Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/777

Rh, the discords of the streets, the noises of animals, the puffing and rush of the rail-road-train, the rolling of thunder, or even the tumult of a battle.

“Edison has recently stated that his best instrument will now talk so as to be heard at a distance of 175 feet. The conditions for increasing the sound are so simple that there can be no doubt of any desirable extension in this direction.”

Garden-Schools.—The New York Academy of Sciences has twice had under consideration plans of using the public parks for scientific and hygienic purposes. One of these purposes was the propagation of febrifuge trees and plants; the other the use of part of these public grounds as garden-schools.

This latter project is to be commended for various reasons: As education becomes general, schoolhouses cannot contain all the scholars. The present school-crowding already necessarily generates or propagates among the pupils various epidemic and other diseases. The shutting of the children in class-rooms when the sun shines, and the air is bracing, is producing leucæmic affections. The eyesight is impaired by concentration on books; and the training of the mind to the exclusion of the exercise of the senses, and of the other active functions, isolates the child from the real world, and feeds him on abstractions which predispose to several forms of insanity.

On the other hand, open-air life, study, and exercise, invigorate all the tissues, organs, and functions of the body.

The plan of such garden-schools must vary, of course, for each locality. For the city of New York, as presented to the Academy of Sciences by Dr. E. Seguin, and by the Academy to the mayor, it would be somewhat as follows: A part of each of the small parks would be planted with specimens of ornamental, edible, medicinal, textile, and other plants, where groups of children could go with their teachers to breathe and learn.

In the Central Park large tracts would be devoted to indigenous and exotic plants, to zoology and ichthyology, mineralogy, and specimen sections of American geology, hydrology, etc. The public-school pupils would visit these places with their teachers; and, when the weather happened to be unfavorable, they could find shelter in the public libraries, museums of painting and natural history, which fringe the park, and where they could continue their studies of Nature.

In a word, the schoolhouse must be used only when it cannot be helped, the rules of physiological education needed by a free people, being: Never to teach in-doors what can be learned out-doors; never to explain in the abstract what can be demonstrated in the concrete; never to teach with books what can be perceived in objects; never to teach by images when Nature itself is at hand; never to show dead Nature when living Nature is obtainable; and never to require belief where seeing and understanding are possible. New York’s beautiful Central Park might thus be made an educational establishment of the highest value. In the Kew Gardens at London, seventy-five acres are given up to the students, without at all impairing the beauty of the landscape. The same might be said of the Gardens of Acclimation of London, Paris, Algiers, Calcutta; of the Botanical Gardens of Montpellier, Brussels, Geneva, which are partly schools and partly pleasure grounds. In this respect we are sadly behind. Once reminded that our parks have been created “equally for the enjoyment of the public, and for the education of the children,” our public authorities, it is to be hoped, will realize the need of preserving them for their original purposes, and so improving them that they may every year become more and more indispensable to our citizens.

New Fossil Reptiles.—In addition to the remarkable Jurassic reptiles recently described by Prof. Marsh from the Rocky Mountains, several others are announced by him in the March number of the American Journal of Science. One of these, a gigantic Dinosaur (Atlantosaurus immanis), was much larger than any land-animal, recent or fossil, hitherto described. The femur of this monster was over eight feet (2,500 millimetres) in length, and the other remains preserved are equally huge. If this reptile had the proportions of a crocodile, it must have been over a hundred feet