our time, outline drawing has not formed an essential part of common school training (does it now?), and our inexpert fingers could have drawn only a clumsy, distorted caricature, which would have excited the scorn and ridicule of our scholars, instead of rousing their interest into frantic delight.

Since that time outline maps have multipled from a bare skeleton outline to the highly finished pictures of Guyot's series, in which we see exhibited the physical geography, the physiology, so to say, of each portion of the earth's surface. We have also introduced map-drawing into our schools as best calculated to impress the features of a country upon the memory. Various plans have been devised to make the execution of such copies easier and more accurate. Still, something was wanting to enable very young learners to draw correct maps without rules and compasses, without laborious measurements and the cumbrous machinery of meridians and parallels of latitude, or without the rather equivocal expedient of copying the original through transparent paper. The strictly scientific method by trigonometrical triangulation and the traverse table was, in their case, clearly out of the question.

Apgar's Geographical Map-Drawing is, I believe, the latest as it is the happiest attempt to popularize that pretty and useful school-exercise, map-drawing. In the primary department of Antioch College, I saw, a few weeks ago, boys and girls, so little that in order to reach the blackboard, they had to be exalted on stools, perfectly at home in this ingenious and simple mode of triangulation, constructing their square as a starting-point, drawing diagonals and circles, using for a rule a long string hanging from the wall, to whose lower extremity was appended a piece of cloth for a rubber. There they were, bisecting, trisecting, quadrisecting lines, constructing equilateral, isosceles, scalene triangles, whose sides were to bear a definite ratio to the base-line of the whole plan. Under their deft little fingers, there would spring up, in due time, an irregular rectilinear figure, with here and there an arc of a circle; every corner of this figure coincided with some important point in the map, a cape, the estuary of a river, the mouth of a bay, the first link in a mountain-chain. This done, the performer drew from memory, as before, the waving outline of the intended country; then, as after the erection of a building the scaffolding is taken down, and the edifice stands revealed in its graceful proportions, so our little architects with a corner of their dusters, delicately rubbed out the lines

which they had so carefully laid down, and there remained clearly exposed to view, a correct outline of the country. The rest of the map was finished much in the usual fashion; only by a simple mode of conventional notation, the relative height of mountains and population of cities were indicated. In these internal details, however, they were still assisted by the intersection of lines which marked some of the leading points.

I wish it were practicable to illustrate by diagrams what must be vague in a merely verbal description; but to those who feel interested in the subject, and would like to set a class of ten or twelve youngsters busily happy at map-drawing all round the blackboards, (with which every school-room should be lined,) I would say: Get the book and study it for yourself; in half a day you will know as much about it as I do; and, after a week's practice, your young scholars will be nearly as expert as yourself. It is published by Cowperthwait & Co., of Philadelphia, the publishers of Warren's Physical Geography. Besides its special directions for map-drawing, it contains much excellent matter as to the proper way of teaching the elements of geography to young children, the natural division of the subject. It contains small but very clear outline maps, and descriptions of countries adapted to the understanding of primary scholars. Short but clear directions are given for drawing the diagrams that form the foundation of each particular country. These are introduced in the order of their relative complexity, beginning with South America and ending with Europe and France.

The plan has been sufficiently tested at Antioch College to warrant the confidence with which I do recommend its adoption to live teachers of primary geography, who are justly dissatisfied with the humdrum way of perverting a delightful study into a formal, lifeless repetition of proper names learned by rote.

Children, previously drilled in local geography according to the principles so clearly laid down in E. E. White's little work, and then drilled in this pretty and easy method of map-drawing, will come fully prepared to appreciate the splendid maps of Guyot's series. Thus will the noble science of geography be, at last, raised to the high position which it deserves to hold in gen

eral education.

T. E. S.

THERE is no more enterprise in mines and factories than there is in churches and schools.

WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF THE EARTH?

BY W. D. HENKLE, SALEM, OHIO.

In the Educational Monthly for March, 1866, I published an article with the above title. I stated that I had heard that Schubert had claimed that the parallels of latitude should be considered as ellipses as well as the meridians, and quoted from Chauvenet's Astronomy, vol. I, p. 103, the remark that "It has recently been attempted to show that the earth differs sensibly from an ellipsoid of revolution" with a reference to No. 1303 of the Astronomische Nachrichten. I suggested that Schubert was probably the person referred to by Chauvenet. Having received definite information in reference to Schubert's calculations as well as those of a later computist, I desire to offer the following as an appendix to my former article:

Schubert's very elaborate memoir (so referred to by Sir John F. W. Herschel in a lecture or essay communicated to the Leeds Astronomical Society, and read at a meeting on October 27, 1863) appears as part of Vol. I, 7th series of the Memoirs of the Petersburg Academy. He considers the equator of the Earth as an ellipse with a major axis of 41,854,800 feet, and a minor axis of 41,850,007 feet. He places one end of the major axis of the equatorial ellipse in longitude 38° 44′ east from Paris (that is about half-way between Mount Kenia and the east coast of Africa), and the other 141° 16′ west of Paris, or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The extremities of the minor axis of the equatorial ellipse would, of course, differ 90° in longitude from those of the major axis, thus making one in longitude 128° 44′ east of Paris (that is, on Waygion, one of the Molucca Islands), and the other in 51° 16' west of Paris, or at the mouth of the Amazon River.

Captain Clarke, in a memoir also styled "very elaborate by Herschel in the Addendum to the esssay already referred to, assigns the following dimensions of the three axes of the Earth:

He gives the longitude of one extremity of the longer equatorial axis 13° 58′ 30′′ east of Greenwich; that is, 11° 35′ 15′′ east of Paris. The position of all the other extremities may be easily obtained from this one.

The following are the axes as given by Schubert:

Clarke in some subsequent corrections based upon data afterward published, made the polar axis a little longer. Herschel says of this memoir by Clarke, published in Vol. xxix of the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, that it "contains by far the most complete and comprehensive discussion which the subject of the earth's figure has yet received, and must be held as the ultimatum of what scientific calculation is as yet enabled to exhibit as to its true dimensions and form."

Corrections.-In my former article p. 70, 7,999.110 should be 7,899.110. Page 72, 26 should be 36"". Page 73, 58' should be 59'.

NEATNESS AND TASTE IN SCHOOL WORK.

The real object of common school training is not merely to impart a few items of knowledge that may prove useful to the pupil in after life. It is far more comprehensive than this. It is to make him, every way, as much a man as possible. It is true, indeed, that the school is not responsible for the pupil's whole development. Very much is to be done in the family. But while the teacher is engaged at school in training the intellectual powers, the other powers are at work. The pupil is acquiring habits of feeling as well as of thinking. He is becoming neat or slovenly, refined or coarse. Every power is exercising itself, every susceptibility is drinking in influence, every capacity is opening itself. Hence the pupil is moulded not only by the things done within the walls of the school-room, but by the manner in which they are done.

For the sake of the pupils' refinement, the school-room ought to be arranged tastefully, and kept constantly neat. Let it be adorned with furniture of tasteful forms and with pictures, each significant of some pure and purifying idea. For the pupils' sake, if for no other reason, the teacher's desk or table should always be kept in order. Disorder there preaches disorder to every pupil's desk. Order there inculcates order throughout the

whole room.

Tastefulness there will breathe upon the school, and tend to tastefulness in everything.

There are many little things that are often neglected, because they are esteemed little and comparatively unimportant. But they are indices of character. They also have an important bearing upon success in life. It is worth while to teach a boy who is studying arithmetic, to make figures of tasteful and comely form. The teacher's duty is not done while he looks only to the mathematical correctness of the work. That boy may some time fail to gain an important and profitable position, because he has not learned to set down a column of figures neatly, and give each figure a tasteful form. Besides this, he is somewhat better, in himself, for doing even so little a thing as to write a figure with neatness. A merchant some years since, addressed himself to a gentleman who had recently taken the post of superintendent of schools in his neighborhood, as follows:

"There is something deficient in the training which our boys and young men get in our schools. I often employ a young man as a clerk in my store. I instruct him in his duties. If I require him to find the sum of a number of items, he takes a sheet of paper, and, instead of beginning at the top in a neat and orderly way, he is quite likely to begin directly on the middle of the page, and do the whole thing in a sprawling, awkward way. It is not right. They should be taught in school to do their work with neatness and taste.'

The merchant was right. A half-sheet of paper spoiled by being used for a purpose that required but a quarter of it, is a small matter. But if there were no motive at all of economy in the case, it is precisely as easy to do the work with taste as without it.

Suppose one have occasion to examine the papers of a class of candidates for teachers' certificates, or, if you please, any class in a school after a written examination. Put two papers side by side. The answers they contain may be equally correct as to their substance, yet the papers differ. On one the letters and figures have something, at least, like symmetry and taste; on the other, they are unseemly scrawls. One pupil has written in lines that are straight and parallel with the top and bottom of the page; the other has written in lines anything but straight, and they are all diagonals, though by no means of equal divergence from what they should have been. And so there is a character belonging to each production. It is impossible not to conclude that one mind has more finish than the other, and is more symmetrically developed. And, very likely, all the slovenliness manifested by the