in the course is M. Henri Marion, professor of the science of education. He holds a series of practical conferences with his students, who then spend two weeks in the Lycées of Paris. This experience concluded, they are divided into groups, and each group receives detailed instruction from the professor in charge of the subject that the members of the group are preparing themselves to teach. While only the beginning of a more comprehensive plan, this system is practical and efficient. This Bulletin Universitaire, which is published as a supplement to the well-known Révue Internationale de l'Enseignement, has been established for the purpose of publishing to a wider public the various lectures and conferences that are given as part of the above plan. It should have many careful readers in America.

DAS STAATSSEMINAR FÜR PÄDAGOGIK. Von Dr. E. VON SALLWÜRK. Gotha: Emil Behrend, 1890, S. 40.

An interesting and forcible argument for institutions, separate from the universities, to give to intending teachers in secondary schools some instruction in the principles and practice of their art. The author insists that the universities are not organized so as to do all that is required; a Staatsseminar für Padagogik is necessary in addition.

PRUSSIAN SCHOOLS THROUGH AMERICAN EYES; a report to the New York State Department of Public Instruction, By JAMES RUSSELL PARSONS, Jr., late U. S. Consul at Aix-la-Chapelle. Syracuse, N. Y.: C. W, Bardeen, 1891, pp. vii, 82.

Mr. Parsons is to be congratulated on having compiled this painstaking statement, and Mr. Bardeen on having rescued it from the undeserved obscurity of an official publication. The teacher who wishes to know exactly what the much praised Prussian elementary schools do, and on what their excellence depends, will find it set forth here compactly and clearly. The New York reader will have the additional benefit of frequent comparisons between Prussian educational details and those in his own State. All those wise persons who are sure that America can work out its own pedagogic salvation without learning from the experience of any other nation, especially Germany, should not read this book. It might disturb their equanimity.

N. M. B.

VIII.

EDUCATION IN FOREIGN PERIODICALS.

66

Some Characteristics of a Sound Mind.

'MRS. SOPHIE BRYANT, D. Sc., IN "THE EDUCATIONAL TIMES."

When it is desired to ascertain the size and shape of a room the problem is easily solved by the application of a foot rule, and the use of certain well-known geometrical and arithmetical principles. With this example in mind it is possible to conceive of an enterprising pedagogue who might seek to gauge the kind and magnitude of the human minds committed to his care in terms of the various faculties which, to use the popular phrase, they possess. The estimates of such a one would be stated somewhat as follows: Perception, 60°; Con-⚫ ception, 50°; Imagination, 10°; Reasoning, 5°, and so on. For the estimate of moral qualities he might, in his imaginings, use a similar process, and thus, having applied his tape measure all round the intellectual and moral man, he would assign to each subject of measurement his proper place in a list of candidates competing for places.

"Now I am not going to assert that this notion of applying the tape measure to the qualities of the inner man is so wholly fallacious as to be quite useless for the practical purpose of selecting candidates for particular offices in certain cases. That physical qualities can be so measured has been shown by several, Mr. Francis Galton being probably the best known' experimenter; and in a sense, faculty, as well as knowledge, is measured in all examinations. Indeed, I have no doubt we could measure in ways similar to those employed in physical measurements, though less accurately, some of a man's intellectual powers. The difficulty, however, even in a partial way, is very great, so great that only those who have tried can easily appreciate how great it is, and the notion that the whole character of the man or child could be apprehended by meas urements ever so distinctly approximate, as one apprehends the size and magnitude of a physical object, is one which can only be characterized as an inconsiderate dream.

"One reason why we cannot measure the more fundamental

features of character is that they are all mutually involved, and another is that we cannot possibly select a unit of measurement in the ordinary physical sense. Now, reflection on this source of difficulty suggests the thought that, after all, though we cannot measure A's faculties as we measure his height and weight, we could estimate A's humanity as a whole by comparing his manifested character as a whole with the typical character proper to him by his divergence from the type. This normally developed type is, in fact, the only unit possible to us. It is not a unit proper, but a maximum or limit. Average human nature will not answer instead, partly because we cannot determine, except when statistics are applicable, what average human nature is, and, moreover, the average changes from age to age. On the other hand, we can determine the characteristics of the type, first, because we have a knowledge, more or less, of the type as that which at our very best we tend to become; and, secondly, because, looking outside ourselves, we know the type by the fruits it brings forth, moral use and intellectual truth.

"In the intellectual sphere, doubt and difficulty as to the nature of the type are least when we look to the objective test of a good intellect, namely, its habit of thinking and finding the truth. When we do not digress into metaphysical subtleties, we know quite well what we can mean by truth. It is therefore not so hopeless-I will not say it is not hard-to determine generally the character of the truth-producing mind, and the truth-producing mind is the mind of sound intellect. Ability to find truth is the general mark of a sound intellect, sound in sense, sound in judgment, and sound in reasoning. Such an intellect is subject to no illusions of sense, does not see things where they are not and as they are not, does not hear statements that were never made nor report events as they never occurred, but hears, sees, and therefore reports accurately in accordance, that is to say, with the actual facts of the case. The sound mind, for instance, sees a shadow on the wall or a moonbeam through the window, when another sees a hooded ghost. Such a mind, moreover, rightly interprets the impressions received, bringing to bear on them the full light of its previous experience: it judges soundly, it sees things whole; it does not muddle new impressions and old together, but understands in orderly, consistent sequence those relations of the new to the old which make the new intelligible. It appre

ciates the fact that a noise in the street is not the sound of a gunpowder explosion, and that the baby's cry upstairs is not that of an infant in dire distress. Just as in sound perception we say that is not so and so, meaning that the fact is different from the idea as which we were about to perceive it, so in sound judgment we say precisely the same thing, meaning to condemn the inference which too hastily springs into being, because we keep our heads and note that the facts are not consistent with our theory. The sound intellect observes accurately, judges soundly; it also reasons correctly, and the correctness of its reasoning is a simple consequence of the soundness of its judgments. It rejects pairs of inconsistent judgments unrelentingly, just as it condemns the moonlight ghosts and the slovenly single judgments—the false interpretations of fact by thought, through lack of steadiness in perceiving that facts and ideas are inconsistent with each other. Reasoning differs from judgment only in this, that in reasoning we compare ideas only with ideas for the time, and reason correctly if we leave no inconsistencies behind. A sound reasoner may not indeed see his way to escape inconsistencies which press on him from the facts of the case, but the mark of his soundness is his sense of the inconsistency, and his everpresent desire to get rid of it.

"A mind, therefore, is sound-sound in perception, sound in judgment, sound in reasoning-when, and when only, it is active in the rejection of inconsistencies between thought and things, and wide-awake, therefore, also, to receive every scrap of information that comes to it, shedding new light of consistency or inconsistency on its contents. It must be, at one and the same time, an open, docile, receptive mind and a strictly accurate, logical mind, insistent upon seeing truth for itself, solid and transparent through and through."

C. M. IN THE

The School of the Future.

ZEITUNG FÜR DAS HÖHERE UNTERRICHTSWESEN DEUTSCHLANDS." The school of the future will be free from top to bottom. Neither in form nor in fact will it be the privilege or possession of the rich: for the state must rest upon the truth that virtue and usefulness, wherever found, are to be sought out and developed. Free instruction alone will not suffice to accom

plish this. If the poverty of parents is not to be permitted to narrow, as it now does so often, the future opportunities of a child, the state must stand ready to care for him up to that time when he is able to pass an intelligent judgment upon his own prospects and provide for his own support. Up to such a time, perhaps then to the seventeenth year of life, the state must make proper provision for the sustenance and care of every child whose parents are too poor to provide either for his material or intellectual care. The question as to the parents' poverty could readily be determined by reference to the assessments made for the purposes of taxation.

"When this comes to pass there will be a real aristocracy of the educated. One can readily see that then the German people will exercise a material and intellectual influence in the world, to which that gained mainly by force of arms will be: scarcely comparable."

The School for Oriental Languages at Berlin.

M. J. DARMESTETER IN THE 'RÉVUE POLITIQUE ET LITTÉRAIRE."

"The organizer and director of the school is Dr. Edward Sachau, ordinary professor in the University and member of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin. Although still young, having been born in 1845, Dr. Sachau is the most comprehensive, and perhaps the best known, of German Orientalists. He studied Semitic and Aryan languages at Kiel, Leipsic, and Berlin, and then passed two years in the libraries of London and Oxford. In 1869 he accepted a chair at the University of Vienna, and quitted it in 1876 to become a professor at Berlin. Having been charged by his government with studying, principally in France and England, the methods of practical instruction in the Oriental languages, he found in the school of Paris that of which he was in search, and the Berlin institution reproduces faithfully the spirit and the letter of the Convention's decree, made in the year III on the 10 Germinàl.

"The object of the school is practical instruction in the Oriental languages and in the facts (Realien) relative to the corresponding geographical domain-namely, the religious customs and usages, geography, statistics, modern history, etc. The programme comprises: (1) instruction in the grammar and vocabulary of daily life and commerce; (2) language exer