Elementary Schools how to Increase Their Utility: Being Six Lectures Delivered to the Managers of the London Board Schools in 1889 and 1890 With a Preface by William Bousfield ..

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Percival & Company King Street, Covent Garden London, 1890 - 189 pages

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Page xvii - ... to bring up the children in habits of punctuality, of good manners and language, of cleanliness and neatness, and also to impress upon the children the importance of cheerful obedience to duty, of consideration and respect for others, and of honour and truthfulness in word and act.
Page 26 - Yet, it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and, more or less, of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules...
Page 26 - ... check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn upon the father who allowed his son, or the State which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a knight? Now, it is a very plain and elementary truth...
Page 173 - And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.
Page 13 - ... iron, she now substitutes the mechanical action of the viewless air. She has enlisted the sunbeam in her service to limn for us, with absolute fidelity, the faces of the friends we love. She has shown the poor miner how he may work in safety, even amid the explosive fire-damp of the mine. She has, by her anaesthetics, enabled the sufferer to be hushed and unconscious while the delicate hand of some skilled operator cuts a fragment from the nervous circle of the unquivering eye. She points not...
Page 25 - Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game at chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces ; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting...
Page 17 - It quickens and cultivates directly the faculty of observation, which in very many persons lies almost dormant through life, the power of accurate and rapid generalization, and the mental habit of method and arrangement ; it accustoms young persons to trace the sequence of cause and effect ; it familiarizes them with a kind of reasoning which interests them, and which they can promptly comprehend; and it is perhaps the best corrective for that indolence which is the vice of half-awakened minds, and...
Page 12 - ... know well that in the achievements of science there is not only beauty and wonder, but also beneficence and power. It is not only that she has revealed to us infinite space crowded with unnumbered worlds, infinite time peopled by unnumbered existences, infinite organisms hitherto invisible but full of delicate and iridescent loveliness ; but also that she has been, as a great archangel of mercy, devoting herself to the service of man. She has...
Page 98 - No line can be drawn between common knowledge of things and scientific knowledge ; nor between common reasoning and scientific reasoning. In strictness all accurate knowledge is science, and all exact reasoning is scientific reasoning. The method of observation and experiment by which such great results are obtained in science is identically the same as that which is employed by every one, every day of his life, but refined and rendered precise.
Page xxvii - MECHANICAL POWERS are certain simple instruments employed in raising greater weights, or overcoming greater resistance than could be effected by the direct application of natural strength. They are usually accounted six in number; viz. the Lever, the Wheel and Axle, the Pulley, the Inclined Plane, the Wedge, and the Screw.

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