not only the style but the substance of what he reads, and will discover who are the writers that think.

"After this there will be a definite object in their reading, vain and aimless wanderings from one book to another will be avoided, pure taste will have a chance of development, and useful books will be preferred to trash. Thus will true scholars be made-thus real authors."

SPELLING.

OUR articles upon the incompetence of Public School teachers, however deficient in other respects, had certainly the merit of telling the truth, and, we flatter ourselves, of telling it pretty plainly. We are glad to say that they have excited attention throughout the country, and we are equally sorry to say that they have provoked disclosures of ignorance more profound and widely spread than we had supposed possible. We have ample evidence that this discreditable deficiency is not confined to New-York. Even from New-England, the Public Schools of which are popularly considered the best in the country, we have received numerous and strong complaints, while the letters upon the subject which come to us from the West are of the same tenor. Thus a friend in Illinois sends us word that in the South and West, during the last twenty years, he has had under his direction a great number of teachers, has scrutinized the qualifications of hundreds of others, and found hardly one fit for the profession. He has pursued a sensible course, and has resolutely insisted that instructors under his management should study as well as teach. In doing this, he has discovered that those of the greatest merit, and who were naturally fitted for usefulness in their profession, were the least impatient of suggestion and the least sensitive to correction. It is the teacher who is not only ignorant, but unwilling to make the exertions necessary to supply his or her deficiencies, who whines the most plaintively or flies into the greatest passion at exposure. It is the teacher who is most conscious of deserving rebuke, who cries out the most pitifully that he has been slandered. Under such painful circumstances, instead of writing bad English to the newspapers, it would be a great deal wiser to expend a little money in the purchase of Webster's Spelling Book and Murray's Grammar, and a little time in the study of those venerable volumes.

As the result of his long experience, our friend in Illinois also declares that very few college-bred men can spell decently, or construct English sentences accurately. This is one of the complaints made by us in the very beginning of the controversy, and it is perhaps the very one which has been received with the least equanimity. It was considered really intolerable to hint that one might write A. B. after his name, might have a little knowledge of Latin and Greek and Mathematics, and yet be absolutely unable to

write and spell his own language correctly. And yet it is not difficult to account for this deficiency. In too many of our universities those branches of learning are most esteemed which have not a living utility but a dead respectability. In what college, we should like to know, does the attention paid to the study of the English language bear anything like a decent proportion to that given to the cultivation of the classics, as they are absurdly called, just as if Milton and Addison were not as classical as Homer and Horace? What position does the Professor of Rhetoric occupy in the Faculty? How many such Professors are fit for their places? Who does not know many such, the merest addle-headed pedants, who year after year give out such exciting themes to their classes as "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," and who annually inform wondering freshmen that the first sentence of an essay should be short? The country is searched for able Professors of Latin and Greek, but almost anybody is thought fit to be a Professor of English. The consequence is, that students who learn to write our beautiful language with power and elegance do so after they have left the encircling arms of Alma Mater, have been knocked about a little in the world, and have discovered the difference between the ornamental and the useful.-N. I. Tribune. 1

DOES THE MISSISSIPPI RUN UP HILL?

THAT'S the question. Dr. Boynton takes the affirmative, and Horace Mann the negative. Who shall decide when doctors disagree? It is a fact that the figure of the earth is an oblate spheroid, having its equatorial díameter more than 26 miles longer than its polar diameter, and consequently the equatorial regions are some 13 miles further from the earth's center than the poles are. If the earth were at rest, the water in the tropical regions would flow with great rapidity toward the poles, until the equilibrium, as far as water is concerned, would be restored. The Mississippi would flow from its mouth to its source, the former being over two miles further from the center of the earth than the latter. It is therefore evident that the water in this river, as it now flows, rises or recedes from the earth's center between two and three miles, in passing from its source to the Gulf of Mexico.

"But how can water run up hill?" asks Horace Mann and others. For the same reason that water on a grindstone in motion will mount the center ridge instead of running off at the sides. The revolution of the earth round its axis gives all bodies on its surface, especially water, a tendency to the equator; and this tendency is sufficient to counterbalance the rise in the surface in the same direction; in fact, the one is the cause of the other. Water is therefore free to flow in any direction, which inequalities on the surface, thus balanced, may occasion. If the daily rotation of the earth

becomes slower, the tendency of bodies to the equator would diminish, and the water would flow toward the poles, until another surface equilibrium were established. If the rotation become more rapid, the water would rush toward the equator, till the equilibrium was restored. These opposite

forces, the centrifugal and centripetal, will always balance each other.

How Mr. Mann could be puzzled about so clear a matter, is singular. One would imagine that the mind which could originate the idea of marrying a man to twenty fine ladies of the modern school without subjecting him to a charge of bigamy, would be able to comprehend a very simple problem in natural philosophy.—Quincy (Ill.) Republican.

REPORT ON IRREGULARITY.

READ BEFORE THE STATE TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION AT Waukesha, Aug. 13, 1857.

"Days of Absence, sad and dreary."

IRREGULARITY is the root of school evil. In blackness of consequences, compared with it, desertion in the army is an angel of light.

Irregularity heaps on a school reproach; breeds in a school inefficiency; thins it like a pestilence; like a wasting disease, drags it down to a state of dullness and indifference to study, which may well be called h-11.

Low views in regard to education, or wrong views as to the manner of getting it, produce most irregularity. The district need to be taught the philosophy of the subject. A school-day, like a dish, has an intrinsic and a relative value. A school-term is just as much of a unit as a set of dishes. A scholar can no more lose a day from the one than a purchaser can spare a dish from the other. In either case, more is lost than the value of a single day or of a single dish.

Wrong views in a district as to the usefulness of regularity must be removed. The majority of every community, where the schools are of an inferior order, will say, "I don't see that a day out of school, now and then, can do any harm." Don't a little whisky, taken now and then, do any harm? The wine of irregularity is as dangerous as the wine of the grape. Teach not your children to look upon it when it is red. Irregular schooling injures a scholar just as much as irregular milking injures a cow. Twice a day, and every day, is the motto in both cases.

The expedients calculated to break up irregularity are of two kinds: those which operate as punishments, and those which operate as rewards. The following penal expedients probably deserve a place in the memory of the Association:

1st. Obliging an irregular scholar to enter a lower class.

2d. Obliging an irregular scholar to go into a lower department.

3d. In all cases and in all schools, without any exception, exacting & written statement from the parent, showing consent and cause of absence. 4th. For occasional cases, a gentle application of birch.

5th. Forfeiture of seat.

6th. Putting the school in charge of a trusty scholar and going after the absent, gives the teacher a chance to speak his mind when he can speak it, and to strike a blow when he can strike it, at a time and in a place where it ought to be struck.

7th. Where you do not go yourself, in all cases note vacancies the instant school is called, and dispatch scholars to know the reason.

8th. In all cases and in all schools, oblige scholars to make up and recite after school all the lessons which were recited in their absence.

forced, inexorably, than this I know of no better penal regulation. Now for the expedients which operate as rewards:

Where en

1st. The first day of the term, notify your school that on the last day of the term you will have something which will draw out the neighborhood, and that then before all you will write on the blackboard the names of those who have been neither tardy nor absent.

2d. If the neighborhood do n't come, have the list published, or nailed up in the post-office, or have the clergy read it in church.

3d. Have taken, in a lovely group, the daguerreotype of those who have been neither tardy nor absent; there is no handsomer school-room picture than it will form.

4th. Let all the parents have their babies named after scholars who have been neither tardy nor absent. Thus generations to come will know that regularity and punctuality excited your admiration and received your rev

erence.

While expedients are merely the bugler's epaulets and standard of the war against irregularity, the munition of rock is the hostility, the settled unceasing hostility of the teacher himself. He must hate irregularity with vengeful, brick-bat animosity. Causticity cannot be extravagant in the premises. Let it have free course and be glorified.

Be not acid to the pupil and oil to the parent. Don't rake down one and rub down the other. Let both feel the rowel of malignant justice. Every case of irregularity or unpunctuality, save for sickness, is such an indignity offered a holy cause, and is calculated to produce such horrible malformation of character in the pupil himself, as to awake the tiger in a teacher, and utterly preclude all pretty-faced, simpering, pussy-cat twaddle.

Let but the teacher set his face like a flint, and stand against the evil like a beaten anvil to the stroke, and the incubus will vanish like the baseless fabric of a vision, nor leave a wreck behind. A teacher can, and a teacher ought to educate a community, to regard irregularity just as they do the itch. D. J. HOLMES, Sheboygan.

WISCONSIN INSTITUTE FOR THE EDUCATION OF THE BLIND.

[WE cheerfully give place to the following article, which has been sent to us for publication in the Journal.-ED. JOURNAL.]

This Institution, now suspended on account of the annual vacation, will be re-opened on the first Monday of October next.

During the present season the building will be so far completed as to afford ample accommodations for more than double the number of pupils heretofore in attendance, and all the necessary appliances for comfort and instruction will be correspondingly increased, so that its capacity for usefulness in the noble work allotted to it will be greatly enhanced as compared with the past.

The design of the Institute is to furnish all the young blind of both sexes, residing in the State, whether native or foreign born, with the means of a thorough education, as well as a comfortable and pleasant home during their term of instruction.

The school course comprises all the branches which are necessary to a good English education, together with vocal and instrumental music. Instruction is also given in a variety of mechanical employments, by means of which many will be enabled to procure a competent support after leaving the Institute. Especial attention is likewise given to the formation of correct personal habits, so that the plan of education pursued has reference to the moral and physical, as well as the intellectual powers.

In the boarding department of the Institute, everything needful for the promotion of the health, comfort and convenience of the inmates is provided, and no pains is spared by the officers to make them as happy and contented as they could be at their new homes. In case of sickness, they receive prompt medical attendance, and are watched over with parental solicitude by the superintendent and matron.

The school session occupies ten months in each year, leaving a vacation of two months, which is spent by the pupils at their homes.

The term of instruction is not limited to any definite number of years, but the stay of each pupil is determined by the advancement made, and consequent fitness for graduating.

The rule pertaining to the ages of pupils embraces only those who are not under eight or above twenty-one years, but exceptions are sometimes made in peculiar cases.

No person of confirmed immoral character is knowingly received into the Institute.

All the benefits of the Institution, including boarding as well as instruction, are furnished to the blind residing in Wisconsin free of any charge, it being supported by legislative appropriations as a department of the Common School system of the State. The only expense attendant upon a course of instruction is for clothing and traveling to and from the Institute.