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classroom. It holds that the student should have read as much as that to give him the mass of words necessary for a reading vocabulary, tho he may have studied and recited carefully perhaps only three or four hundred. Careful work at the beginning with much question and answer makes rapid work possible later, and a class so trained will read in the end twice as much as is possible by the old translation method and will thoroly enjoy the process. Such a class should be able in the third year of the high school course to read with enjoyment and appreciation some of the simpler of the literary masterpieces of the language they are studying and to read them, as literature should always be read, from the point of view of thought and form, not of vocabulary and grammatical construction.

VASSAR College

MARIAN P. WHITNEY

VIII

DISCUSSION

THE HIGH SCHOOL HYDRA: A REPLY

In the November, 1915, number of EDUCAtional ReVIEW Helen Babcock Latham, under the caption of The high school hydra, revives the high school fraternity question. She thinks:

1. That in our efforts to suppress fraternities we are unjustly exacting blind obedience from our students.

2. That the control or direction of these fraternities must rest with the parents, and the Juvenile Court!

In each of these contentions she is mistaken. High school fraternities have been proscribed for the same reason that the sale of opium is prohibited. Experience has shown that high school fraternities are a blight upon the school and upon the individual. Like opium, they have been labeled "poisonous," but if people will persist in cultivating a craving for them, then they must be outlawed absolutely.

To illustrate, I have a boy who is interested in poultry. He undertook to raise several lots of chicks during August and September, in the face of a divided opinion on the advisability of trying to raise chicks so late in the season. He endeavored to help matters by hatching them under hens in preference to incubators, and he even took pains to purchase from a neighbor some hens that would surely be good mothers. The chicks hatched and got along nicely for a few weeks. Then some of them began to die, showing symptoms of dizziness and partial paralysis. Investigation revealed the cause. Those that suffered were out of a brood that were allowed to run in a field containing a weed known as "deadly night-shade." As soon as they were penned up the trouble ceased.

Deadly night-shade in small doses may not be poison

ous to full-grown fowl-it is even used as a medicine for human beings, but it is too strong medicine for young chicks. Fraternal organizations may be good for mature persons, and college fraternities are beneficial for college men in some ways, but the high school fraternity, with its secret oaths, night entertainments-frequently with cigarette accompaniments, its hand-me-down friendships, is too strong medicine for immature minds. The mother hen was wise in her way, but because she was powerless to safeguard her flock against the insidious poison of the deadly night-shade, it became necessary to lock up both mother and chicks to exact of them blind obedience, in other words. If the danger had been from a coyote or from a hawk, the mother hen would have raised a cry that would have brought my boy to the scene with a shot-gun, somewhat in the capacity of a juvenile court of last resort. But when it comes to deadly night-shade, the best remedy is to pen up and protect the flock until the weed is rooted out.

Miss Latham admits that fraternity members have sought refuge "in evasion, subterfuge and deception, and she seems to uphold them in so doing. The unlovely picture she draws is like that of an opium fiend seeking to crave his appetite. She would argue that because the opium eater does these same things, and persists in doing them, we should lift the ban that has been placed upon opium. High school students as a body are clean, wholesome young people, and they are not to be compared with the degenerate opium eater, but in one particular the analogy holds: it has been mainly the weaklings who have defied the anti-fraternity laws, placing themselves in the position of outlaws, skulking thru the back alleys, as it were, like hunted animals, and fearing to face the constituted authorities of the school. They may think that they are suffering a martyrdom, as Miss Latham claims, but as a rule their suffering is akin to the craving of a depraved appetite, or is the incipient stage of a withered mentality. GEORGE A. MERRILL

SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

A short history of English.

IX

REVIEWS

HENRY CECIL WYLD, University of Liverpool, London. John Murray. 1914. 240 p.

Readers of Professor Wyld's Historical study of the mother tongue (1906) and other of his publications will be prepared to welcome this most recent addition to the equipment of the teacher and student of the English language. A short history of English is not intended for the wide general public, but for those students who have some knowledge of English in its historical aspects, that is, who have read texts of the earlier periods, and who wish to secure a scientific and moderately thoro understanding of the language from the point of view of its grammatical development. Both what the book does and what it refrains from doing are significant. Professor Wyld excludes altogether the discussion of vocabulary, his reason for doing so being that this subject has been treated "at great length, and very competently, in many other books." To this he might have added that vocabulary, by its nature, is the side of language which the undisciplined student can most readily understand. Words come into languages, or modify their meanings, in ways which are fairly obvious and intelligible to anyone who is observant of social innovations and customs. On the other hand, Professor Wyld has omitted all formal discussion of what is perhaps the most difficult division of the history of the language, that is, syntax. But here again his judgment was sound. Syntax is the least tractable of all the aspects of language from the point of view of systematization and organization. A short history of English could not have treated this subject adequately, and a brief sketch for the beginner would have served no useful purpose. By the exclusion of vocabulary and syntax, Professor Wyld has been able to

center attention upon the history of English sounds and inflections, the two sides of language which unquestionably provide the most significant and fundamental body of fact, both for professional and non-professional students of language. His limitation of subject has also permitted him to treat sounds and inflections with a fullness that approaches scientific exhaustiveness. So far as it goes, the book is thoro, and the student who masters the content of it will have a good foundation knowledge of the history of the English language and a sound preparation for further and more special study. The reviewer would emphasize, with Professor Wyld, the principle that the student "must get away from textbooks as soon as possible, or use them but as servants and guides." The purpose of studying textbooks on language is to be able to study texts, and it is only by going to texts at first hand that the student of the English language will learn to realize that the textbooks on the history of the language do not contain an ultimate summary of final and inalterable facts.

Inexperienced students often find it a cold plunge to be thrown immediately into the study of sounds or phonetics. And yet this branch of the study of language is so much a prerequisite to any further study, that it seems a sheer waste of time to dilly-dally over more general and often non-linguistic ways of approach. The reviewer agrees with Professor Wyld that the study of sounds is "necessarily the backbone of all serious courses of study, whether in universities, or among private students who wish to be more than amateurs. On no side of the study does the untrained dabbler in etymology show his incapacity so much as on questions which demand an exact knowledge of the sound laws of the various dialects of Old and Middle English. But even those who have an elementary working knowledge of the sound changes of the Old and Middle English, are often very much at sea when it comes to following the history of English sounds beyond the Middle English period." The language has by no means remained stationary since the death of Chaucer,

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