Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/523

Rh Back of them stand the begrimed and impoverished workmen. Tubal-Cain was doubtless a strong man, but he does not greatly touch the imagination. You may think it a fancy, but I can not help believing that the hard and glittering surfaces of the metal exercises have a less humanizing effect than the other manual work. These influences of sound, color, texture, odor, and touch are very subtle, but they are not to be neglected, and particularly in the case of young children. I should therefore like to see the metal work somewhat reduced in amount, and thrown toward the end of the course. Its place could well be taken by work in wood and clay. I am glad to see that this is now being done in the majority of manual training schools, and that no metal work is introduced in the first year. In the early days, the poor little first-year boys used to have three solid terms of vise work, and it was somewhat dreary. Where the elementary metal work is still distributed over the first and second years, care is now taken to make it less monotonous. There may be one or two terms of vise work, one of sheet-metal work, one of molding and casting, one or two of smithing, and one of ornamental iron work. This is still the sequence in Philadelphia, but elsewhere the tendency is to throw the joinery and carving and part of the turning in the first year; the pattern making, molding, and smithing in the second; and to leave the vise work until the last year.

The most interesting and important of the metal work is undoubtedly that of the third year, the machine-tool practice and the construction of finished articles in the way of apparatus and machines. In the hands of a scientific man this department can be made to yield very rich results. The instruction may include so much to arouse and awaken a boy and bring reality into life and thought. Here he can learn to interpret mechanical drawings—a large training for the imagination; he can learn the niceties of mechanical construction, and by means of vise work, lathe, drill, planer, and shaper can turn his designs into solid facts in three dimensions; here he can embody scientific principles in suitable forms; can test new plans by carefully constructed models; he can do a hundred things that are useful and helpful, and will bring him into possession of himself. The work does not always take this broad turn, for it requires a very broad man to give it such a turn, but in estimating it, it is proper, I think, to value it for what it may become as well as for what it is.

Meanwhile, the girls have not been idle. They have been deep in the mysteries of cookery and domestic economy—mysteries so deep that I had better leave them to your imagination, for they would require of themselves a long chapter. But it is to be remarked that the occupations of the girls have nearly all of them a distinct