tive work. I do not remember that I have ever in my whole life read a Latin or a Greek book for pleasure, or from any other motive than a sense of duty. I have known two persons who seemed to get a real pleasure out of their knowledge of the classics. I have envied them-I envy them now-and I have always been a little ashamed of my own attitude towards these languages. I know very well that I cannot read a page in Latin or Greek without constant use of the lexicon.

I believe in the usefulness of Latin, with a good many reservations, to be sure, but to an extent reaching beyond the limitations which Mr. Hall approves. I think the Latin to be of far more importance when one studies a Romance language than Mr. Hall would admit. For example, as these letters seem to be personal confessions, I studied French one year in college, and since that time I have read French with some freedom and occasionally with great pleasure. Again, I feel very sure that it is only through Latin that most young people can get a really satisfactory comprehension of the principles of grammar-if there are any principles in it.

I do not believe that any one study offers an intellectual drill superior to that provided. by any other study if pursued with equal earnestness and concentration. But one must consider in any scheme of education the characteristics and intellectual status of pupils as they grow from childhood into young manhood and womanhood. There are many most useful studies which are beyond the capacity of a boy or girl of from eleven to fifteen years. I think that a great deal of the science study in schools is so simplified in order to bring it within the range of young people as to make it rather worse than useless. This applies particularly to physics. In general, the elementary study of Latin has always seemed to me particularly adapted to the mind of youth. My own idea is that boys and girls will get more benefit from two or three years' study of Latin than from this same amount of time devoted to many other studies which are offered in the place of Latin. And I feel further that an exceptional student with a turn for that sort of thing would do well to study a classic tongue for a good deal more than three years.

I cannot say that it did me very much good, but it seems to me that I have observed valuable results of classic study in the English style and the mental attitude of a great many of the thousands of young men

who have passed under my eye during a long experience in school and in college work. F. S. LUTHER,

President of Trinity College.

TRANSIENT KNOWLEDGE AND
PERMANENT EDUCATION

The aim of classical study is not the hedonistic aim. Few living men ever use in after life the studies to which they devoted their years in school or college. That is as true of science as of classical literature. Once upon a time I studied astronomy and could calculate an eclipse. Now I have forgotten every formula in trigonometry, and can calculate nothing. Once I gazed day after day through the microscope in a botanical laboratory. That knowledge has vanished forever. Once I passed a fine examination—me judice -in chemistry. To-day not a formula remains in memory. But the glimpse into nature's laws, processes, methods, and meanings constitutes a priceless possession. That abides, though every fact depart.

66

The chief need of American education is background. We are swept away by a desperate desire for modernity. "The onsurge of the last thirty years,' 77 66 contemporaneous social knowledge,' contemporaneous European newspapers "—such phrases color all Mr. Hall's article. The worship of the contemporaneous, which is really the extemporaneous, means loss of all perspective, disregard of history, callow judgments, superficial reforms, and ready acceptance of panaceas.

Greek undoubtedly has passed into the position of Hebrew-the delight of the chosen few. But the message of Greek civilization must be interpreted afresh to each generation, or the world will be set back a thousand years. Latin still constitutes the most thoroughly ordered and synthesized body of knowledge in the modern world, and hence the best of all known studies for building an ordered mind.

Neither Latin nor Greek will save us. Taught in wooden fashion, they have hurt us. Treated as mere discipline, they have wrought their own nemesis. But those studies-or others devoted to the interpretation of great thinking into modern speech and action-at least will save us from education given solely by short stories and moving pictures, and from the naïve conviction that our own age is the only one worth knowing.

W. H. P. FAUNCE, President of Brown University.

A

SCHOOLMA'AM in a little country school in the Middle West caught one of her pupils puffing on a cigarette behind his desk one afternoon, and, thinking the occasion an auspicious one for the delivery of a pointed lecture on the harmful effects of tobacco in particular and drugs in general, she called all her charges before her.

"Children," she began, "I've just found Brad Jones smoking right here in the schoolroom. Now, you must know that children who begin to smoke soon get the habit, and it is an easy thing for people who are addicted to one drug to become slaves to other and more harmful drugs-like opium, for instance. Do you children know what opium is?"

"Yes, teacher, I know all about it," volunteered a little tot whose head hardly came above the top of her desk.

"What! you know about opium, Jennie?" said the horrified instructor. "How do you know anything about it?"

"Please, teacher, I've seen them make it in the movies. It grows in poppies, and it's lots of fun to see Chinamen smoke it."

When the teacher went home that afternoon, she was thinking of diminutive Jennie's remark, and she decided that, as a factor in education, the moving picture had almost unlimited possibilities. The next year this teacher was called to a school in a large city, and, through the kindness of a philanthropist, she was able to install in her class-room a small cinematograph. She believed that in so doing she was the first to use the "movies " as an aid to education, but she afterwards learned that this had already been done in a few other schools in the United States and Europe.

To-day, in a hundred ways, the motion picture is utilized for educational purposes in the United States and abroad. Of course many pictures not primarily educational, like some of the "travel" films shown in the ordinary picture theaters, and like some of the pictures shown for advertising purposes by industrial corporations, are responsible for the dissemination of a good deal of useful knowledge, but only in a casual way. Every month, however-in fact, every day-the pic

ture that moves is being more and more widely used to serve the ends of education alone.

Not long ago an English rowing coach had his eight-oared crew photographed in action, and when the pictures had been developed he threw them onto a screen and the men saw themselves swaying back and forth in the frail shell-saw which of them were out of time, which were slow on the recovery or too quick on the slides; in short, were made to realize their faults as they could never have been made to realize them by mirrors, still photographs, or any amount of megaphoned comment from the coaching launch.

In Vienna and Düsseldorf the city authorities with movies teach the citizens the proper method of getting on and off street cars, and in this country a year ago a group of manufacturers equipped the "Industrial Betterment Special," a railway train, including lecture cars and a moving-picture theater on wheels, in which thousands of industrial workers saw films that taught them how to avoid accidents in their daily work and how to care for the machinery which they operated.

The United States Department of Agriculture has for some time used moving pictures with good results. The Department is now fitting up special cars to go over the country showing in particular districts the sort of pictures that are of especial interest. there. Thus, in the wheat country, the farmer may gaze at films that will show him the growth of wheat all the way from the planting of the seed through the growth of roots and stalk to the harvesting, and the proper method of shipping after the crop has been harvested. Formerly weeks and even months were necessary for the Department to show the farmer in its experimental stations what it can now show him in twenty minutes with the movies. Whenever one of these "Rubes' Theaters," as the demonstrating cars have been nicknamed, is in a poultry region, the evening's entertainment consists of views of the best ways of raising hens, of packing and storing eggs, or of the best markets and the best routes to them.

The other departments of the Govern

ment are now falling in line with the Department of Agriculture. The Departments of Commerce, of the Interior, of the Navy, and others are preparing or planning to prepare films in order that the public may not only share in the vast amount of useful information which Government experts have collected, but that it may know what the Government is doing with the people's money. Soon citizens can see how the National forests are preserved, how money is coined, how young lobsters are raised in the fisheries, how seals are protected in Alaskan waters by revenue cutters, and what goes on from engine-room to bridge when a big battle-ship unlimbers for action.

Hospitals and boards of health are using moving pictures to throw light on the nature, prevention, and cure of disease; and surgeons are illustrating their lectures before audiences of laymen or of savants with cinematographic views of themselves performing operations. Dr. Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute, and Dr. Doyen, of Paris, are among the more prominent meinbers of the profession who have used this method of spreading information concerning some of the unusual feats of surgery which they have performed. Nervous diseases, which are usually characterized by quick movements, are easily shown on the screen, and when the X-ray is combined with the cinematograph, moving photographs of the stomach in process of digestion or of the palpitating heart may be secured. The newspapers have reported an interesting use of moving pictures by Professor Hugo Münsterberg, of Harvard University, to test the adaptability of young men for the chauffeur's profession. The applicant is seated in an automobile so arranged that the engine will work without moving the car, then the picture of a child crossing a country road is flashed on a screen directly before the car and the young man's psychological reactions are closely noted by the instructor in charge of the examination. If the candidate flinches, he is dismissed; if he coolly reaches for the proper appliances and "stops" the car, he is considered qualified to drive an automobile, so far as "nerve" is concerned.

Welfare organizations and civic bodies have found the motion picture an invaluable ally. Part of the plans of the authorities of Spokane, Washington, for a civic cleaning up included the showing of moving pictures on methods of city cleaning and beautifying to

several thousand school-children, and somewhat similar pictures have been used advantageously in Ohio on the subject of Neighborhood Welfare Work. The Public Health Service of the United States boasts of a film a mile long, which drives home upon those who see it the conviction of the necessity of the observance of the simple rules of public hygiene by all citizens. The Rockefeller hookworm photographs, which are to be shown at the San Francisco Exposition, will afterwards be exhibited in the Southern States, where the hookworm does its deadly work, and where the greatest ally the creature has is ignorance on the part of the people. Even the American Bankers' Association has made use of the movies, and its film, "The Reward of Thrift,” which teaches the advantages of economy, has had a wide circulation. The State Reformatory for Women at Bedford, New York, makes frequent use of films that carry a strong moral lesson, such as "Les Misérables," and in eight Minnesota institutions movies are used to strengthen and redeem the weak and wicked inmates. In some of the insane asylums of Wisconsin and of a few other States the same thing is done.

To the churches the movies have been a blessing. A church in Newark, New Jersey, which had been hard hit by the encroachments of business houses in the parochial neighborhood and by the competition of various modern seductive forces, including, in fact, the motion-picture theater, won back its wayward members and took on a new lease of life by showing for six successive Sunday nights moving photographs of religious subjects. Other churches have been doing likewise, and recently, in both Philadelphia and New York, bureaus have been organized to supply educational and religious films to the Protestant churches of the two cities, for the commercial distributers have only a very limited supply of such films. An organization of Catholics, with headquarters at Huntington, Illinois, has recently been formed to perform the same service for the Catholic churches and parochial schools.

When it comes to the use of moving pictures as an integral part of the curricula of the schools, colleges, and educational boards of the country, we find an extremely chaotic condition. Thousands of schools and colleges are using the cinematograph to teach, but for the most part they are going ahead blindly and alone. The result is that the demand for educational films is unorganized,