cault's then new experiment, in the presence of a few teachers and students, in the heart of the Western Continent, was a memorable figure, grander than he seemed, as he there startled us with the realization of a great physical fact which the world had long accepted as true, without being able to prove. The typical illustration of scientific method, foretold the triumph of exact knowledge in our day. It does move the world of thought. Vaughn is reported to have said to one who boasted of beliefs, "It matters little what you believe; tell us what you know."

Vaughn was in the prime of life, about thirty-seven years old when he appeared at the Oxford Institute, in the summer of 1855. It must have been before that time and shortly after his coming from Kentucky to Ohio, that I first saw and heard him lecture; saw and heard, for a Vaughn lecture was an object lesson addressed quite as much to the eye as to the ear. The Professor came often into Warren County for purposes of geological investigation as well as to address gatherings of teachers; and my recollection is that he spoke in Lebanon as early as 1853 or 1854. I used to accompany my father from his farm near Ridgeville to the county seat. whenever there was speaking, either political, religious, or educational, at the Court House, the old Academy, or the new Union School House. Vaughn's popular lectures

were fascinating, though his manner on the stage was awkward, and his brogue, accent and modulation, were so peculiar that those unaccustomed to hearing him found diffculty in understanding him. He stooped much, and having imperfect vision, sometimes stumbled as he paced the platform. He made strange, vague gestures, and not infrequently stopped abruptly in the midst of his speech to indulge in a fit of thinking or dreaming. Very vividly present to my recollection are the wierd aspect of his intellectual face; his keen, deep-set eyes peering out from mysterious depths, like Teufelsdrochk's; his black mass of bushy hair; his faltering voice as he hesitated preliminary to lapsing into one of those brief spells of meditative silence when some invisible presence appeared to be whispering occult thoughts to him as he stood unconscious of himself and the waiting audience.

Unaided by manuscript or notes of any sort he appeared embarrassed though not confused at the commencement of his lecture, and his opening sentences were pronounced slowly and with effort, and were addressed, not to the people, but to the ceiling or the floor, or even to the blank wall behind the rostrum on which he stood with his back to his waiting hearers. Not until he had seized a piece of chalk and made a plunge at the blackboard did the speaker recover his self-possession. Once his gaunt fingers

had closed on a crayon, he was master of the situation; and then he commanded his audience by wholly forgetting it. Chalk and blackboard were essential to his method of developing a subject. Rude diagrams, chemical symbols, algebraic formulæ, geometrical figures, were dashed upon the wall in profuse illustration. A wonderful memory enabled Vaughn to array the accumulated facts and figures of science whenever he needed them. He could recall accurately the distances and dimensions of the heavenly bodies, the demonstration of mathematics, the names of men and things, and dates of important events, the tables of weight, measure, specific gravity, etc., used in physical science, and the minute history of speculative opinion in both ancient and modern times. A practice which he sometimes indulged, of demonstrating problems before. his audience, had its perils; not that he ever failed of a solution, but the temptation was to go beyond the necessities of simple elucidation and to strike out on original lines of inquiry for which the average scholar was not prepared. The ardor of discussion would suggest fresh views and novel hypotheses, and away would fly the philosopher to the seventh heaven of argument, conjecture and controversy. If the topic involved the higher mathematics, as it usually did, the blackboard would whiten under a snow of complex calculations; the astron

omer would climb from star to star on the dizzy ladder formulæ, and the gazing listeners would lose him in the realms of inaccessible and infinite space.

I have said that Vaughn's manner was awkward; his language was never at fault, nor were his personal oddities noticed when he became incandescent with the heat of delivery. The man was lost in the glow of his ideas. Often he grew eloquent, poetical, fervid. I recall an occasion on which he closed an address on the mutability of matter with a peroration so sublime and overpowering that, for many minutes after the orator had ceased to speak, the spell of his words remained unbroken. The men and women who had heard him, sat as if, in hushed contemplation, they beheld some vision of wrecked matter and crushed worlds from which the curtain of futurity had been lifted by the disclosing power of a prophet. It was on vast subjects, requiring comparative knowledge and broad generalizations that Vaughn's genius delighted to dwell. His last essay, published in the Popular Science Monthly in May, 1879, proof sheets of which he corrected on his death-bed, was on the "Origin of Worlds."

In his laboratory, this modern Paracelsus lived like an alchemist, feeding on the exhalations of a retort, or, shall I say, on that choice food of philosophers, the hope of discovering or inventing useful

things for the welfare of his race. He haunted the libraries that he might turn the potential energy of books into active working power for the advancement of civilization. In the old library of the Mechanics' Institute, or wherever free access to books was to be had, Vaughn was to be found, by day and by night. Reading was a large part of his daily work. Unobtrusive, dumb, silent, sitting apart in some window lighted alcove, cr in the flicker of night-burning gas he sat, in his threadbare coat, pencil in hand, book on knee, searching for truth. The passer by, if perchance his attention might be arrested by the sound of a subdued hacking cough from the absorbed student, glancing at him might wonder how it happened that such a visitor was permitted the privileges of the library. Incredible that in such a figure and under such a garb resides the best scholar in Cincinnati, if, indeed, not the best in the United States! Would you believe that he came of a wealthy family? It is harder to believe that, coming from Ireland to Kentucky in the beginning of this century, he broke stones on the public road for a sustenance. When his good angel found him and took him to a Bourbon County home to become a tutor, the house dog sprang from the hearth and bit him, mistaking him for a mendicant! Having earned a little money he must needs buy the means whereby his soul

might live-books! How thrilling that story of his purchasing in Cincinnati his knapsackful of books! and trudging home a hundred miles with the precious freight on his back. He was never in good circumstances and always frail of body. I accidentally encountered him once, at unawares, scaling an Ohio hill in search of fossils. His body was bent almost double, and at every step he groaned. Chagrined that he had betrayed physical weakness, he put his strong will into his weak muscles, and straightened up like a king! "The winters were always hard on him," writes someone. That was because he wanted food and clothing. Confucius said, "A scholar, whose mind is set on truth, and who is ashamed of bad clothes and bad food is not fit to be discoursed with." A curious, almost incredible history of this Daniel Vaughn, hungry and thirsty and ragged, and having not where to lay his head in the land of the Ordinance of '87. It seems so unAmerican. It seems a bad Ohio idea. And yet we need not blame institutions or individuals, while we pity and honor the martyr of fate. Genius is always solitary. Sacrifice seems a necessary part of heroism. Daniel Vaughn was best pleased with isolation. He voluntarily took up his cross. Solitary was he. He spurned conventionality, and broke idols, and thinned his blood by fasting, and was accused, like Socrates, of teaching the young men danger

ous doctrines, and of denying the ancient gods. Could such a man avoid the destiny of draining the cup of hemlock? It is part of the victory of the gentle to love and to suffer. Vaughn was gentle. With tears often in his deep, sad eyes, and a mistrust of flattery on his blue, thin lip. "Fear not your enemies," was his motto; "fear your pretended friends!" He was full of reason, full of sweet philosophy and persuasion; a hater of all things false and cruel; just such a man as, a few centuries ago, bigots might have burned at the stake as a rebel or a heretic.

We did not stone our prophet, or behead him, or roast him; we only let him starve! The city did. not know he was here. Politics had no use for him. Did he live before his time or out of his place? It was as difficult for the world to get at him as for him to get at the world. It is always hard to behave justly towards proud and sensitive men of genius. Daniel Vaughn was proud not as Lucifer, but as refined poverty. He was one of those who, to use a phrase of Huxley's, "starve like a man.” Had he been abject, cringing, a solicitor of alms, how could he have been a hero, how could we honor his memory by unveiling his bust? The miseries of his life were more than compensated by its blessings. Heaven made him a humorist, and thus enabled him to chew a sweet flavor

from the bitterest gourd. God created him a gentleman, and he was recognized by his kind. Women loved him. Not with earthly passion, but with celestial admiration. Two ladies, one in Kentucky and one in Ohio, were his saving benefactors when all the men had forgotten him. It is recorded also that little children danced with him and kissed him.

Thus, after all, the neglected man had good company. He was asked in my hearing, what was his native town? Smiling, he answered evasively:

"Seven cities claimed the birth of Homer dead,

Who living had not where to lay his head."

One morning, a few weeks before Vaughn died, I met him on Fourth Street, looking wan and haggard. He seemed dejected, and spoke with some bitterness of life's hardships. His eye lit with a strange fire as he drew from his pocket a letter which he had just received from a renowned French savant. Opening this he pointed with his long thin forefinger at the salutation at the head of the paper. "Mon Cher Frere. He calls me frere! He fellowships me as his dear brother!" said our martyr, a tear putting out the fire in his gray eye. "You see," he added, "I have dear brothers on both sides of the ocean."

How we can succeed in putting pupils more fully in possession of their power of acquisition, is a matter of vital importance. If he is a benefactor to his age and generation who succeeds in making two blades of grass grow where .one grew before, what should be said. of the teacher who accomplishes the greater work of causing two ideas to spring up in the mind of the pupil in the same time in which one grew before! Not only is a greater present harvest reaped, but what is far more valuable, we have given to the pupil a force, a power, which will enable him to go on through life with this increased. ability to acquire, gathering rich harvests from fields of knowledge, and achieving greater success in practical life.

LACK OF ADEQUATE APPRECIATION.

We cannot believe that pupils, though young and immature in judgment, are wholly indifferent to the question of rapid acquisition. Rather may not this apparent indifference be due to the lack of a just and adequate conception of the value of additional power to acquire, and to hold? If there be truth in the proposition raised by this question then its proper solution must lie in the direction of the

answer to the question: What is the value of child time? There are many phases to the answer of this question which may be given, but for the present we wish to present that phase which may be called the

COMMERCIAL VALUE OF CHILD
TIME.

To express it in dollars and cents, as we sometimes say, let us ascertain, as far as we may be able, first, the value of a life of uneducated, or unskilled labor; and, second, the value of a life of educated, or skilled labor; and the difference between these must be the value of an education; which when divided by the number of years in which it must, for the most part be acquired, the result will be, in some measure at least, an expression of the value of child time.

Suppose that unskilled labor, such as may be done by muscle chiefly, requiring little or no education, commands the year round, $1.50 per day. Suppose that the fuller producing period begins at 20 years of age and extends over a period of 40 years, that it is employed 300 days in the year, this gives us 300 X $1.50 X 40, an amount equal to $18,000; or the money value of a life of uneducated labor.