Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/734

714 calling. As boys, they are truants or shirks; and later on they constitute the class of men never able to retain a situation for any length of time. Others become thieves, to be able to indulge their propensities for dissipation. Within the last few years there has been a marked increase in the number of those committed whose nervous and mental condition is unsatisfactory.

The Grass Garden of the Department of Agriculture.—In the grass garden of the United States Department of Agriculture double beds, or plats, are arranged on each side of the greater length for the growth of native plants to be allowed to come into flower. Inside of these bands is a narrow range of plats in which are grown various fodder plants—clovers, vetches, lupines, etc.—which do not belong to the grass family. Extending lengthwise through the center is a series of larger beds in which are cultivated those grasses that are known or supposed to be good formers of turf. An opportunity is afforded by such an arrangement for the comparison of one kind of grass or forage plant with another, and for noting their relative merits for special purposes. In it may be grown, too, for the use and information of the botanist, the grasses of all countries, arranged according to their natural tribes and subdivisions. Opportunities for study and experiment may thus be given the botanist and the economist such as can be got in no other way. Native plants should always have a prominent position here, in order that we may become familiar with them, and because they may exhibit under cultivation qualities of usefulness which can not be detected in them in their native stations. Mr. F. Lawson Scribner, Agrostologist of the United States Department of Agriculture, says, in the Yearbook of that department, that "we have better grasses and a greater variety of them native to our soil than we can ever get from Europe, and it will not be necessary to grow them ten or twenty years or more in order that they may be acclimated. . . . There are sixty native species of clovers found in the United States; there are more than sixty kinds of bluegrass—distinct botanical species; there are twenty or more good grazing grasses related to the buffalo grass; there are fourscore or more of native lupines and twoscore vetches which have yet to be tried in our agriculture; and then there are broom grasses, and meadow grasses, and pasture grasses, and hay grasses, almost numberless, suitable to every kind of soil and rock formation and climate. And of all this wealth of kinds, the natural heritage of our country, hardly more than a dozen have been brought into cultivation."

Oral Schools for the Deaf and Damb.—The first oral schools for the deaf and dumb were established in 1867, when the sign system of instruction had been in full sway for fifty years, and they had to dispute for progress with a method which seemed firmly established. In 1868, 38 out of the 304 deaf pupils in the New England States, or a little more than 12 per cent of the whole number, were taught in oral schools. The Horace Mann School was established in Boston the next year, and since then the percentage has steadily increased till, toward the end of 1893, 351 out of a total of 524 pupils, or 67 per cent, were found exclusively in oral schools. Outside of the New England States, besides the special schools in which it is exclusively used, the oral method has been admitted into many of the other schools, and both systems are taught in them—a fact which is expressed by the words "combined system." Statistics of the use of the oral method in the whole United States show very clearly that the oral method is extending with great rapinityrapidity [sic]. Prof. A. Graham Bell, in the address from which we quote these facts, adduces as an argument for the excellence of the oral system that the little schools in which it is taught, springing up by private enterprise, are able to compete successfully with the State sign schools until the latter introduce the oral system and become "combined" schools, while the little schools still live. In Germany the oral method has encroached upon the sign method till that has given way to a combined system. At the International Convention of Teachers of the Deaf, held in Milan in 1880, all the delegates from continental Europe voted for the preference of the pure oral method, while all the votes cast against the resolution were those of an Englishman and three Americans. This decision has been