Nature thinks God's thoughts after Him, and acquires just that sort of culture that this selfish, grasping, material age stands most in need We believe that Nature study can be amply justified on the side of utility, for the eye that is informed and reinforced by a sympathetic heart is better prepared for true investigation than the eye that moves in obedience to a cold and calculating intellect." So said Professor Brumbaugh in a recent address at the Philadelphia Normal School, where, by the way, some splendid work along this line has been inaugurated. But not alone for its utility is such study to be commended. The uplift of heart and the broadening of vision is worth more than dollars and cents. We pity the narrow soul of the hard old New England farmer who said of his wife's window garden, that he "didn't see what good them plants were, you couldn't eat 'em nor drink 'em." Let a child learn the life lessons of the plants and stones and bugs and animals that make so much of the content of human environment, and he cannot help being a better and a greater man than otherwise. We welcome the dawn of a more sunshiny day in our school rooms than that of a former generation.

E recently enjoyed the opportunity of hearing a lecture by Congressman Morse, of Massachusetts, in answer to Robert Ingersoll; and, also, of visiting Mr. Morse's home and extensive factories at Canton, Mass. ; all of which suggests some reflections on the opportunities offered by the genius of our free American institutions to the young people in our public schools. Mr. Morse is an American pure and simple, and of the best type. He is a self-made man, who, with his own natural abilities and such aid as was furnished by the public schools of Massachusetts and New York, has made for

himself a place of conspicuous influence and usefulness, and built up a business that gives employment to hundreds of men and women. He illustrates the saying that "there is always room at the top," and the principle that pluck, enterprise and character command the respect of the public.

Mr. Morse was born of New England parents, at South Bend, Indiana, May 25, 1841, and came to New England with them in early childhood. He is a direct descendant of Samuel Morse, the Puritan, who settled in Dedham in 1635. He entered public life as a member of the Legislature in 1876 and has since served in the state Senate and in the Governor's Council, and has four times been elected a Member of Congress. Last November he received the largest plurality given any member of Congress from Massachusetts save one, and he has been frequently mentioned as a leading Republican candidate for Governor of his State. He is a man who has a remarkable faculty for getting upon the right side of all public questions. He has valiantly championed the free public school, restriction of immigration and legislation for the protection of chastity, temperance and other measures of moral reform. He is a ready and natural orator, and impresses his hearers with the feeling that he is a man of the people, one whom they may safely trust. In these days, when so much is being done in the schools for the inculcation of the principles of good citizenship, we commend the study of such living models.

THE SPIRITUAL INFLUENCE OF THE TEACHER. MISS HATTIE LOUISE JEROME, WORCESTER, MASS.

We mean the

By spiritual we do not mean religious influence. inner motive power which is transmitted from the teacher to the pupil. Call it what you will,-influence, spirit or atmospherethere is nothing of greater importance than this subtle something which pervades the room and determines the character of the class.

If you recall your own school days, you will remember the vast difference which existed in the same school under the influence of teachers of varying motive or disposition.

The spirit of the teacher determines the character of the class. She can sway the emotions of her pupils at will-if her self-command be sufficiently strong. One who can rule herself can govern others. Learn spontaneous obedience to the dictates of your own best self, and you can develop spontaneous obedience to that same person in your pupils.

Obedience and respect are a teacher's first requisitions. They go hand in hand, and can never be separated. Children cannot be brought to obey spontaneously (the only sort of obedience worth having) a person whom they do not respect; and they will not respect, no matter how pleasing or indulgent, or how austere and exacting, a person whom they do not obey with spontaneity.

To a teacher comes often the task of changing the spirit of a child. A "bad boy" is usually one who has come to look at the world about him from a wrong standpoint; to act from a wrong spirit. If the teacher can change his spirit, and thus alter his motives, all his acts will be different. This change can be more easily accomplished than many may suppose. It can be done through the influence of the teacher's own spirit and strength of character. Such influence can scarcely be over-estimated. A sulky or selfish boy can be made into a cheerful or generous one, or a disobedient and disagreeable girl into a lovable one, not by coaxing or reasoning, or even training alone, so effectually as by the influence of the teacher's own warm geniality— for evidence of this I refer you again to the memory of your own school days. Were there not teachers whose strong, quiet, noble personality transformed even the "worst boys in school" into earnest workers? Was it not those teachers who ruled their class with this unseen and subtle power, who had the greatest influence over your own life to change its motives for the better?

This changing of the child's standpoint, or altering his spirit or disposition whatever one may choose to name it—is the awakening of the soul of the child. This is the noblest work of the teacher; to accomplish this miracle in the soul of a child is to give him new birth,— regeneration. It is the foundation of all moral development; the wisest aid to all mental improvement; the most God-like work in which a teacher can engage.

Her

It is a toil, however, in which one cannot succeed without personal sacrifice. It means the giving of one's all; it requires a strength and nobility of character which can only be God-given, and a perfect purity of purpose. Children detect falsity instinctively, while they love and honor truth and justice. They are veritable imitators; and who is taken as their model more often than "the teacher?" code of justice and honor, of loving kindness and tender mercy, becomes theirs. In short, a teacher, whether consciously or unconsciously, gives to her pupils more than the instruction she imparts or the mental and moral development which she superintends,- she gives herself, whatever that self may be.

Realizing then the vast importance of the character of the spirit which she infuses into the lives of the susceptible ones about her, a teacher can but appreciate the eloquence of the Psalmist's prayer and make her own the daily plea,-"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me."

This institution was founded in 1855 by Alfred Holbrook, who through the intervening forty years has presided over it, without the loss of an hour by reason of sickness. During these forty years the school-year has consisted of an average of fifty weeks, with no vacation.

President Holbrook is a son of Josiah Holbrook, an Eastern educator well remembered by many as a co-worker with Horace Mann, Samuel May and others in educational reform.

On February 17th, last, his entrance upon his eightieth year was enthusiastically celebrated by the students and faculty of the institution, and prominent citizens of Lebanon, many of whom have been under his instruction.

Lebanon is celebrated as one of the most beautiful, quiet hamlets of the West. Here Tom Corwin lived, reared his family, and is buried. General O. M. Mitchell spent his boyhood here. The village is most widely known, however, as the seat of this institution, to which over one hundred thousand (100,000) students, young men and women, have come from all of the States of the Union. Its beautifully shaded streets are thronged the year through, and especially during the summer months with "Normalites," as they are called.

To particularize. In schools where nature studies now have their proper place, the pupils write ten times as much and ten times as well as they did twenty-five years ago, which period of time does not limit my experience with thousands of children in the school room. They can now use language with a readiness that was not dreamed of when I went to school, forty years ago. Then it was not considered essential or even possible to write readily about every-day life every day, and to describe, in a variety of ways, well known objects. Children then could not talk, describe in writing, or illustrate by drawing the commonest objects. So far as their real knowledge of natural objects and natural phenomena was concerned, they might as well have had no schooling whatIf they did know anything taught in school they could not express it except in the words of the book. They could not express graphically individual ideas, if they had any. To ask them to describe in writing or draw a flower, a tree, a stone, a beet, or even a book, would have been considered a sublime imposition of unreasonableness. They could not use the language which they went through the form of studying until they became adults, but supposed they were using it finely in their fearfully and wonderfully made compositions on the Christian virtues, and their grotesque declamations of the speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero, Burke and Pitt.

ever.

Nature studies have had a remarkable influence on the reading matter published for children. The reading matter now treats of children's environment, their pets and games, flowers, birds, butlerflies, little people of other lands and everything in which they are or can be interested-consequently they read ten times as much, and with ten times the pleasure, as under the old education. Supplementary readers on botany, natural history and nature in general have increased enormously within a decade. Although these readers, giving, as they do, nothing but secondhand information, can never be of much service in real science work or true nature study, in which nothing comes between the student and the actual objects which he studies, they have done a good deal for reading. Children are delighted with them and read them much.

Nature study, which requires the constant use of the pencil in sketching characteristic parts, has emancipated children from dry, formal drawing and developed in them a pleasure and a