Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/388

376 species are found regularly during the breeding season in the valleys of the Susquehanna, Delaware, Hudson, and even the Connecticut Rivers, extending inland for a greater or less distance, but are unknown in the surrounding higher country. Thus, Carolina wrens, cardinals, turkey buzzards, and other no less characteristic Carolinian birds are abundant in the bottom lands along the Susquehanna in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but are scarcely ever found on the uplands above the wooded slopes of the river, though the conditions of food and shelter seem equally favorable.

Much of the outside world enters a man's soul and becomes the ground of his joy through life. We all owe something to the region in which we dwell, unconsciously perhaps, but still something that is assimilated by the tissues of the inner life, and that goes to the making of what we really are. Those of us who dwell on the borderland of Dixie owe some fragmentary moments of inspiration, even of happiness, to the genial influence of its proximity. We think of ourselves as belonging with the North, but has not the South spun a few threads into the web of our lives? The cardinal whistles the same sweet tune as he does in "Old Virginia" the opossum and the persimmon savor of the South; even the turkey buzzard suggests the warmer clime. And then spring is always two weeks earlier just down the Delaware, and this is something; even if it is too far off to start the "spring feeling," it hints of fresh early strawberries and the first run of the shad.

, addressing the Section of Mathematics and Physical Science in the British Association, was able to testify to a great improvement which had taken place in the teaching of science in the public and secondary schools during the past ten years. The standard in physics attained by the pupils was increasing from year to year. There might, however, be danger of a temptation to make the pupils cover too much ground. "Although you may increase the rate at which information is acquired, you can not increase in anything like the same proportion the rate at which the subject is assimilated, so as to become a means of strengthening the mind and a permanent mental endowment when the facts have been long forgotten." In the university training of intending physicists the preservation of youthful enthusiasm was, in the speaker's opinion, one of the most important points for consideration; and this could best be effected "by allowing the student, even before he is supposed to be acquainted with the whole of physics, to begin some original research of a simple kind under the guidance of a teacher who will encourage him and assist in the removal of difficulties. If the student once tastes the delights of the successful completion of the investigation he is not likely to go back."