it, because it was such hard work to get it out. They could break up the rock in which a little copper was mingled, and cart it out and melt it down and so get at the metal, but these deposits of pure copper they did not know how to manage, for they were too soft to be picked or broken or blasted. But by and by some one thought of the plan of melting them down, and it was done. I wonder whether some of the hard nuts and incorrigible cases we teachers now and then talk about are not really pure nuggets of genius or character, which we vainly try to break with our clumsy methods, but which some day shall yield up their riches unresistingly when they are brought, from center to circumference, under the melting radiance of sympathy and love. They can make armor for a battleship out of ingots of pure steel or scrap iron, but the process is different. If I may continue for a moment on the subject of beginning at the point of contact, I should like to mention with the highest possible commendation a little book on this subject called The Point of Contact in Teaching, by Dr. Patterson Du Bois, one of the editors of the Sunday School Times. In a small compass of less than ninety pages is contained about all that is really essential in the science of Sunday school teaching, or, indeed, of any teaching. May I here give my list of books for a Sunday school teacher's library, outside of the Bible, and commentaries and other helps that are of direct assistance in the interpretation of the Bible? I would make three books indispensable in the library of every Sunday school teacher. If the teachers cannot afford to buy them, the schools ought to buy them for the teachers and furnish a copy to each. These books are "Point of Contact," by Dr. Pattersou: Du Bois, just mentioned, "Picture Work," by Dr. Hervey, and "Beckonings from Little Hands," another book by Dr. Du Bois.* These books are all small and I believe $2.50 would cover the cost of the three. It is absolutely impossible for a teacher to read these books and ever be again as poor a teacher as he or she was before. And may I say again that I could not recommend a single book of more vital interest to parents than the "Beckonings from Little Hands." A vast deal of parental and childish sorrow both would be saved to the world if every father and mother could take the hour or two necessary to read this book with care. Read once, it * These books have been used freely in the preparation of this article. would surely be read again and again. I can hardly resist the temptation to fill all the rest of my space with quotations from this book, and I am only saved from doing so by the difficulty of selecting one passage more deserving than another of being quoted. But I must give a few practical illustrations about the point of contact. One is from an article by Mrs. Mary Cutler in the Sunday School Times. An enthusiastic high school girl having become interested in geology, resolved to make it the basis of bed-time stories for her little brother, and so, night coming around, she asked if Robby would not like to have her tell him night after night one long story about how the earth was made. Robby was a little doubtful and said perhaps so, adding, can't you tell me how the sidewalks were made? Oh, well, she said, we will get to that by and by, but first I must tell you how the earth was made, on which the sidewalks are laid. So the story proceeded with varying degrees of interest on Robby's part, but nothing approaching intense interest, except as he would occasionally ask, with some eagerness, whether she were not getting pretty near the story about the sidewalks. The experiment was not so successful as the girl had hoped, and it was only many years afterwards that she learned that Robby's point of contact with the history of the earth was the sidewalks, which he knew about. She should have begun with the sidewalks and worked outward to the whole wide universe and he would have followed her, but she began with something he knew nothing about, and he really never connected with her story. The oft-repeated pedagogical maxim, proceed from the known to the unknown, is only another way of stating this same truth. Recent investigations in Child Study have shown, among other things, that children have a very weak time sense; that is, their appreciation of time, the length of time, and the relationships and sequences of time, is very slight. So history as history, a mere record of impersonal events of remote causes and effects, is entirely out of his plane of comprehension. The moral is that we make altogether too much of chronology in our teaching of the Bible. The historical parts have the very greatest value to the children, but not as history. As stories, and very interesting stories, they appeal to every child, and as such they should be presented. Again, to tell the average six-year-old child that a virtuous woman is far above rubies, plain as it seems to us, presupposes an experience and acquaintance with the value of rubies and also the relative value of women, which is, after all, when we look at it, far beyond the plane of average adult experience. Once more, it is worse than useless, it is all but sinful, to require children to commit to memory utterly meaningless words. For example, what can such a Golden Text as this mean to a child under ten: "Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light"? Suppose the "elders of the Jews did build and prosper through the prophesying of Haggai, the prophet, and Zechariah, the son of Iddo." What is that to a little child who has no conception of space, time, organized society, or even of our commonest adult conventional ways of doing things? The responsibility is upon us to see that the truths are presented to the children in an order consistent with their capabilities to receive those truths through the medium of their own experience. A studious and intelligent child of nine was studying the Cities of Refuge in a Sunday school lesson. The father tried to explain what refuge meant, and what the City of Refuge was, and then the Sunday school teacher, to make the lesson real, told a dreadful story of the torture which some boys had inflicted upon a companion. The story shocked her and affected her nerves very much, but the idea of a City of Refuge took no hold of her at all. Six months later she visited an old fort. In discussing it her father happened to tell her that it had been a place of refuge for the inhabitants of an adjacent town during an attack of the Indians. Immediately she asked, what is a refuge? Her Sunday school lesson on refuge had been all lost. It had to be explained to her over again, but now she had seen and knew what a refuge was, and after that Cities of Refuge were real things to her. Missionaries in uncivilized countries find their greatest difficulty in gaining a point of contact. One missionary writes: "I have sought in vain for a suitable abstract of Bible history which might be translated. The scenes of civilization are too often brought in, and illustrations fall flat. What is wanted is something vigorous, not requiring much imagination to understand, based on wild native life of the old Israelites." The Africans find no point of contact with our civilization or modes of thought. Our children have few points of contact with ancient Oriental life and modes of thought. How many of us, by the way, can read with any clear apprehension through the Prophets? The Salvation Army makes its appeal to the degraded wretches in the slums through that which is common to their experi ence. It attracts them, not by a map of Paul's. Journeys, but by noise and racket. I cannot help thinking that it was partly in order that children might understand Him that Jesus was born in a manger and grew up through childhood and boyhood and manhood. Dr. Patterson Du Bois tells of an incident of his own child, who was very reserved about relig ious matters. He could not be induced to display any hearty interest in the idea of God or the Savior, but the true chord was touched when, in his Bible pictures in the course of the Sunday evening readings, he came to the New Testament part. As soon as his eye fell upon the picture of the baby Jesus lying in the manger, or a little cot bed, as he called it, a new era opened for him. He began at once to ask questions and show a startling interest in divine affairs. Jesus had been a child. That was enough for him. The little Jesus was what he wanted to know about, and whether Jesus helped people when he was a boy. The cry of theology has been of late yearsback to Christ. We cannot emphasize that cry too much in any part of our activities. We must get back to Christ's standpoint in dealing with children. The Great Teacher of whom I spoke at the beginning never missed the point of contact. He taught in parables, and these referred to the commonest experiences of life, so common, so universal, that there is scarcely one of them that is not just as intelligible to us to-day as it was to those who first heard it on Judea's hillsides nineteen centuries ago. He took men where He found them, met them on their own level, and all who would be teachers to-day must follow His method. He had that insight into character which gave Him perfect sympathy with all whom He met, the same insight that we teachers must get if we will attain our highest success. C. H. THURber, University of Chicago. A Study of Laughter ONE of the delights of my childhood was a "true story" of my mother's writing a composition on laughter, in which she embodied all the somber notions she had gathered from the life and teachings of her preceptor, who was a clergyman of the old school; he was so much pleased with her effort that on returning it he wrote a heavily underscored amen under her last well-turned scriptural allusion to the weeping prophet. The absurdity of it all, and the gravity of the man whose philosophy she had attempted to satirize, so touched the risibles of the merry school girl that she broke into a peal of laughter in that solemn hour of judgment and criticism of composition, which so discomfited the good man that his anger blazed up, and snatching the essay from her hand he tore it in two, and both master and maid stood self-rebuked before the school, one for uncontrolled anger, the other for ill-timed laughter. The great primal emotions of anger and fear, with the impulse to laugh and cry alike when stirred by the deepest of them, quite as certainly as when tickled with a straw or by a witticism, have lain unexplained and misunderstood longer than the material forces of Nature have waited for man to appropriate them. The syllabus on laughter, crying, and the tickle sense issued from Clark University last year must have seemed to many, as it certainly did to me, of minor importance in the study of children. It was such a commonplace fact that children laughed when the soles of their feet were lightly touched, that some of them laughed immoderately even if a finger were pointed at them, and that most of us have a severe course of self-discipline in the inhibition of laughter as we pass from childhood to adolescence these seemed so very matter of fact that to have them traced back to prehistoric influences and causes gives one a glimpse of the significance of life which is most stimulating and uplifting. Perhaps one of the most surprising facts brought to notice by the voluminous returns to this syllabus is the one relating to the frequent pain and contortions of laughter. We are apt to think of laughter on the pleasing side of its expressions, allowing the discordant cackling, the disagreeable convulsions, and even occasional tragic consequences, to hide from our contemplation, as if when these forms were assumed or lapsed into it were no longer fun and laughter, but some horrid lie or phantasma. goria, slipping like a thief or murderer into the place so lately occupied by a merry comrade. Who has not laughed until keen physical pain forced him to hold his sides and check the current of thought which threatened to choke him? Who has not heard the exaggerated speech, "I laughed until I thought I should die," or, "I was dying to laugh," or the schoolboy's bold assertion that he fairly "busted" with laughter? From age to age men have laughed in beautiful unconsciousness of the physiological significance of it; and to find this primitive characteristic, which, like language, distinguishes man from the lower animals, may have the deepest significance in the evolution of the soul, makes one turn to introspection with a sense of added dignity and self-reverence. Court fools and satirists, clowns and caricaturists, have played upon men as upon laughing instruments. Lugubrious men and abnormal women have fought against laughter in children and attempted to banish its sound from the world; anathemas have been hurled at it from cell and altar; books have been written, from one of which I quote the following: "Children learn to laugh, not because they like it, or because they are pleased, but solely because they are tickled; and the association of tickling and laughing thus become so intimate that children actually begin to laugh when they merely see the hand of some one approaching with the apparent intention of tickling them. This is evidence, amounting to demonstration, that the original and only cause of the laughter of young children is their being tickled; the inference is undeniable, namely, that if they were not tickled they would not laugh. Such being the case, it necessarily follows that laughter is artificially induced, and consequently is unnatural." This author claims that the moral world owes John Milton both pity and contempt for certain parts of L'Allegro," in which he invites "heart easing Mirth" to minister to man, and one lays down at least one book on laughter with a bewildered notion that its author missed success with an intended satire or else was mildly mad. Literature abounds, as we know, in pleasing references to laughter. From Minnehaha to Falstaff one may go laughing sometimes in a merry company, but we like to turn from Wordsworth's way of looking at a butterfly to that of Darwin's. Such is the difference between laughter in literature and laughter as considered by the scientific men at Clark Uni versity, upon whose studies and conclusions I draw by permission for the remainder of this article. Beginning with tickling, their returns show that children are ticklish in the following order: Soles of the feet, 117; under the arms, 104; neck, 86; under the chin, 76; waist and ribs, 60; cheeks, 58; knee, 25; down the back, 19; behind the ears, 15; all over, 15; palms, 14; corners of mouth, 8; breast, 8; nose, 7; legs, 5; elbows, 3; lips, 3, etc. Sixty clearly marked cases show more ticklishness when nervous or after a good meal or when in very best physical condition. In his resume of the whole subject, soon to be published, President G. Stanley Hall reminds us that primitive organisms had only the sense of touch, and that for them there was no sense of gradual approach, but danger was announced by sudden shock of touch and caused reactions of escape or resistance. From these shocks we may conjecture that the senses of sight, smell, and hearing were finally evolved, and the growing psychic life at last distinguished between dangerous and harmless contacts. The lips are tickled by a straw, but not by the firm pressure of the hand upon them; do not these minimal touch excitations thus represent the oldest stratum of psychic life in the soul, and have in their strange sensitiveness and energy reminiscences of the primeval vigor and spontaneity of the dawn of psychic life in the world. There is sufficient food for thought in these suggestions about the significance of the tickle sense to lead one to pause at the very outset of the study and get one's psychic orientation before attempting to follow the profound moral sig. nificance of the various causes of laughter which President Hall treats in his forthcoming paper. West Roxbury, Mass. SARAH E. WILTSE. Study of Pupils' Preferences HE following study of pupils' preferences is based upon a careful canvass of 2,181 papers, written as a language exercise by third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade pupils of the Sioux City (Iowa) schools, in response to the following questions: 1. What school study do you like best? Why? 4. What is your most unpleasant work out of school? Why? The teachers also sent in statements of their preferences as far as school studies were concerned. The purposes for which the above exercise was given were: 1. To give teachers an insight into their pupils' preferences in regard to school and other work, so as to bring them into closer touch and sympathy with their pupils. 2. To raise the inquiry whether or not teachers' preferences for certain studies lead them to put more thought, energy, and skill into the teaching of such studies, and thus largely shape their pupils' preferences. 3. To disclose to teachers, through their pupils' lack of interest, in what subjects they are, probably, doing their poorest teaching. 4. To reveal to teachers those outside interests of pupils which may be utilized in arousing interest in school work that has unfortunately become distasteful. The following is a tabular view of the results obtained in regard to the investigations of pupils' likes and dislikes of school studies, in which subjects of the curriculum are ar ranged in the order of preference as correctly as possible. A word of explanation is, however, necessary. Geography is not taught beyond the middle of seventh grade, nor writing beyond the sixth, nor history, by text-book, in any but the seventh and eighth grades, nor civil government in any but senior eighth grade. Hence an exact average of all these studies cannot be tabulated, although in the case of geography it is approximately correct. The average age of each grade can be approximated by adding six to the grade, or, third grade pupils average about nine years, etc. A study of the table presented discloses many interesting facts, some familiar and some otherwise. Every observing teacher is familiar with the fact that boys generally prefer arithmetic, while girls usually are more interested in geog. raphy and language. Our table shows that arithmetic heads the list for both boys and girls, the boys having a constantly increasing per cent, beginning with 30% 2. What school study do you like least? in the third grade and ending with 50% in the Why? eighth grade, or an average of 38%, while the 3. What is your most pleasant work out of girls begin with 28% in third grade and end with school? Why? 39% in eighth grade, or an average of 34%. What about the teachers' preferences? They have, as might be anticipated from the high per cent of girls' preferences for arithmetic, a more decided leaning toward that subject than their pupils, beginning with 35% in third grade, and ending with 62% in eighth grade, or an average of 49% throughout. Here, no doubt, teachers' preferences have much to do in shaping pupils' preferences, but the high per cent on part of pupils is not wholly due to the teachers' love of the subject. There is a kind of fascination which grows out of the exactness in the operations of arithmetic. The pupil is lured on to storm the strongholds of his problems, and capture the answers as trophies of his skill, as the soldier is lured on by the honors and spoils of war. Then, too, there is the common delusion that arithmetic is the most practical of studies, because it affords such excellent training for the reasoning powers, when the fact is that there is but little use for such exact reasoning, since conclusions in real life are reached almost entirely through the balancing of probabilities. The subject next highest in favor is geography. Here the boys again lead the girls. The per cents do not increase as uniformly as in arithmetic, but the decrease in seventh grade,the highest grade in which geography is taught, -is due to the fact that it is only taught the first half of that grade. The maximum of pupils' preference is reached in sixth grade, that of teachers in fourth. Nevertheless, pupils' preferences follow pretty closely on that of the teachers, although averages run as follows: Teachers 20%, boys 29%, girls 22%. Had such an investigation as this been made no longer than ten years ago, geography would not have ranked second in pupils' preferences, but at the foot of the list. Why this change? All because of a better marshalling of the facts. Geography as taught ten years ago presented a vast mass of disconnected facts, and only appealed to the carrying power of the memory, upon which it attempted to place intolerable burdens. Like the Pharisees of old, it bound heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and offered no compensations. What wonder that |