Is the picture made for its own sake, or is it intended as a purely ornamental addition to something else? The discrimination here intimated is to be carefully considered. Surely no one. will deny the importance of keeping clearly before the pupils' eyes the difference between substance and shadow, the intent and purpose of his work, and its agreeable surroundments. There are artists who spend the major portion of their time in contemplating the kind of frame they are about to give their paintings, and the scanty and abbreviated residue in determining upon their subject; but the envious world has in such cases refused to take the view of their merits which themselves insist upon to the dolorous end without adequate recognition. Moreover, ornamentation is not something apart, but has a relation of a somewhat close character to what it is intended to embellish. Consider for a moment a piece of graphic work which we have met with, and which no doubt has its counterparts and congeners in many an educational sphere. A knight in full panoply of armor holds in his hand a scroll on which is elegantly engrossed a solution of a problem in arithmetic. This is an æsthetic conception, which it is difficult to criticise with any seriousness. The drawing of the knight has taken up all the available time of the executant; and he is strictly a subsidiary figure, a mere extravagance of the ornamental fever. The arithmetical solution has not been forwarded in the smallest degree by his presence; on the contrary, in some of these elaborate exuberances of the illustrating enthusiasm so small a fraction of the pupil's attention has been given to the scholastic section of the hybrid, that solutions, begirt with every manner of ornamental splendor, have been found to be wholly incorrect in principle and calculation. Our knight is an absurd anachronism, of course; he had never sharpened his wits on the multiplication table; doubtless this is all the worse for him, but how he would stare if he were to awaken from his sleep of centuries, and find himself holding a scroll with an arithmetical solution sable and rampant !

The question of the technical in drawing confronts us just here with a somewhat forbidding countenance. In these elaborate illustrations, bringing into play far more complicated laws of representation than we attempt in regular drawing lessons, we throw away all guidance and compass, and plunge into a wilderness, whence the talented by dint of persistent and microscopic copying

gain some sort of egress, but in which the unfortunates hopelessly flounder to the end of their days. Light and shade, perspective, right use of the medium intended to be employed, present a series of difficulties, which may well give us pause. Into all these the pupil rushes with no one to lead him; his teacher with the best of intentions very often can furnish little or no help; she knows hardly more than he does about the best ways of attaining artistic effects. The only path out of the jungle is the way the picture or what-d' ye-may-call-it looks when it is done, and to the educated gazer it may be after all the conscientious and long-continued. agony only a source of suppressed mirth and laughter.

Moreover, what is the value of mere copying, for such in most cases this work of illuminating the otherwise dull and colorless manuscripts unquestionably is? Copying may teach a lesson of patience, and strengthen the habit of attention, and these excellent qualities of the scholar are not to be underestimated. The copy is surely not equal to the original; it involves small exercise of the power of thought; from an æsthetic point of view it brings into the least fruitful activity the powers which need cultivation the most; a simple drawing made from the thing itself outweighs in educational value a long series of copies however skillful and complicated.

Besides the world of pictures is a very large one; it is full of avenues leading to places of the most different kinds and the learner is not to be turned loose into that weltering waste without a competent director. The desultory nature of the work under consideration is another serious objection to it. A picture is not to be copied simply because it is a pleasing landscape or charming group of figures; it ought to have some necessary connection with the study pursued, should spring from that study naturally and inevitably, not be dragged in by the heels, so to speak, merely to display the manual dexterity of a pupil born with the draughtsman's instinct. Inasmuch as the picture-making is largely left to the discretion of the student, the few who are specially endowed seize upon it with avidity, the many stand aloof and look on with mixed feelings of admiration and displeasure. If it were something which they are regularly taught and in which instruction followed an intelligible method, by which success were, in a measure, placed within the reach of all, this seizure of the æsthetic and bringing it captive into the schoolroom would wear

an entirely different countenance and aspect. As it is, the majority find themselves shut out from achieving successes, which their companions win by means quite incomprehensible, and an undertone of dissatisfaction, taking various forms, pervades the atmosphere, by no means conducive to the highest interest of the schoolroom. There is no need of forcing the painful fact of nature's stepmotherhood prematurely upon the notice of her forgotten offspring; that deplorable condition will be made sufficiently patent in their after careers; the schoolroom ought to be absolutely republican in tone and conduct; all paths should lead equally to the highest, if followed in the genuine spirit of the learner, obedient, faithful, indefatigable.

Many of these drawings are executed with a patient minuteness and a loving attention to details which almost reaches the pathetic, but the pupil fails entirely to learn from them that drawing is in reality a language, in which he can express ideas, if he becomes properly acquainted with its forms and methods. Much better than this finical nicety of execution is the free blackboard drawing, which is thoroughly alive in every stroke, and which is always the expression of the moment's need and intent. The illustration is perforce a part of the subject, grows out of it as the leaf from the branch, or the flower from its stem. Thus is avoided the unfortunate stereotyping of exercises; the new class asserts its individuality in the new illustrations, which it demands and evolves; new phases of the old story flash upon the teacher's jaded apprehension, and the enthusiasm of discovery converts the monotony of explanations gone over so many times in so many years into a freshness of elucidation and statement, which affect the participants as a breath of sea-air may an inhabitant of our vast inland plains, who has not seen the white flame of the breakers for many a day, nor for a long time heard that hoarse sonorousness of intonation which has told the story of the sea to generation after generation, and which has not yet found an interpreter competent and sufficient.

In the hand of a skillful and intelligent teacher many of the objections spoken of here may be materially lessened in force. There is a great deal of illustrative work in history, which may be profitably undertaken, and carried to a high degree of finish and elaboration; but there are everywhere dangers to be avoided, and directions which it is undesirable to take. If a map is to be

drawn, it must not be forgotten that the map is the central and important thing. Why should a pupil be allowed to spend an hour or more in making a picture, and then a few minutes in placing a map in a corner, where the gazer has to look long and steadily before he finds it? Here is a typical instance of mapillustration, to which objection is made. Figure to your imagination a charming representation of implements of war, old and massive cannon, rusting out in the fields, where once the embattled farmers stood, and children playing on the now useless engines of destruction and death; a delightful conception; it has taken a long and patient effort to make this excellent drawing, and in one obscure corner is the map of the battle, too trivial to have been other than carelessly executed. The mistake in this case is the more marked, because the map is itself a specimen of the graphic art, and therefore susceptible of a legitimate pictorial development, which will afford ample scope for all the pupil's time and talent. Then those other forms of map-illustration, which no intelligence can give any reason for, extraordinary concatenations of things never before united since hoary-headed Time began. Battle-maps shining on the sails of shipless masts, or adorning the flaps of wigwams, or hanging from the necks of birds of passage seeking warmer climes, or rejoicing in efflorescence of borders, which in the original picture cards were deemed by their creators appropriate to some peaceful Christmas or New Year's greeting. To such a mixture of incongruous ideas no teacher ought to lend his countenance. Ask an artist what he thinks of such agglutinations of what ought never to have been conjoined, wedlocks over which the decree of divorce was pronounced before the benediction had fairly left the lips of the preacher. In any picture the central sentiment must predominate; it must find expression in the smallest leaf and tendril of the border; and no art has the right to violate the dictates of

common sense.

When it comes to the elaborate illustration of mathematical problems, the utility grows small by degrees and beautifully less. Mathematics is a science of abstraction, and no dexterity of manipulation will make it anything else. In a large series of problems, the introduction of illustrations becomes indispensable; but I ask whether, in order that the learner shall understand mensuration, it is necessary that he shall draw exquisite bridges spanning

gently gliding streams, or moss-covered buckets hanging beside immemorial and dream-haunted wells, or in discovering how many yards of carpet it will require to cover a certain floor, he shall be compelled to place on paper or board a romantic villa in the country spreading its gardens to the fostering sun-light. In Longfellow's Kavanagh, the minister, who spends his life in day-dreams, and in projecting great work after great work, without accomplishing anything, finds a Hindoo arithmetic which is a delight to his visionary soul. The problems in it are all about butterflies, and bees, and flower petals, and ripples on the surfaces of sunlit rivers. Beside them our books of problems are nothing but the merest and baldest expression of the utilitarian tendencies that control the Occident as compared with the vague and mystic East. But the star of Empire sweeps westward, and the utilitarian wins the day. Mathematicians apply the epithet elegant to many of their demonstrations, but it is on other grounds than that they are illuminated with mediæ val marginal resplendence.

Certainly one of the main functions of education is to enable the learner to discover the salient elements of a subject, to find its center and vitalizing thought, and to group about that whatever else belongs to it, to discriminate between the important and the unimportant. Whatever has a tendency to cloud this developing faculty, or worse yet, to allow the pupil to mistake the lesser for the greater, turns the educating process upside down, and stands the learner upon his spiritual head. We fly in the face of genuine education when we allow ourselves to be deluded by a temporary gratification into a forgetfulness of the real task assigned us. Intelligence implies the rapid and habitual sifting of the wheat from the chaff, of finding the true gold in the baser things surrounding and concealing it. It is also an essential of right conduct that the higher be established in its place of honor, and not subordinated to its servants and accompaniments. Where the true educational tone is attained, the spirit of subordination, intellectual and moral, will surely be present as a pervasive influence, and the merely ornamental and illustrative will not be allowed to usurp the place of the legitimate sovereign. I am convinced that this lesson of the right adjustment of parts, of giving to each thing the place it ought to have, of putting it in the due prominency which belongs to it, is a worthy and important one, and we are not justified in fostering habits of perception and