Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/388

374 on the same principles as the provincial board. The latter govern the higher schools of first grade, and the former those of the second grade, and the primary schools. All of these boards are under the control of an educational minister located at Berlin, with whom they are in continual communication, and to whom they make a general report on school affairs once in every two or three years. There are also seven examination commissions whose business it is to examine applicants for the positions of teachers. The Minister of Education appoints the professors of a university, from names suggested to him by the academical senate. The full professors elect a rector, or, in cases where the king is titular rector, a pro-rector, to serve for one year, and an academical senate, also for one year. The senate consists of the actual rector, the retiring rector, and a full professor of each faculty. Besides the full professors, is a class of assistant professors, and another class called privatdocent, which stands partly in the capacity of private tutor and partly as an attaché of the university.

art of Drawing and the art of thinking are based alike upon two simple principles. The crude leaf-picture of the novice and the accurate landscape of the experienced draughtsman are the results of one and the same process—the combination of straight and curved lines. The only difference between them lies in the degree of skill with which the lines are combined. The infant, recognizing its mother, displays the same mental process that Newton employed to produce his "Principia." The child recognizes its mother by perceiving her unlikeness, to the other persons around her. Newton discovered the law of gravitation by detecting the likeness displayed in the movements of falling bodies. The art of thinking, in its rudest as well as its most perfect state, is simply the detection of likenesses and unlikenesses displayed in things. The only rational method, therefore, of cultivating the art of thinking—in other words, of education—is to teach the mind to seek for and trace out those likenesses and unlikenesses. To cultivate the art of Drawing, the pupil is taught to distinguish between straight and curved lines, between the effect produced by drawing a straight line in one direction, and that produced by drawing it in another; and further, to distinguish between the effects of combining both kinds of lines in various ways. To draw a leaf, a flower, or a house, he must first recognize the differences in the various major parts and minor parts, and then the difference in the character and direction of the lines required to represent those parts. But that is learning to discriminate between different things and different parts of the same thing, is learning to recognize likenesses and unlikenesses––is learning to think. The child who maps off in his mind the various like and unlike parts of a leaf or a flower with a view to reproducing them on the paper before him, is learning to think in botany, and soon begins to classify leaves, flowers, plants, and trees, according to their peculiarities of form and structure. He that observes the differences and similarities in the various parts of an insect or an animal, for the purpose of making a drawing of that insect or animal, is learning his first lessons in zoology. And he that is able to represent the different forms and structures of rocks and minerals has learned his first lessons in geology and mineralogy. In short, there is scarcely a science that cannot be taught, well taught, and agreeably taught, by the aid of Drawing. For, in teaching a pupil to draw, you cultivate his observation, quicken his perception, and strengthen his judgment. He forms a habit of scrutinizing objects with a view to discerning their component parts, which is an act of observation; of separating the like and unlike parts from each other, and these again into their respective smaller parts, which is an act of perception; and, in comparing the features of the parts with each other for the purpose of ascertaining their likeness or unlikeness, he performs an act of judgment. Thus drawing awakens and develops the three most important faculties of the mind; upon them rests the whole fabric of Thought. By observation of things, we perceive their differences from some things and likeness to others, and we judge or classify them accordingly; and from observation of things