drilled on in class; or that they should translate Spanish into a mongrel English, are matters of no little concern to an exact and painstaking teacher. More than persistent drilling by the teacher is necessary; it is essential that the student's attitude change from one of indifference to one of interest and precision.

The inordinate hurry of the average student to consider an assignment done is largely responsible for poor work. In college, it is not too much to give an assignment of outside work calling for one and a half to three hours of preparation. It is doubtful if the average amount of preparation on Spanish is more than three-quarters of an hour. Most students either stop studying at the end of so much time; or go over an assignment superfiicially so as to get through it in a certain period. Few stay with their work until they know it thoroughly; fewer still divide their preparation into two or three parts. The work is learned mechanically and imperfectly, and is mostly forgotten before the student takes his seat in class.

And at bottom, the problem is that of the poor student. It is no difficulty inherent in English or Spanish, or in the system used, in the text book, or the teacher. A good student learns in spite of handicaps, and the poor student is ever on the lookout for an alibi. The poor student wants to get along on a minimum of effort; accordingly, he resents whatever has even the appearance of being an additional load.

What has already been said may be sufficient to show something of the need of a closer interworking of English and foreign languages. English is a tool which (a symbol of the mind that directs it) is vital to every college man who takes his work seriously; and Spanish, or any foreign language, projects a man's vision beyond the confines of his own mother tongue. Now, the commercial value of Spanish, in view of the small number who ever use it after leaving school or college, pales beside its specific value as a cultural and informative medium, wherein it is ancillary to English. English and Spanish (or French or German or Italian) are more or less kin in their pedagogical value-and Spanish adds even to

the richness of English. As long, therefore, as both are housed in the same temple, there should be some communion between them.

How can this co-operation be worked? Co-operation between the two cannot be effected by requiring English or Spanish teachers to add to their present load. Either both must be lightened of their charge to allow time for the additional work; or new men, specialists perhaps, must be added to take care of the additional work. Such a step must be made definitely, and in regular program; anything other than that, when tried out, does not work. No department need give up its autonomy, either; but each could make definite provision to enlarge some of its own work by a certain co-operation with the other.

One way the plan could work would be as follows. Every Spanish examination of any length has a certain amount of translation from Spanish into English. Papers calling for a fairly extensive passage in English could be corrected by the Spanish examiner for the mechanics of style.

The chief objection here is that the English work can be secured by less indirect ways, and that the first examiner wants the Spanish knowledge irrespective of the garb in which it is clothed. This is a real injustice to the student. It makes his work a series of parallel channels, with no communication between them. Were the history, the civics work, the scientific papers, and so on, subjected to English criticism as well as criticism of subject matter, the general intelligence of the student would be sharpened, he would be more careful all along the line, and the whole level of all work would be slowly but surely raised.

Specialization has been carried too far-many studies are artificial, unrelated to life. We can advantageously continue our specialization, but we must relate specialties one to the other; else, we have a dismembered organism. With the practical trend of modern education, language work, including English, has been subjected to considerable criticism. Nothing could make English a more vital and desirable subject than giving it its proper place in foreign language work.

T

Biology in the Public Schools

E. F. ANDREWS, ROME, GA.

•MK HERE has been much discussion recently about the indifference, not to say opposition to the teaching of biological science in the public schools. The reasons given for this unfortunate state of affairs may be referred to two heads: faulty methods in teaching; and ignorance or misunderstanding on the part of parents and the public generally, as to the educational value of biology, and their consequent failure to appreciate the reasons which entitle it to a place in our scheme of popular education. Then, too, the growing agitation for vocational training has tended to blind the public mind to the equally pressing claims of cultural training, which is as important to the welfare of the race as vocational training to that of the individual. As usual in such cases, the more immediate and personal interest has obscured the more remote and general, and impressed the mind of the unthinking multitude with the idea that to make a student learn anything that will not be of direct use to him in earning a living is labor thrown away. At the same time, unattractive methods often employed in teaching give the pupils a distaste to the subject, which helps to strengthen the prejudice against it in their homes. By a singular misfit in our educational arrangements, it happens that biological courses have been provided for, mainly, in the high schools of the larger cities, where money is plentiful for laboratory equipment, but conditions are most unfavorable for popularizing the subject. On the other hand, in the strictly rural districts, where the minds of the pupils are responsive and nature is prodigal of material, botany and zoology are practically ignored.

It is not a question here of "pure science," or of training experts for research, but of training the minds of immature boys and girls in scientific habits of thought and broadening

their outlook upon life by a more or less elementary, but so far as it goes, accurate study of life itself. The teacher, if he is anything of a biologist himself, knows that each individual of us epitomizes in his own mental development the successive stages through which the race has passed in the course of its long evolutionary history, and that the average high school boy (or girl) is, with the exception of a much wider experience, in about the same phase of psychological development as the American Indian when Columbus discovered America. He cares nothing for generalities; abstractions bore him, and things alien to his experience are indifferent to him. He is interested in the concrete, the tangible, the visible, and to hold his attention, his studies must be linked with objects familiar to his environment. In the congested districts of large cities like New York and Chicago, suitable material for this purpose is not easy to find, and this difficulty has probably led to a too exclusive adherence to laboratory work, with its generalizations about carbo-hydrates and proteins, and osmosis and photosynthesis, which are apt to prove both irksome and unprofitable to youthful minds unless they have first learned from their own observation, something about the more obvious and striking features-flowers, fruits, leaves, etc., of the plants in which these processes are taking place. It is not within the scope of this paper to suggest details for teaching, but those interested are referred to the admirable paper by Francis T. Hughes of the Boys' High School, Brooklyn, published in Torreya, Vol. 19, No. 4.

The second part of our subject-the reasons why biology should occupy a prominent place in the high school curriculum, have been summed up in an able article in the same issue of Torreya (Vol. 19, No. 4) by Paul B. Mann of the Evander Childs High School, N. Y., under five heads-of which the two most important are: The imperative need of biology as the most natural means for the presentation of sex hygiene, and the necessity of popular biologic education to insure wise legislation.

In regard to the first point, if the present generation had

been educated in the fundamentals of biology, the much disputed question as to the teaching of sex hygiene in the schools would have settled itself long ago in a perfectly clean and natural way, and we might have been spared the deluge of erotic novels and mawkish picture plays exploiting the adventures of the girl who has gone wrong, under the pretense of giving "sex hygiene"! The veil of mystery in which ignorance and superstition have shrouded the reproductive processes would have ceased to excite prurient curiosity in the minds of young people who had studied them in the simple process of plant fertilization and in the lower forms of animal life, where they are so impersonal, so remote from our own self-consciousness that they can be freely discussed in any company without causing embarrassment. And yet, I have heard a foolish mother object to the study of botany because it teaches about the ovaries, which she considered a very indelicate subject to be mentioned in the presence of young girls!

The existence of ignorance like this among people who pass for educated is a striking demonstration of the need for popular biologic teaching to insure not only a little common sense in dealing with questions of social morality, but for the cultivation of a broader mental vision which looks to the well-being of all mankind. Eugenics, the youngest of the sciences, and the one which concerns the future welfare of the race most nearly, is a direct offshoot from the botanical experiments of an Austrian monk with his sweet peas; and our only hope of improving the human race-if not, indeed, of saving it from deterioration, is dependent upon the wisdom of the legislation enacted by the coming generation, and the intelligent co-operation of the citizens in carrying it out. The problems to be faced are, to a large extent, purely biological ones and can be handled successfully only by a citizenry acquainted with the fundamentals of biology-the science of life. And the only means by which this knowledge can be freely imparted to all, is through the agency of the public schools.