Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/518

502 tersely states the whole aim and purpose of my remarks. Rabelais, Montaigne, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Combe, Spencer, and others have urged the importance of practical teaching, of studying things before words, of proceeding from the concrete to the abstract. But, as yet, such has been the inertia of school authorities and teachers, and such the force of tradition, that we are only now beginning to employ the methods of instruction that have been advocated for years by the most eminent educational reformers.

In what I have said, I have endeavored to show that workshop instruction may be made a part of a liberal education; that, as an educational discipline, it serves to train the faculties of observation, to exercise the hand and eye in the estimation of form and size, and the physical properties of common things; that the skill acquired is useful in every occupation of life, and is especially serviceable to those who are likely to become artisans, by inducing taste and aptitude for manual work, by tending to shorten the period of apprenticeship, by enabling the learner to apply to the practice of his trade the correct methods of inquiry which he has learned at school, and by affording the necessary basis for higher technical education.

Possibly, the latest authoritative expression of opinion on the importance of manual training was a resolution, unanimously agreed to at the International Congress on Commercial and Technical Education, recently held at Bordeaux, to the effect that it is desirable that manual work should be rendered obligatory in primary schools of all grades.

It is satisfactory to know, from a circular that has recently been sent to school managers, that this important subject is engaging the serious attention of the Royal Commission on Education now sitting, whose labors, it is to be hoped, may result in making our elementary teaching more practical, less mechanical, and better adapted to the future requirements of the working-classes.—Contemporary Review.

is about to undertake the botanical investigation of the hitherto unexplored higher mountains of Santo Domingo. He is under commission of Dr. Urban, assisted by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin. Collections will be distributed in limited numbers, at prices bearing relation to the novelty of the species.