interest-and thus of the child's own native urgencies and needs; and further, it reduces method in teaching to more or less external and artificial devices for dressing up the unrelated materials, so that it will get some hold on attention. In reality the principle of making things interesting means that subjects shall be selected in relation to the child's present experience, powers and needs; and that the teacher shall present the new material in such a way as to enable the child to appreciate its bearings, its relationships, its necessity for him.”

If now we grant as our aim, making science vital to the child, putting him into connections with the outside world, adjusting him, arousing his appreciations, causing him to react, if we grant to that aim its legitimate right not only to dominate method, but to select the subject-matter, and if we possess a teacher thoroughly furnished for all good works, we may properly declare the problem solved in its theoretical aspects.

There remains the duty of selecting in the light of our aim the principles to be taught and the method of our teaching. Any constructive attempt to criticize and improve the science teaching in our schools is under obligation to make definite suggestions of a practical nature. What are some of the possible modifications of our present courses and some of the changes of present method likely to be brought about by the application of the foregoing principles ?

"The movement to make mathematics and the absolute real and concrete," according to Professor Mann, "is being pushed by Perry and Armstrong in England, by Klein and Poske in Germany, and by the brothers Poincare in France." The leaders are everywhere awake to the pressing need of cutting the science, natural or other, to the measure of the child. This movement will inevitably make certain eliminations in our present courses modeled as they very generally are on the science of the higher schools. In the proposed reconstruction of physics, for instance, Professor Mann would omit entirely the absolute units with the view of allowing "vigor, intuition, the concrete, the relative and true discipline to prevail." President Butler insists that "far too much has been made in recent years of accuracy of measurement in the teaching of elementary physics." With this latter statement one of the scientists in this country most distinguished

himself for accuracy of measurement in the research laboratory, Professor A. A. Michelson of the University of Chicago, is in striking accord. "Physics," says Professor Michelson, "might be made far more attractive as well as useful if less stress were laid upon the science of measurement." And farther on he adds that it is "far more important to know the nature of physical relations than to know their exact value." G. Stanley Hall finds that high school physics textbooks "seem essentially quantitative, require great exactness, and are largely devoted to precise measurements, with too much and too early insistence on mathematics." By implication he would reduce the mathematics and quantitative work. Elsewhere Hall declares that the first step necessary to "rescue physics from the degradation into which it has fallen through neglect of simple common-sense pedagogy" is to "restore the old descriptive stage with many experiments but a minimum amount of mathematics."

In the biological sciences Mr. W. T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park, insists that there has been "too much evolution." He would eliminate a vast amount of matter put in for logical completeness which not only fails to interest and attract the young pupil, but which often disgusts him and arouses a lasting prejudice against a subject which is intrinsically one of the most interesting. "The pupil," says Mr. Hornaday, "desires and needs to be taught about the birds of use and beauty; the big animals; the injurious rodents, rattlesnakes and moccasins; the festive alligator, the turtles and the once cheap foodfishes." One questionaire at least shows that pupils are decidedly uninterested in many of the lower forms, seeing according to their own statements "least value in them."

What the proper mean is between the quantitative and the qualitative work in physics, for instance, can be answered only in the laboratory when the laboratory is used in accordance with its original intention as a place where pupils come in contact with nature herself rather than with a complicated technique. "Let there still be a laboratory," says Woodhull, "for personal contact with things and for large measurements-pounds and feetsuch as ordinary people use." Just as much of exactness, rigor and accuracy is needed as the pupil demands for his proper

adjustment to his environment, just as much, that is to say, as he can actually use vitally and significantly.

With the adjustment of the child to his environment constantly in view there will be a pressing to the fore of certain utilities, immediate connections, obvious interests-utilities, connections and interests which have been previously frowned upon by the strictly orthodox as more or less unworthy a place in the high halls of science. As President Hall suggests, the teacher will allow "practicalities to come first," and will employ rather than suppress their motivation. Botany and chemistry will be so taught, as the Massachusetts Industrial Commission declare they should be taught, as to show their relations with horticulture and agriculture. Chemistry will be obviously serviceable in detecting the adulteration of foods, in testing milk, butter, coffee, spices, headache powders, jellies, gelatines, candies, vanilla and lemon extracts, in determining the relative economy of fuels, in revealing the use and nature of such common compounds as carbon dioxide. In numerous other ways links will be formed between the house, the kitchen, the shop, and the laboratory.

Physics will not be afraid of testing eggs, of teaching the controlling of fires, and the management of water filters, of inquiring into the cost of light. It will find in water and air innumerable marvels at first hand to arouse curiosity and stimulate investigation. Mechanisms of all sorts will be treated practically; meters, pressure tanks, pumps, hydraulic elevators, injectors, furnaces. The weight and elasticity of the air will scarcely be dismissed with a single lesson. Such subjects as the water pressure in pipes will very likely prove of unfailing practical interest.

For this introduction and use of the near at hand teachers will find ample authority in the example of all inspiring teachers such as Huxley who began teaching biology according to the natural arrangement of the subject. "After two or three years trial of the road from the simple to the complex," says Huxley, "I became so thoroughly convinced that the way from the known to the unknown was easier for students, that I reversed my course and began with such animals as a rabbit or a frog, about which everybody knows something." That this use of the obvious is the common-sense and truly logical method is admirably sug

gested by Professor Jenkins of DePauw University. "If you live in a blue jay country, and it is blue jay season, and there are plenty of blue jays, and you can get your hand on a blue jay, that is the logical order in which to study a blue jay." Or as Dryer says, "The cat and the fowl we have always with us, the frog and the fish are to be had in their season, and a great many lines of creation run through each of them."

Along with this use of every-day material should go the introduction of some of the inspiring history of science. A wealth of material for such work as this which Butler calls the "humanizing of science" lies ready to hand in the lives of great scientists, in the history of inventions and discoveries, and their practical application to life. That science is quite capable of giving culture as well as discipline no one has a right to deny until all these adjacent fields have been thoroughly explored for educative material.

Perhaps one of the most suggestive criticisms of current arrangements for teaching seience may be found in the remark of Professor Mann previously referred to, that the concepts which. are taught in science in our American high schools do not have sufficient opportunity for growth and that there is a great need for the planting of the seeds of these concepts at an earlier age that they may be nourished through a series of years.

The carrying out of this suggestion would involve the teaching of elementary science in the upper grammar grades, a consummation, no doubt, devoutly to be wished, but only when high school science has been sufficiently well organized within its own domain to justify its extension downward. For what is needed from the high school point of view is not the customary smattering, the ill-assorted mass of totally unrelated facts which now passes current too often as nature-study, but a real course in elementary science in which the young pupil discovers not merely isolated facts to marvel at but a new meaning in the world of nature and some idea of its essential unity. At any rate before high school teachers ask that the pupils come to them with the seeds of some of these concepts of science in their minds let them put their own house in order and justify the right of science to a larger place in the elementary school by demonstrating what it can do within the high school.

The high school can do much if it will toward carrying out this fruitful suggestion of Professor Mann's. Any school which has three or four years' work in natural science can help to give these different concepts a fair chance by providing an introductory course in the first year designed to familiarize pupils with the simplest elements of all the sciences, to arouse a permanent interest in the application of their principles to the every-day affairs of life, and to establish the presumption in the minds of pupils that all science is really of some interest and value to them.

Such a general elementary course has been given for some years with good results in a number of high schools in this country. These courses have been found to result in increasing the interest and enthusiasm for science among the pupils and hence in increasing the number taking the advanced courses. This presentation of a unified introduction to all the sciences has a most wholesome effect upon the choice of studies in general.

High school teachers are prone to lay the blame for unsatisfactory conditions upon the colleges maintaining with some show of reason that college-entrance requirements do not permit of flexibility of treatment or of adaptation to local or much less to individual needs. Whatever sins may be charged to college domination here the remedy lies in a courageous assertion on the part of high schools of the right and duty to prescribe a course fitted to the needs of the pupils and to stand or fall by its results. The larger schools might offer two courses in physics, if necessary, one for those pupils who were not concerned about the college, somewhat after the plan in operation in the Brookline (Mass.) High School, where Mr. John S. Packard has developed a Popular Course in contrast to the College Requirement Course. This course, according to Mr. Packard's outline, aims: (1) To develop in the pupil the habit of steady, persistent, logical thinking; (2) To render him fairly intelligent in reference to his own scientific environments; (3) To beget a sense of power in his own ability to appreciate scientific truth and to draw legitimate conclusions from simple facts; (4) To teach him to apply the elements of algebra and geometry to the problems of daily life; (5) To arouse within him a deep sense of appreciation of all that modern science has done and is doing for the comfort and