he had never used it in speech. He was willing the dictionarymakers should decide if they thought it worth while.

Simplified spelling shows the perverted verbal sense, "You are spoiling the word!" we hear when only the symbol is changed. To these people to destroy a photograph would seem like committing murder. Poets and stenographers who go by sound are more inclined to be phonetic in their spelling than prose writers. "If the opponents of spelling reforms were tested in the psychological laboratory they would be found to belong mostly to the visual or graphomotor classes, while those more tolerant to orthographical innovations would be found using auditory or vocalmotor imagery."

The decay of the habit of reading aloud is due to the multitude of books and lights. Once the fire-light from the logs on the hearth was literally the focus of the family. Then the legend, the saga, the story were told and flourished apace. Old and young listened to the monologue with eyes on the flickering flames. Next the lamp made a single light and one reader read to many listeners -this was the age of the leisurely novel, the continued story. Some books are to be chewed and some to be Fletcherized to bring out the full flavor. The practice of reading together for months the same book, gave the family a unity now lost, for now the family has no focus. Each member of the house now has his own reading matter as he has his own bread and butter plate, and salt holder. Magazines and books are cheap or can be had, a bushel a week, from the public library. Every room is heated and lighted and everybody independent. If the family is all together for one event of the day, it is by special effort. To read together is a rare and godly practice. Hence, there is little common interest and no common theme of conversation. Mutual affection alone holds the family together. The family today needs a new focus.

Young people need to be made to listen to reading and themselves taught to read out loud. At present there is a mild and unreasonable prejudice to a public reading of anything. A man who presumes to read an address is heartily disliked. We are told that people are too tired mentally to follow an article read aloud. Yes, we are too tired to think seriously about many things five minutes at a time, so we must needs have motion pictures, the

dramatic skit and the charged short story. We need a revival of reading aloud.

The second form of public speaking is the debate or in its simplest form, declaiming. It is only in its highest form that this declaiming becomes the perfection of talking or what we call oratory. The whole trouble is this-that we expect a public speaker to be an orator. Orators are the result of years of labor and unending practice. Many good public speakers become perfect readers-most public speakers become skilled and acceptable declaimers, but to become an orator, a perfect talker-"Ah! here is the rub." Orators are made like Demosthenes, by incessant and unrelenting work. It is a foolish assumption that a man is born an orator because he can talk a little in public without embarrassment. Any man who is not lacking in mental equipment can be made a good reader, then trained to talk away from the printed page, and finally can become an orator, with proper training.

Finally, it might be said that the one thing a public speaker needs to be a success is the Sense of Good Taste. This is the hardest of all to get. It comes only by centuries of training. The preacher who "hollers," the teacher who speaks in a nasal monotone, the actor or the judge on the bench who lack orientation, fail in this Sense of Good Taste. It is indispensible.

The Teaching of Natural Science in Our American High Schools

BY ASSOCIATE PRINCIPAL FRANK P. WHITNEY, GLENVILLE HIGH SCHOOL, CLEVELAND, O.

T

HE past thirty years have witnessed many surprising changes in education not the least interesting of which have been those connected with the teaching of natural science in the field of secondary education. Introduced by its champions as the most vital of all studies, as the one destined most effectively to put the child into connection with the modern world, as the one study combining mental discipline and culture with the most immediate and practical benefits, natural science stands today in our high school programs at least with respect to the claims put forth on its behalf revealed as a lamentable failure. Natural science, whatever its possibilities, is today far from holding any position of acknowledged superiority in the curriculum. On each of the three scores where it proposed to surpass, culture, discipline, and practical utility, it has rivals in history, mathematics, the foreign languages and the mother tongue. Far from possessing any advantage in the minds of either pupils, teachers, or parents it is today in these quarters more or less on the defensive.

The purpose of this paper is to show how widespread is this conviction of the educational inefficiency of science as taught in our secondary schools, how great is the divergence between aims and methods, what conditions and causes have operated to produce the present situation, and finally, to suggest certain methods of procedure which would be calculated, in the opinion of the writer, to improve the efficiency of the teaching of natural science in our high schools.

One searches in vain for any testimony to the effect that science as ordinarily taught in our high schools makes conspicuously for precision and accurracy of thought, for a much larger appreciation of the practical benefits of science in the world outside or

even a more intelligent use of them, or, in the third place, for the development of what is much lauded but little practicedthe scientific habit of mind in relation to ordinary affairs. High school science is notably academic, bookish, remote from present interests. Even the laboratory has become a drill, an exercise through which the pupils too often pass without the slightest motive other than the desire to make the thing come out as the book or the teacher wants it to, or to see what some one else has seen. "How many science pupils," asks Professor Scott, "ever get so far as to have an hypothesis; or, if so, have the still more illuminating experience of seeing it either proved or disproved by the actual facts?"

High school teachers and the college authors of high school textbooks apparently in the fear that the sciences might become interesting and genuinely attractive, have selected subjects far removed from any possible connection with present life introducing concepts totally foreign to the experience of the children mystifying them with absolute units and technical terms such as no one in real life ever uses or even mentions. Biology and physics and chemistry have all been under the spell of a "logical" treatment. Evolution is the cardinal fact of biological science; hence biology has been evolutionized. Pupils may study zoology a year without getting beyond the star-fish. At one time it is classification, at another anotomy; just recently it seems to have been ecology that demands the same logical systematic method of treatment given to university students. In physics multitudes of teachers insist on introducing the absolute units for the sake of the rigor and precision which they fondly believe is thus secured. The methods of exact quantitative research are brought into the high school and pupils are set to work perhaps using the micrometer caliper as the first laboratory exercise of the course.

This forced effort at precision, this straining after results which belong to the research laboratory, this desire to use exact methods for which the pupils are in no wise prepared, has had its inevitable result in a diminishing interest in the natural sciences. In spite of the fact that the most lavish provision was made for the high school science in laboratory equipment during this period, the years from 1890 to 1906 show a remarkable decrease in the pro

portionate number of pupils in the several natural science studies in the public high schools of this country. While the number of pupils studying Latin in our high schools increased from less than 35 to more than 50 per cent of the whole number enrolled, the number in physics dropped from 22 to 15 per cent and that in chemistry from 10 to 6.5 per cent. Astronomy and geology are rapidly passing over from secondary schools to colleges as separate subjects of study, a fact which very likely is not to be deplored, but for the past eleven years for which the figures are available, from 1895 to 1906, physical geography and physiology have each shown a considerable relative loss in the number of pupils reported as being engaged in their study. And this decrease in the popularity of the natural sciences reported upon has very apparently been due not to the introduction of other new and attractive subjects into the program of studies, but to the loss of interest in science in the face of the steady appeal of the traditional subjects, such as Latin, Algebra and German. For the same period the private high schools show a slight decrease in physics, an actual gain in chemistry, and practically no change in physical geography and physiology.

How much of the change in these proportions may have been due to such epoch-making changes in programs as were initiated by the report of the Committee of Ten and furthered by the report of the Committee on College Entrance Requirements, we have no means of determining. The postponement of physics to a later year in the course, for instance, would have the effect of reducing the relative number taking it without necessarily affecting its popularity. It is to be regretted that the report of the Commissioner of Education takes no account of biology, zoology, or botany, subjects which under some name have been introduced very generally into the first or second years of the high school. It hardly seems possible however that the decrease of 25 per cent. in the number of pupils studying natural science from 1895 to 1906 would be materially lessened even if we had the figures for those first year sciences. As a rule where pupils have been free to elect, biology has gone into a decline. Elementary science in the high schools under whatever name it passes, is far from being a popular study.

The failure of the sciences to live up to their expectations as