Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/41

Rh that will in lieu claim prominence are drawing and the elements of the physical sciences so far as they can be illustrated by the common things of every-day life. That is the first and easiest step in reform, but it it does not probe to its depths the malady: at best it is little more than skin-deep. The distaste for work on the part of the artisan children on the one hand and the incapacity and ignorance which result from the chaotic state of apprenticeship on the other hand alike call for a more trenchant remedy. It is absolutely necessary, in the first place, that the children should enter earlier upon manual labor, that they may gain some skill with their fingers ere they pass the perilous point at which their taste or distaste for work may be acquired; and, in the second, that their education, the training of their mental capacities, should continue till a later period, when their minds are more matured and their faculties sharpened by experience. The whole question of technical education lies in the simultaneous solution of these two problems.

 

N that distant age when Nature was still toiling at the foundations of the Eastern Continent, portions of America had become dry land, and mountain-peaks in North Carolina were illuminated by rising and setting suns. It is, therefore, an anachronism to speak of America as the New World, especially when we remember the high antiquity of the fauna of North America. Still it is believed that the Eastern Continent was the original abode of man.

But when, or under what circumstances, did America receive her first human inhabitant? Heretofore those who have discussed the question have assigned the event to a comparatively modern period, and have considered the probability of immigrations from Asia by Behring Strait; while others have suggested early transatlantic movements, or the peopling of America from a lost continent of the Pacific Ocean. The discovery of stone implements, however, in the glacial deposits of the Delaware Valley gives a fresh turn to the 