Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/148

138, and unobtrusive that but few suspected the presence of a great thinker so near at home, and fewer still knew him personally. He died in Houston, Texas, January 12, 1890.

The Late Henry James Clark.—A biography and bibliography of Henry James Clark has been published by the Massachusetts Agricultural College, in which he was the first professor. He was born in 1826, began the study of botany under Asa Gray in 1850, and became a pupil and private assistant of Agassiz, who spoke of him in 1857 as "the most accurate observer in the country." He was in succession adjunct Professor of Zoölogy in Harvard University; Professor of Botany, Zoölogy, and Geology in the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania; Professor of Natural History in the University of Kentucky; and Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Veterinary Science in the Massachusetts Agricultural College; and he was a member, fellow, or correspondent of the principal American scientific societies, including the Academy of Sciences when its membership was limited to fifty. He assisted Agassiz in the preparation of parts of the Contributions to the Natural History of the United States; delivered lectures on histology and the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Zoölogy; and delivered a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute on Mind in Nature; or the Origin of Life, and the Mode of Development of Animals. He died on the first day of July, 1873, in the forty-eighth year of his age. The list of his scientific writings comprises twenty-seven titles, mos of which cover more than one article.

Educational Value of Manual Training.—The committee report of the National Council of Education on the Educational Value of Manual Training admits the reasonableness of substituting a system of manual training in special schools, in so far as it can be done, for the old system of apprenticeship, but insists that the training ought not to be begun before the completion of the pupil's twelfth year, nor before he has had the statutory instruction prescribed by the state in the intellectual branches of school work. It admits that manual training is an educative influence, and that, in so far as the schools teach the scientific principles that underlie the practical points of their work, they add intellectual education to physical education. The study of general scientific principles, according to Dr. William T. Harris's interpretation of the views of the report, would be educative in the first rank: they explain all machines and all natural phenomena in our present experience, and will explain those that we meet in the future. In the second rank are special applications of science in the form of theories of special machines, as, for example, of the steam-engine. These theories explain all machines made in accordance with them; they are very general, but not so general as the scientific theories of the forces involved. They are accordingly less educative. A third and least educative school exercise is the construction of a particular machine, when the theory is narrowed down to a special example. The laborer meets many new things in the work of constructing the machine, but unhappily they are not educative, because they are contingent, and do not assist in explaining or constructing the next machine. Examined in these three grades of educative value, the purely manual work of the school belongs to the lowest grade, and furnishes the obscurest knowledge of principles covered up by a mass of non-essential circumstances. The committee, however, lays stress on the importance of aesthetic culture through drawing. It is culture in taste that American workmen need, and not culture in skill, for our laborers are already ingenious and skillful and industrious. Drawing is the best means of acquiring familiarity with the conventional forms of beauty in ornament—forms that express the outlines of freedom and gracefulness, and charm all peoples, even those who have not the skill to produce them; and make markets for the articles that bear them.

Causes of Insanity.—The latest report of the British Commissioners of Lunacy gives tables showing the causes of insanity as verified by the medical officers of the institutions, in the cases of 136,478 patients who have been admitted into public and private asylums since 1887. The causes are classified as "moral" and "physical." As might