Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/149

 consisting of theme-writing and disputations, is to be held, and then the school breaks up for holidays. “Heir efter because the maist part of the countrey will be glaid to se thair bairnis and mak thayme clathys, and provid to thair necessiteis the rest of the yeir, thair may be given sum vacans on to the first day of October, on the quhilk day al lessonis begynnis againe in al collegis. At the quhilk day naine salbe promovit to na classe without he be examinat be the principal and regentis committit thairto.”

Corporal punishment by inferior masters is forbidden. “Nor yit sal it be leful to the said pedagogis to ding thair desciples, but only to declair the fall to the principal or to thair regent, and refer the punition to thayme.”

Of a large portion of this, his academic ancestry, Comenius was unaware, though, as has been shown, he did his best to assimilate and to build upon the efforts of previous workers. It remains to mention three of his contemporaries who exercised an undoubted influence upon him. These are Wolfgang Ratke, John Valentine Andreæ, and John Henry Alsted.

At first sight it would appear as if Ratke (1571–1635) were the chief inspirer and forerunner of the Great Didactic, but a little investigation tends to weaken this presumption. It has already been shown that Comenius, while putting his ideas into shape at Lissa, did not know with any exactness in what the method of Ratke consisted, and that the secrecy maintained by the latter hindered his contemporaries from knowing what were the actual suggestions that he had formulated. It was possibly the eulogy of his method by the Giessen professors Helwig and Jung that had reached Comenius at Herborn, and it is more than probable that no more detailed account ever came into his hands. True, he lays stress on the fact that Ratke’s examples fired him, in the beginning, to attempt school-reformation, but he speaks with little appreciation of his system of teaching Latin; and, though he can scarcely have been ignorant of the general principles contained in them, does