TEACHERS are wanted to solicit subscriptions for an old and well known literary magazine. Large commissions are given, and teachers looking for pleasant and remunerative employment during the holidays or at special gatherings of educators, will do well to write for further information to "EDUCATOR," P. O. Box 5206, Boston, Mass.

BOOK TABLE.

Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

-THE ILIAD OF HOMER, translated into English blank verse by William Cullen Bryant (two volumes in one, 332 and 355 pp.; $1.00), places within easy reach one of the best translations of the Iliad yet made into English. Of course tastes differ as to which is best-even as to what kind of verse is the most suitable for rendering Homer. We confess, on the whole, a decided preference for the unrhymed pentameter, the English heroic verse if we have any. which Mr. Bryant has chosen. It has a dignity and suppleness well suited to the matter, and while perhaps sometimes lacking in rapidity, is much more agreeable to read than the rhymed couplets of Pope for instance. Bryant's translation has been long before the public and its merits have been pretty thoroly discussed; sufficient to say, that this American version has attained very high rank among those in the English tongue, It is finely printed, on good paper, and every way creditable to a house which takes as its motto, nothing except the best, while the price is surprisingly low. The two volume edition, the only one hitherto obtainable, costs $2.50. A large demand ought at once to spring up for so desirable a work. It ought to be in all our school libraries and to find purchasers among teachers and pupils. It will interest some to know that the publishers, in case the demand for this volume warrants the venture, propose to issue in like form and price, Bryant's Odyssey, Longfellow's Dante and Bayard Taylor's translation of Goethe's Faust.

D. Appleton & Co.

-THE PLANT WORLD, its Romance and Realities; a Reading book of Botany, compiled by Frank Vincent (228 pp.; 60c), belongs to the "Home Reading Books' series, edited by Dr. Harris. The fifty selections which it contains represent a wide range of authors, and treat of specially interesting features of the vegetable world-its giant productions, its curiosities, interesting special groups of plants, the habits and life history of plants, especially rich botanical gardens, etc. Among them are a few well chosen bits of poetry relating to plant life. The book has fourteen beautiful full page illustrations and is in every way attractive and entertaining.

-THE STORY OF OLIVER TWIST, by Charles Dickens, condensed for home and school reading, by Ella Boyse Kirk (348 pp.; 60c), has been made on the principle of omitting everything which a child in reading would naturally skip. Thus we have a stirring and rapid narrative which sweeps on continuously to the final outcome. Dickens may be condensed in this way much more readily than most of our authors, for his long dissertations and elaborate preachments are thrust into his story in such a way that dropping them leaves no sense of lack. There seems to be no reason why this book should not at once become a favorite with young readers.

Silver, Burdett & Co.

-INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF ECONOMICS, by Charles Jesse Bullock, (511 pp.) has several new and valuable features as an introductory text-book. Foremost among these we place the sketch-all too brief but exceedingly valuable -of the industrial history of this country condensed in the first three chapters. These strike the key-note of the book which seeks to deal with American problems in a historic and scientific manner. Next we note the careful bibliographies, not merely the general one at the close of the volume, but also those at the close of the chapters, which indicate more closely sources of information on the topics discussed. What students need is a discriminating bibliography, not a miscellaneous list of all books bearing on the subject but a selection of the most valuable authorities. This Mr. Bullock gives. We note further with satisfaction that difficult topics are not simplified away into nonsense

Vol. XXVII.

A SUMMER number of the JOURNAL such as we have planned to make this, may suggest to many of our readers to reflect upon the various forms of summer activity now presented to them. The oldest is the "outing," boating, fishing, hunting, camping, travel at home and abroad, some sketches of which we offer in this issue. The beautifying of school grounds and rooms may naturally be connected with this. The great educational meetings, of which the N. E. A. in Milwaukee is by far the most important, comes next in historical order. Then come the organizations for summer study, the summer schools, the vacation schools, and, the latest to appear, the "continuous session." This enumeration of interests represented in the present number, leaves out of account one of the oldest organizations for summer study-the Teachers' Institutes, which will receive special attention next month. In the American Literature Series, Hawthorne affords delightful "outing" se

No. 7

lections; and in the next issue, Dr. Holmes will be found not less attractive. We hope to make the Institute number of special interest to all readers.

AMONG the announcements at the university commencement was that of the establishment of a School of Education, under direction of Prof. Stearns. The university extension department was connected with this School, and Prof. M. V. O'Shea, of the Buffalo School of Pedagogy, was elected Professor of the Theory and Art of Teaching. Prof. O'Shea is a graduate of Cornell University, and was for a time Professor of Theory and Practice in the Mankato, Minn., Normal School, from which place he was called to Buffalo. He has written a good deal for the periodicals, the Atlantic Monthly, Educational Review, etc., and has made a brilliant reputation as a lecturer on educational subjects. We have time merely to mention these changes this month, but the expansion they give to the pedagogical work of the university is evident.

SPELLING reform has made no more notable conquest of late than results from the adoption of Mr. Vaile's resolution at Indianapolis, directing the secretary of the N. E. A. to use, in the official publications of that body such simplified spellings as a committee, composed of Dr. Harris, Sup't Soldan of St. Louis, and Sup't Balliet, of Springfield, Mass.,. might agree upon. That committee adopts the following: "Program (programme); tho(though); altho-(although); thoro- (thorough); thorofare (thoroughfare;) thru(through); thruout-(throughout; catalog(catalogue); prolog-(prologue); decalog(declalogue); demagog-(demagogue); pedagog-(pedagogue)." gog―(pedagogue)." The secretary of the N. E. A. announces that these recommendations will be brought before the Board of Directors in Milwaukee for official adoption. Everyone of the changes approves itself to right reason, and we do not see why all teachers should not adopt them. The JOURNAL gives them its cordial support.

CONSIDERABLE doubt seems to have arisen as to the effects of the shorter course at the summer school this summer. One question relates to credit at the university. This is al

ways for work done, and by arrangement with instructors students may concentrate on fewer studies and accomplish the usual amount in them for credit. This answer applies to those who are working continuously towards a course, to those making up deficiencies, and to those seeking only special credits. As to the state examination, the completion of the four weeks work before that takes place is an advantage which all candidates will appreciate. provision for the school made by the last legislature becomes available next summer, and will permit such expansion of courses and teaching as has long been desired. The summer school at the university is firmly established, and will be able to meet the demand rapidly growing in Wisconsin as elsewhere, for able and varied summer instruction in the more advanced studies.

The

"HAS not your state been too much isolated in its educational work?" asked an intelligent observer from another state recently. It is usually not profitable to take up an attitude of defence against such friendly criticism, but rather to remove all occasion for its repetition. It is quite possible for a system of schools to keep too much to itself, and a body of teachers to fail sufficiently to mingle with outsiders so as to feel and participate in movements about them. Are there not peculiarities in our courses of study for high schools due to such isolation? Are there not great movements— child-study, growth of skilled supervision, consolidation of feeble and scattered schools, etc. -in which we have not participated as we might because of a certain aloofness? The coming of the N. E. A. to Milwaukee this year affords a grand opportunity for establishing closer relations with educators in other

states, and deriving fresh impulse from the ideas and movements which prevail in other

sections of the Union.

SIX YEARS ago we called attention emphatically to the smallness of the graduating classes at our normal schools and to the fact that two-thirds of their enrollment was of pupils below high school grade. Since then a great and satisfactory change has come about. High school graduates now fill the upper courses of the normals, and the graduating classes are better proportioned to the enrollment of the school and growing rapidly. In fact normal education in Wisconsin has greatly changed in character in that period. We turn back ten years and find only 136 free high schools in the state, whereas we now have 200. At that time schools of three and of four years' courses were not distinguished in the list; now

we have 140 with four year courses, and all of them much stronger in attendance and teaching power. In 1887 the university catalogue showed an enrollment of 505 students, against 1,650 in that of the present year. The graduating class numbered 75 ten years ago against 208 this year, Thus secondary and higher education have certainly made remarkable advances in this state within the last decade.

THE SUMMER VACATION.

The long summer vacation seems to be encroached upon on every side, and likely to disappear under the sharp competition of modern life. How charming it was, we say to ourselves as we watch its rapid vanishing, with its long bright days of tranquil leisure, and its summer delights. One escaped from business cares, and ripened ideally and in close contact with nature. Literature finds us in such periods, the poets become our interpreters, and we catch gleams of the hidden meanings of things. Children too ripen naturally in the simple and unconstrained freedom of country living. Hot house culture may be valuable in the winter season, but summer holidays even more deeply determine life and character.

Of course there is another side to this. We must remember that the school vacation usually occupies from a fifth to a quarter of the entire year—a large proportion to be given to We must remember comparative idleness.

also that while a few days of leisure seem delightful, they soon begin to hang heavily on our hands. We demand occupation and begin to invent for ourselves forms of "laborious idleness." Common sense says, too, that these are best when they contribute most to the

deepening and enrichment of our own lives,— travel, elevating companionship, reading and study. Thus the vacation takes on a serious aspect, becomes, in fact, rest and refreshment through change of labor. The summer school and the continuous session are the product of this experience. They afford help toward that enrichment of life which common sense commends.

An important distinction may be drawn between the summer school and the continuous session. The former is a "go as you please" institution. It offers advantages but does not set up requirements, so that the student who chooses may march tranquilly in a limited and chosen path. This is the best type of vacation work,-best for real growth and ripening of mind as well as for rest and refreshment. One may devote weeks to a single study, with such boating, riding and out-door

pleasures as he may prefer. There is no ranking to pique, no examination to worry over. "The calm air of delightful studies" may be breathed to the full. The continuous session, on the other hand, imports into the summer the exciting artificial stimulants of the "established institution." It has requirements, rankings, examinations, and the promise of a degree at the end of a course. Thus the vacation is fully overcome-engulfed in "life's endless toil and endeavor." Mighty forces are working steadily to this result, whether for good or ill the future must determine.

The vacation school runs along different lines. Its immediate end is to help city children who have no pleasant homes and no opportunity of going to the country. They are not all children of want, or street Arabs, but children of the poor, to whom the spacious rooms, order, cleanliness and comfort of the school with its occupations, kindly helps and wholesome companionships come with charm and blessing. For such, a summer on the streets brings decided retrogression. The influences under which they fall are not only unpleasant but degrading. The rise of the vacation school, however, is causing many to ask why school is not valuable to all children in the summer, and why public schools should not also hold a summer session. But the sum

mer schools and the continuous sessions are conditioned upon the release of teachers from their tasks at this season. Thus the present movement seems to meet its limitations at this point. The long vacation has been the teachers' opportunity for self-improvement; but the eager use of it by large numbers for such ends has set up a movement which threatens to sweep away the vacation itself. Can we witness the developments now going on without seriously reflecting upon the usefulness and reasonableness of this summer vacation; and whether the rush of American life, in threatening to overwhelm it, is not seriously increasing the strain of life, its hard and practical character, and taking away one of its humanizing as well as its most delightful features?

SALT LAKE CITY.

S.

A determined effort will be made at the Milwaukee meeting of the National Educational Association to secure the next meeting of the N. E. A. for Salt Lake City, Utah. The usual railroad inducements will be offered, which are given for all great national gatherings held in the Pacific or the Rocky Mountain states, which have enabled so many thou

sand persons already in the east or the middle west to see the western half of our country.

As a lesson in geography such a trip is worth its cost to any teacher. The geography learned from books and maps is never so vivid or so valuable as that learned by actual travel. It is one thing to look at a map of the western half of the United States and to see mountains, rivers, lakes and deserts marked there, and it is quite another thing to see the magnificent mass of the Continental Divide stretch from north to south through two hundred miles of vision, and then to stand upon the summit of Pike's Peak with the great plains stretching away to the east and the billowy mountain ranges below and around you to the west and south and north; it is quite another thing to crawl up the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas with cliffs towering thousands of feet on each side and the river brawling far below, to wind up to the top of the Marshall Pass, twice the height of the Alleghanies, and then plunge down through the Black Canon of the Gunison, and come out on the Great Utah Desert where there is not a spear of grass or a sign of insect life; it is quite another thing to bathe in the Great Salt Lake with head and shoulders above the heavy water, and eyes and nostrils smarting from the salt plunge; it is quite another thing to see the original sage brush, bunch grass and alkali dust with which you have become only too familiar on one side of a road and the desert blossoming into fertility on the other side under the magic of an irrigating ditch. The practical student of geography who learns from his own observation soon realizes that the western half of our country has a very different set of conditions. for its population from the eastern half, which are rapidly moulding a different type of man.

As a study of nature such a trip is far better worth its cost than a trip to Europe. With the exception of Niagara and the great lakes there is nowhere in this country and rarely anywhere in the world such a display of the great forms and forces of nature as can be seen even from the car windows on a trip to the Rocky Mountains and beyond. To climb up the west side of the Cascade Mountains through dense forest of two hundred feet fir trees, and at the top to suddenly come almost to an end of vegetation, and to go down the east side of the same mountains between hills bare and brown for lack of the abundant rains that nourished the giant forests on the western slope is a lesson on air currents and rainfall as well as on forestry. To see the trees grow smaller and smaller and at last cease entirely while climbing the summit of Pike's Peak, is a lesson

in the influence of elevation on temperature. The geysers in the Yellowstone Park, the soda springs everywhere, the mines of Colorado and Nevada, the great glaciers of Alaska, now easily reached by steamer, the yawning chasms of the Yosemite and of the Grand Canon of the Colorado, are examples of natural forces, and their effects well worth a long trip to see. Much of this can be seen in the course of an excursion which at the rates usually offered is within the reach of a teacher's modest purse. Salt Lake City has two special attractions, the Mormon church and the great tabernacle. The Mormon church is a sociological study well worth going a long journey to see. Originally only one out of many exhibitions of human gullibility, the pilgrimage of the outcast Mormons to Salt Lake in the days before the railroads had brought that remote region near to the rest of the country, gave an opportunity for a peculiar civilization to be built up on a basis of sound sense and practical statesmanship mingled with priestcraft and unscrupulous despotism. But one only has to see the five acre lots supporting families under irrigation, the cooperative stores, the avoidance of mining and other speculation, the plain food and clothes, the repression of the ordinary vices of the frontier, and the thorough organization of the social life, to discover that the most successful experiment in socialism ever made is before him, disguised under the forms of a fantastic faith, an experiment which like all socialism reduces society to an average of comfort and of opportunity, preventing both the social gains and social losses of the competitive system under which most of us live.

The Mormon Tabernacle is the best auditorium in the world. Ten thousand people can be seated in it and can hear an ordinary speaker without effort. If the object of a church or a public hall is to enable speakers to be heard and an audience to hear, then this tabernacle is the best constructed meeting house in the world. But if the object of a church or a hall is to show off the beauty of the architecture, then it is one of the worst. It is a homely turtle backed ellipse, which disregarded all rules of architecture and follows the laws of acoustics. It is a whispering gallery. A person standing at one focus of the ellipse can be heard in the lightest whisper by a person at the other focus, or a pin can be heard to drop into a hat. From one focus of the ellipse a speaker can be heard in all parts of the hall with the greatest ease. This depends upon the laws of physics. To prove it theoretically one only needs to draw an ellipse

and then draw the lines of incidence and reflection which the sound waves must follow. But to actually experience it, is still better. We need not say that the use of such a building is of material advantage to a great national gathering. Few other buildings in the United States can hold the numbers who now attend the National Educational Association, and none of anything like the size will allow the audience to hear without difficulty a speaker with an ordinary voice. The effect of having a great national meeting using this tabernacle ought to be to so impress a large number of intelligent people with the value of this form of building as to cause others like it to be built in every large city. W.

THE MONTH.

WISCONSIN NEWS AND NOTES.

-The Madison high school graduated a class of fifty-eight.

-The Horicon high school had a graduating class of 13, five of them men.

-The Mayville high school graduated a class of ten, four of whom are men.

-The Prescott high school graduated four May 28th, three of whom are men. -The Third ward high school of Appleton graduated six, of whom four are men.

-Ten graduated from the Lake Mills high school this year, of whom three are men.

-At Phillips the Price county summer school will continue five weeks from July 12th.

-Examinations for state teachers' certificates occur at Madison, August 10th, 11th and 12th.

-The De Forest high school graduates five, all women. This is the third class from the school.

-The summer school at Elkhorn, Walworth county, will continue five weeks from July 12th.