to begin the construction of a building to house the State Historical Society collection and the library of the state university. The last legislature extended the levy to seven years. As the levy for each year will amount to $60,000, the total appropriation will amount to $420,000. The half of the building deThe half of the building designed for the use of the historical society is partly completed. The plans for the whole building have been made and the commission which has charge of the building has authority to borrow money from the state funds to complete the building while prices of building materials are low. The building, as planned, will be a noble structure, worthy of its purpose. To maintain the historical society more adequately in its new home its annual appropriation was increased from $5,000 to $15,000. The legislature also passed an act which practically increases the annual appropriation from the the city of Milwaukee to its public library from $35,000 to $47,000. TRAVELING PICTURES. County Superintendent Elvira Buckley, of Dunn county, writes as follows in the Dunn County News: We have long felt the need of having the country school-houses made pleasanter and more home-like. Graded schools in the country as well as in the city have done considerable in this direction, but comparatively little has thus far been attempted in the common country school-houses aside from what the teacher herself feels able or is inclined to do. At the last teachers' Institute an offer was made to give to teachers illustrated magazines from the Memorial Library. I have called for and received many such as Harper's and Leslie's illustrated weeklies which I have distributed while visiting schools and attending teachers' meetings, leaving to each from four to six numbers with instructions for mounting the finest pictures and making the best use of the reading as well. This gift has been appreciated and many schools have been made cheerful and attractive by this means. However, these pictures. are, of course, not as attractive as new and neatly prepared pictures gotten up for this especial purpose. To supply this need for something better as well as to induce districts to improve their schools, Senator Stout has made the generous offer to purchase 800 pictures which will be carefully selected to meet the needs of the school-room. They will be ready for delivery by the beginning of the spring term of schools. These pictures are somewhat of a supplement to the traveling libraries as they are to be kept in each school as long as they desire and then exchanged with a neighboring school for another set. It is intended to supply each school with six pictures which are to be gotten up in a suitable manner to permit of easy moving. All pictures will have like fastenings so that it will not be necessary to drive new nails for each new set of pictures. The only requirement exacted of the schools is that the school-houses shall be newly kalsomined and cleaned so as to make a suitable back-ground for the pictures. A pale shade of olive is recommended as being the best for the eyes and where it is possible to obtain this color of kalsomine I hope that will be used. I trust that the school districts will appreciate this generous gift and show their hearty co-operation by continuing to improve the schools as may be done by enlarging, painting, and otherwise improving the school buildings, or by building new ones where necessary. We do not always realize the importance that is attached to our surroundings. The influence of beautiful and appropriate surroundings cannot be over-estimated. The best and most lasting things are the things that we learn unconsciously. Many higher and nobler aspirations of children as well as older people are awakened through the influence of a soul-stirring picture, the grandeur of a beautiful tree, or by tasty and cheerful surroundings. WISCONSIN SONG. The following was recently written by Pres. E. D. Eaton, of Beloit college, for a special college reunion. It is well worth preserving for future use as a state song: Surge of the saltless sea, These are Wisconsin's song; Prayer of the saint from far, Breath of the glowing forge; These are Wisconsin's song; COURSES AT THE UNIVERSITY FOR NORMAL GRADUATES. [From the new catalogue of the University of Wisconsin.] The following special course for normal graduates has been arranged (for graduates of the normal schools), leading in two years to the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy in philosophy. It is intended especially for those graduates of normal schools who desire a wider training for the profession of teaching than is offered by the normal courses. The course contains a minimum required amount of advanced studies in philosophy and pedagogy, with opportunity for further elections in those subjects. It requires also a continuous study of foreign language during the two years of the course. In other directions the student may elect his studies either with entire freedom, or under certain restrictions. It is expected that the normal graduate will give especial attention to fitting himself for teaching in one or two of the main lines of instruction, and the requirements and electives have been so arranged as to permit him to attain this end. He may devote himself especially to science, to literature or to history, or to any practicable combination of these studies. will be required, however, to make one of these lines of study his major work, and will not be permitted to elect a large number of short, scattered courses of instruction, since it is the especial design of this course to enlarge and complete his knowledge in certain definite directions. He The attention of the student is called to the necessity of directing his work from the first to the preparation of a satisfactory graduation thesis. In most cases the thesis will probably be written on some topic suggested by pedagogy or philosophy. If, however, the student is capable of pursuing advanced work in any department, he may arrange for his thesis in that direction; but in such cases it will be necessary for him to plan his course from the beginning with the view of satisfying the requirements of a thesis. COURSES OF STUDY. Junior Year: Latin, French or German 4; philosophy 3; advanced pedagogy 3; language, history, English, advanced mathematics or science 5; electives 3 to 5; 18 hours per week required. Senior Year: Continuation of Latin, French or German 4; philosophy and advanced pedagogy 5; electives from language, science, history, economics, mathematics or English 7; also 2 courses of synoptic lectures and thesis; 18 hours per week required. PEDAGOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY. We extract from the new Catalogue just issued the following, showing work in pedagogy as at present outlined. An additional instructor will be added to the department before the opening of next year: 1. History of Educational Theories and Institutions, Greek, Roman and Modern; lectures, readings and essays. First semester; M., W., F. at 9. 2. School Supervision. The making and administration of courses of study, examinations, promotions, inspection, etc. First semester; Tu., Th. at 9. 3. The Philosophy of Education. Lectures, readings and discussions on the nature, forms and elements of education. Second semester; M., W., F. at 9. 4. The Herbartian Pedagogy. Herbart's Science of Education; Rein's Pedagogics; Lange's Apperception. Second semester; 7. Modern Educational Systems. A comparative study of Education in England, France and Germany. First semester; three times a week. For graduate students. 8. Child Study. Second semester; twice a week. A re 9. The Foundations of Pedagogy. view of principles of psychology, logic and ethics involved in the science of education. 10. Seminary in Pedagogy, for the discussion of current educational problems. Open to those who have done one year's work in pedagogy. Once a week throughout the year. II. School Work. Study by observation and practice of school work in the high school and in supervision will be provided for graduate students who desire it. Special courses for those intending to teach are offered in the departments of Greek, Latin, German, English and History, to which the attention of students is called. In the sciences special instruction of this character is given in the summer school, an announcement of which appears on subsequent pages. OBSERVATIONS UPON CHILDREN'S READING. Prof. James E. Russell, of the University of Colorado, is engaged upon a systematic study of the kind and amount of reading done by children, based upon careful statistical inquiry in the public schools of Colorado. His investigations have not yet been concluded, but are sufficiently systematized to afford some ground for the following propositions: (1) That pupils of a given age read approximately the same amount whether the town is well supplied with libraries or not. In towns poorly supplied with books there is a regular system of exchange in vogue. Many instances have been found of a single book being passed about until every member of a grade had read it. This is the natural traveling library. (2) That the chief influence of libraries, especially of school-room libraries, is to improve the quality of reading. (3) That much more reading is done in the seventh grade (age 13 to 14) than in any other grade, including the high school. Girls seem to reach the maximum a year earlier, but hold over during the seventh. (4) At the time of most intense reading there seems to be a great diversity in the character of the books read. Pupils of the seventh grade read everything that comes into their hands. In the high school the taste seems to be better developed and more uniform; one reads fiction and little else; another reads history chiefly; another is interested in scientific books, etc. In any case the tendency is generally well marked. This raises the query whether more attention should not be given to reading in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. These generalizations are based upon returns from towns of widely different tastes and tendencies; they have yet to be fully worked out, but they give interesting indications of the valuable results that may be expected.Library Fournal. which the best known after Uncle Tom's Cabin were: Dred, The Minister's Wooing, The Pearl of Orr's Island, Agnes of Sorrento, and Old Town Folks. HER GREAT SUCCESS. She wrote other stories as thrilling, others much more perfect in literary art; she made studies of the Yankee character and dialect that are worthy of comparison with those of Lowell; she made sketches of life and character that are irresistibly humorous and pathetic, and she wrote several poems and hymns that are of surpassing sweetness, but to the world she is simply the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The story of its success almost exceeds belief. Seventy thousands copies were disposed of before the critics could write a word; 80,000 more were ordered faster than the publishers could turn them from their presses. In 1855 the Edinburg Review declared that by the end of November, 1852, 150,000 copies had been sold in America, and in September of that year the London publishers furnished to one house 10,000 copies per day for about four weeks. It was translated into French (three versions), German (fourteen versions), Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Welsh, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Wendish, Wallachian, Romanic, Arabic and Armenian, and it has since appeared in Chinese, Turkish, Japanese and many other tongues. Pattee's American Literature. School Life in Cloudland. [From Old Town Folks.] Mr. Jonathan Rossiter held us all by the sheer force of his personal character and will, just as the ancient mariner held the wedding guest with his glittering eye. He so utterly scorned and contemed a lazy scholar, that trifling and inefficiency in study were scorched and withered by the very breath of his nostrils. We were so awfully afraid of his opinion, we so hoped for his good word and so dreaded. his contempt, and we so verily believed that no such man ever walked this earth, that he had only to shake his ambrosial locks and give the nod, to settle us all as to any matter what ever. In an age when in England schools were managed by the grossest and most brutal exercise of corporal punishment, the schoolmasters of New England, to a great extent, had entirely dropped all resort to such barbarous measures, and carried on their schools as republics, by the sheer force of moral and intellectual influences. Mr. Jonathan Rossiter would have been ashamed of himself at even the suggestion of caning a boy, -as if he were incapable of any higher style of government. And yet never was a man more feared and his will had in more awful regard. Mr. Rossiter was sparing of praise, but his praise bore a value in proportion to its scarcity. It was like diamonds and rubies,-few could have it, but the whole of his little commonwealth were working for it. He scorned all conventional rules in teaching, and he would not tolerate a mechanical lesson, and took delight in puzzling his pupils and breaking up all routine business by startling and unexpected questions and assertions. He compelled every one to think, and to think for himself. "Your heads may not be the best in the world," was one of his sharp, off-hand sayings, "but they are the best God has given you, and you must use them for yourselves." Mr. Rossiter dearly loved to talk and to teach, and out of school-hours it was his delight to sit surrounded by his disciples, to answer their questions, and show them his herbarium and his cabinet, to organize woodland tramps, and to start us on researches similar to his own. It was fashionable in his school to have private herbariums and cabinets, and before a month was passed our garret-room began to look quite like a grotto. In short, Mr. Rossiter's system resembled that of those gardeners who, instead of bending all their energies toward making a handsome head to a young tree, encourage it to burst out in suckers clear down to the root, bringing every part of it into vigorous life and circulation. I still remember the blessed old fellow, as he used to sit among us on the steps of his house, in some of those resplendent moonlight nights which used to light up Cloudland like a fairy dream. There he still sits, in memory, with his court around him,-Esther, with the thoughtful shadows in her eyes and the pensive Psyche profile, and Tina, ever restless, changing, enthusiastic, Harry with his sly, reticent humor and silent enjoyment, and he, our master, talking of everything under the sun, past, present, and to come,-of the cathedrals and pictures of Europe, describing those he had not seen apparently with as minute a knowledge as those he had,-of plants and animals, of the ancients and the moderns, of theology, metaphysics, grammar, rhetoric, or whatever came uppermost, -always full and suggestive, startling us with paradoxes, provoking us to arguments, setting us out to run eager tilts of discussion with him, yet in all holding us in a state of unmeasured admiration. The first few weeks that Tina was in school, it was evident that Mr. Rossiter considered her as a spoiled child of fortune, whom the world had conspired to injure by over-much petting. petting. He appeared resolved at once to change the atmosphere and the diet. For some time in school it seemed as if she could do nothing to please him. He seemed determined to put her through a sort of Spartan drill, with hard work and small praise. Tina had received from nature and womanhood that inspiration in dress and toilet attraction which led her always and instinctively to some little form of personal adornment. Every wild spray or fluttering vine in our woodland rambles seemed to suggest to her some caprice of ornamentation. Each day she had some new thing in her hair,-now a feathery fernleaf, and anon leaf, and anon some wild red berry, whose presence just where she placed it was as picturesque as a French lithograph; and we boys were in the habit of looking each day to see what she would wear next. One morning she came into school, fair as Ariadne, with her viny golden curls rippling over and around a crown of laurel-blossoms. She seemed to us like a little woodland poem. We all looked at her, and complimented her, and she received our compliments, as she always did coin of that sort, with the most undisguised and radiant satisfaction. Mr. Rossiter was in one of his most savage humors this morning, and eyed the pretty toilet grimly. "If you had only an equal talent for ornamenting the inside of your head," he said to her, "there might be some hopes of you." Tears of mortification came into Tina's eyes, as she dashed the offending laurel-blossoms out of the window, and bent resolutely over her book. At recess-time she strolled out with me into the pine woods back of the school house, and we sat down on a mossy log together, and I comforted her and took her part. "I don't care, Horace," she said, "I don't care!" and she dashed the tears out of her eyes. "I'll make that man like me yet,—you see if I don't He shall like me before I'm done with him, so there! I don't care how much he scolds. I'll give in to him, and do exactly as he tells me, but I'll conquer him,— you see if I don't." And true enough Miss Tina from this time brushed her curly hair straight as such rebellious curls possibly could be brushed, and dressed herself as plainly as Esther, and went at study as if her life depended on it. She took all Mr. Rossiter's snubs and dispiteful sayings with the most prostrate humility, and now we began to learn, to our astonishment, what a mind the little creature had. In all my experience of human beings, I never saw one who learned so easily as she. It was but a week or two after she began the Latin grammar before, jumping over all the intermediate books, she alighted in a class in Virgil among scholars who had been studying for a year, and kept up with them, and in some respects stood clearly as the first scholar. The vim with which the little puss went at it, the zeal with which she turned over the big dictionary and whirled the leaves of the grammar, the almost inspiration which she showed in seizing the poetical shading of words over which her more prosaic companions blundered, were matters of never-ending astonishment and admiration to Harry and myself. At the end of the first week she gravely announced to us that she intended to render Virgil into English verse; and we had not the smallest doubt that she would do it, and were so immensely wrought up about it that we talked of it after we went to bed that night. Tina, in fact, had produced quite a clever translation of the first ten lines of "Arma virumque," etc., and we wondered what Mr. Rossiter would say to it. One of us stepped in and laid it on his writing-desk. "Which of you boys did this?" he said the next morning, in not a disapproving tone. There was a pause, and he slowly read the lines aloud. "Pretty fair!" he said,-"pretty fair! I shouldn't be surprised if that boy should be able to write English one of these days." "If you please, sir," said I, "it's Miss Tina Percival that wrote that." Tina's cheeks were red enough as he handed her back her poetry. "Not bad," he said, "not bad; keep on as you've begun, and you may come to something yet. This scanty measure of approbation was interpreted as high praise, and we complimented Tina on her success. The project of making a poetical translation of Virgil, however, was not carried out, though every now and then she gave us little jets and spurts, which kept up our courage. Bless me, how we did study everything in that school! English grammar, for instance. The whole school was divided into a certain number of classes, each under a leader, and at the close of every term came on a great examination, which was like a tournament or passage at arms in matters of the English language. To beat in this great contest of knowledge was what excited all our energies. Mr. Rossiter searched out the most difficult specimens of English literature for us to parse, and we were given to understand that he was lay ing up all the most abstruse problems of grammar to propound to us. All that might be raked out from the course print and the fine print of grammar was to be brought to bear on us; and the division that knew the mostthe division that could not be puzzled by any subtlety, that had anticipated every possible question, and was prepared with an answerwould be the victorious division, and would be crowned with laurels as glorious in our eyes as those of the old Olympic games. For a week we talked, spoke, and dreamed of nothing but English grammar. Each division sat in solemn, mysterious conclave, afraid lest one of its mighty secrets of wisdom should possibly take wing and be plundered by some of the outlying scouts of another division. We had for a subject Satan's address to the sun, in Milton, which in our private counsels we tore limb for limb with as little remorse as the anatomist dissects a once lovely human body, The town doctor was a noted linguist and grammarian, and his son was contended for by all the divisions, as supposed to have access to the fountain of his father's wisdom on these subjects; and we were so happy in the balloting as to secure him for our side. Esther was our leader, and we were all in the same division, and our excitement was undescribable. We had also to manage a quotation from Otway, which I remember contained the clause, "Were the world on fire." To parse "on fire" was a problem which kept the eyes of the whole school waking. Each division had its theory, of which it spoke mysteriously in the presence of outsiders; but we had George Norton, and George had been in solemn consultation with Dr. Norton. Never shall I forget the excitement as he came rushing up to our house at nine o'clock at night with the last results of his father's analysis. We shut the doors and shut the windows, for who knew what of the enemy might be listening? and gathered breathlessly around him, while in a low, mysterious voice he unfolded to us how to parse "on fire.' At that moment George Norton enjoyed the full pleasure of being a distinguished individual, if he never did before or after. Mr. Rossiter all this while was like the Egyptian Sphinx, perfectly unfathomable, and severely resolved to sift and test us to the utmost. Ah, well! to think of the glories of the day when our division beat!-for we did beat. We ran along neck and neck with Ben Baldwin's division, for Ben was an accomplished grammarian, and had picked up one or two recon |