine whose efficacy no man shall question ;. the moral simpleton, in the ear of whose soul the categorical imperative never made a sound louder than the whirr of a butterfly's wing, is now to be stimulated to a sensitiveness of perception which reaches the verge of the morbid. The illustrating fever has fairly set in, and the patient approaches the crisis.

It may not be uninteresting nor wholly devoid of practical value to inquire what the best use of the illustrating fervor may be in. the educational process, and what are the limits within which it should be kept. We are all ready to concede to it a fair measure of value; but in the multiplicity of things which we are called on to do, it can only exact from us a certain portion of attention, and it is worth while to ask ourselves how far we should yield to it, and where we should apply the bit and the reins.

The world is full of illustrations. Everywhere we see exemplifications of law, repetitions of processes, manifestations of ideas. Nature is never satisfied with doing a thing but once, but year after year patiently goes through the same creative endeavors, moulds rose after rose into evanescent loveliness, weighs down the autumn trees with successive fragrant burdens, tells over and over the old, old story that the man-child may lose not one faintest thread, one dimmest subtlety of meaning she has woven for his pleasure and profit. We have not hesitated to follow the method of nature in our teaching, and have called on illustrations to aid us, but we have not always attained her success. Our illustrations do not always illustrate; sometimes far from illuminating a subject, they darken it with much counsel, and withdraw us from it on paths that lead no-whither. An illustration that does not help to clear up a difficulty, that does not serve to

impress a truth, has no reason for its existence. This law is fundamental to all illustrative teaching; it seems so plain that to state it is like uttering the merest truism, and yet we have all seen teaching which violates it at every step. In connection with this law another must be stated which is quite like it, and which is forgotten with equal frequency. Some subjects are more susceptible of illustration than others, and the same subject lends itself to picturesque treatment more decidedly in some aspects than in others.

We have need to be cautious in the application of the best methods. Time and place are potent factors in the determination of what ought to be done, and no arbitrary prescription will meet all cases. Thought is not all picture-making; our thinking cannot all be reduced to sensuous perceptions; the mind itself adds an element to sense, which is outside and beyond it, and whose growth is not helped by ways of instruction derived from caricatures of itself to be found in the writings of the sensuous school of thinkers. There are aspects of number which are not brought into clearness by being burlesqued with sticks or marks or scraps of paper, and which are best taught by enforcing the pupil to those abstract mental operations which produce them, and which no illustration can more than vaguely adumbrate. We have a great deal to say about the necessity of making pupils think, and then have so little faith in the genuine thinking process that we shrink from it when it presents itself in its proper form, and fly to pictures and objectivities of all sorts to evade it. We must forever have things instead of ideas, objects in place of thoughts, exemplifications in lieu of law. It may be as well, perhaps, to induct the learner into the free exercise of his power of thought, to be satisfied with his knowledge without too much exercise of his imagination upon it, and let him discover that his thought is an avenue to truth as well as his eyes and ears. Too much picture-making may be a delusion and a snare; it by no means follows that he always knows all about a subject because he can make a picture of it, nor that he fails to understand, because he cannot make an illustration.

To know

Every subject has its own laws of development. anything aright, we must know it as it builds itself into completeness according to those regulative principles which are its life and consistency. Through the shell of its manifestations, we

must penetrate to those general activities which create it, and establish its specific form and character. We may use the ladder of illustrations to climb to its nest and habitat, but when once there we are authorized to use the speech of the locality, and cast aside the childish things. Picture-making is a valuable bridge over chasms and intervening streams, but there comes a phase in the discussion of every subject when it deserves to be considered per se and the illustration is to be carefully eschewed. Nature is all very well; the imagination is a glorious energy, which we have every reason to stimulate and cultivate; but the power of abstract thought has done excellent service to mankind, and need not be forgotten in our zeal to make every difficulty as small as possible, and to be so marvellously certain that the pupil sees the subject at our own angle of vision.

This graphic work makes a superb appeal to the exterior public, which knows so little about the true value and estimation of educational expedients. School-teaching is not an interesting affair to the casual perception; it is far more pleasing to go into an artist's studio, and see the extraordinary collection of odds and ends from all quarters of the globe, and to watch the bits of color unite into a visible dream illumined by the light which "never was on land or sea." The repetition of phrases and numbers and sentences, the immature discussions of great themes, the more or less stereotyped questions of the teacher and the more or less satisfactory responses of the learners, the hot and dusty atmosphere characterizing most schoolrooms, make up a realm not altogether adapted to call forth unmixed emotions of pleasure. The picture-making relieves the monotony and the tedium, and is so far very well, but it is not an infallible gauge of the excellence of the work done. It may be an indication of quite the reverse; it may mean neglect of essential labors, and the frittering away of invaluable time in affairs of little pith and moment. Something must be done if the youth is to be educated, his memory must be cultivated, his eyes opened, his reasoning powers exercised, his mind stored with those conventionalities of intelligence without which no understanding of the life he is expected to enter is possible; whatever can be added thereunto without detriment to these is every way to be desired, and often the important is to be attained by way of indirections; but we shall find it best not to make incursions too far into the vasty deep, and for the most part remain in the safe haven where the rougher waves are shorn of half their danger.