ture. It was usually difficult to engage him in controversy, and his opinions were often hidden by a mask of pleasantry.

I have reason to think that this peculiarity was somewhat trying to a few of his friends, more especially to those whose thought was turned with great seriousness toward the fundamental presuppositions of method. It seemed to class Mr. Howland among those who deny the possibility of formulating much of anything in the way of a positive philosophy of education. That the superintendent of a great city system should occupy an equivocal attitude toward matters of such momentous concern appeared especially unfortunate and parodoxical. While I believe him to have been in sympathy with all movements looking toward the improvement of educational conditions, I have not been able to resist the conviction that to the close of his life he entertained no small degree of doubt respecting the utility of anything like elaborate systems of methodology. As you know, it was not unusual for him to discuss Apperception and Concentration with that ambiguous and quizzical manner of his, that left him free to enter either of two hostile camps without any charge of apostasy. Indeed, I may go further and say that he appeared to be something of a loiterer about the porches of the normal school, not quite sure whether it was his duty to advise the young people to go in or stay out.

It is not difficult, I think, to explain his position. While I should be the last person to declare his administration of the Chicago schools as in any sense a failure, yet I must be permitted to remark that, in my opinion, his old function of high-school principal was far more congenial than the supervision of the work of elementary schools. He was a

true son of the renaissance in his scholarly sympathies, and, measured by its standard, he was indeed equipped in no ordinary way. His long service as a

teacher of the classics had endeared them to his fine artistic nature in a rare way. He was fond of the solitudes of the study and the companionship of books. His style as a writer quickly betrays his love of the beautiful. His fancies freely flowed into verse, and many an exquisite bit of song indicates the shady covert where his hours of rest were spent.

His

long contact with pupils who had reached that self-directive period, in which method is of smaller significance, had perhaps diminished the sense of its importance. He had dealt with fruitful knowledges rather than with the beginnings of the forms of things, and the habit of a quarter of a century did not, I think, suffer any very radical change. He had great faith in scholarship, and believed that the scholarly man or woman would find a way that would suffice.

His transfer from his old and muchloved work to the arduous position of superintendent must have broken into his life in many ways. He was not a young man when the change came, nor was he old. He would never have been

I

I may be entirely wrong, of course. am not speaking as an authority. Others will do that. I am giving only personal impressions. But my conviction is that his influence upon his schools was moral rather than professional. It was the infusion of a spirit of good will, of generous culture, of personal regard. There was not much shop-talk, but there was much dignifying of the beautiful in childhood, much softening of the severer side of life. Out of the "humanities" that were his passion, numberless concrete humanities found their way into the lives of little children. His life had always stood for culture and now it stood for kindness, that finest culture of the emotions. I do not forget his occasional brusqueness, nor even his rudeness at times; but they were superficial, and did not stand for fundamental traits.

I well remember once sitting with him at his desk after a busy day, during which his office had been thronged with visitors, most of whom had made some call upon his patience. All had at last

and had a strong personal attachment to him, and the influence of such men as Prof. Swing, even in the wicked city of Chicago, is in no danger of being overestimated. And even the simon-pure politicians, the city hall, office-dispensing fellows, seem to have had a regard for him, which is one of those apparent contradictions occasionally encountered. He was discreet, doubtless, and did not needlessly offend them, but he did not cater to them, and I am misinformed if they ever attempted to use him.

The state at large knew Mr. Howland chiefly through his public addresses. While not greatly in demand, he made frequent pilgrimages to a goodly number of counties, especially in the institute season. He was for many years a regular attendant at the State Teachers' Association, and often appeared upon its programs. Yet his influence there was largely personal. The gracious tributes to his memory uttered at the meeting succeeding his death, illustrated this fact in an interesting way. While he was delightfully acceptable on the platform, his influence was no less strong in the social meeting and the hotel lobby; and yet, as I have intimated, he was in no sense on exhibition.

The volume published by the Appletons and edited by the distinguished commissioner of education, contains a number of the addresses alluded to.

No one can read them with any care without getting a just appreciation of his tastes and dominating sympathies. As I have intimated, you would not expect elaborate treatises on the History of Education, Criticisms and Reforms, or the Theory and Science of Education. If you knew the writer from the point of view from which I know him, you would make no mistake in predicting the topics toward which he would instinctively turn. The speculative was not his habit of thought. To him the teacher was by far the largest element in the educational problem. Upon him his view would be focused. As he has so well expressed it, he believed that "the one great thing needed in our schools, public or private, is that spirit of humanity and culture which shall make their life healthy, happy, and progressive, the well-spring of an upright, true, cultured manhood

first paper, "Moral Training in City Schools," has little to say of that systematic effort at moral culture by the use of the ethical element in classic literature in the lower grades-an agency so highly prized by the Herbartians. He looked toward that concrete embodiment of the ethical idea, the teacher, quite to the exclusion of any methodically organized system of moral training. And in him he had the profoundest faith.

Was it because he lived and died a bachelor that his views on the subject of punishment were so one-sided? He could not endure the thought of severity with the young. He loved to idealize childhood. He saw its beautiful side in the cultured homes where he was always a welcome and honored guest. His earlier life as a teacher was spent in secondary schools almost exclusively. I often thought that he had small appreciation of the years of patient discipline through which the child emerges from his natural selfishness and becomes altruistic and human.

But who shall say that this very fact did not the better fit him for the duties of his later life? City systems have tremendous tendencies toward machine methods. Where there are so many children the individual cannot count for very much, unless the teacher is peculiarly sympathetic. Into that hurried, formal, and-shall I say it?-commercial life, this poet-superintendent was forever. throwing his delicate fancies about the beauty and dignity of child-life.

It is related of him that he once rebuked a teacher in the presence of her school for sending a pupil from the room for some misdemeanor. As he left her smarting under her sense of humiliation, he failed to see the mischievous lad with his extended foot just outside the door, and rumor has it that he tripped and fell. It is admitted that in the presence of the insistent actual he forgot some of his gentler theories and attended to a matter of discipline. If the story be true, and it is as well authenticated as such stories ever are, it shows how he

might have been spoiled for a superintendent if the fates had made him responsible for the conduct of children. What he called the "barbarism of corporal punishment" always encountered his indignant protest, and it was well that he should feel as he did about it, although the rod is sometimes an unmixed blessing. He believed in the irresistible potency of moral suasion and he never surrendered his belief.

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A passage from the paper already alluded to illustrates his faith in the refreshing influence of culture, and is quoted to suggest a certain stimulating influence which Mr. Howland exerted in his quiet and indirect way. He advises a hobby. Though it be nothing rarer or more costly than moth-hunting, the jingle or jangle of rhymes, or even reformed spelling, they are, some of them, as I well know, of boundless possibilities. But at your daily mount of your hobby-horse, take not your way down the crowded street, nor over the choice flower-beds and fragrant exotics of your friends; but rather turn aside into the quiet lane, or the unfrequented country road, or still better, off for a free stretch over the wide, open prairie, where, with tossing arms and expanding chest, you can shout forth your happiness, till with loud answering echo, the solitary places shall be made glad with your presence.

It is in such topics as "The Character of the Teacher, "The Elements of

Growth in School Life," "The Scholarship Aimed at in the School," "The Teacher in the School-room," and "How the School Develops Character," that he is most at home. And with what charming graces of style he deals even with the common-place! It was quite as much the literary flavor as the theme that charmed him in Horace Mann, while to the author of "Tom Brown at Rugby" he gave his whole heart. This volume of the Appletons is a fine memento of our friend, and will be read as a frequent recreation, rather than as a study, in our lounging half-hours of restful peace after a weary day. We shall pencil-mark its pages where we find his poetic fancy leaping up with a fine illumination, and we shall perpetually see in the book what is rarely present in treatises of this character, the warm personality of the author. To read a chapter is to re-live a quiet hour with him in his office at the close of the day, or by the genial grate of his favorite club, or in my own home, to which he was not entirely a stranger.

But I am trespassing upon your time. I have had no heart for methodical biography, or critical analysis, or for anything more than this informal prosing. No episode of his life can dim my affectionate regard for him. He died in the solitude that was so dear to him, and I think that he would not have had it otherwise.

a

Prof. Fernando Sanford, of Leland Stanford Jr. University, has done valuable and timely service to the people in a large section of our country, by the thorough and satisfactory exposé he has made, in The Popular Science Monthly for August, of the folly of supposing that rain can be produced by artificial means. His marshaling of facts and arguments is masterly and unanswerable to any one who follows it. He shows that there is but one practical way of condensing the vapor in the air into water, and that is by lowering the temperature. The bombarding of the heavens with shells and dynamite, in so

far as it does anything, increases the temperature and prevents the forming of rain. Rain is produced by the upward movement of the air over large areas, carrying the vapor into the cold altitudes until the temperature falls below the dew point. This upward movement is indicated by the low barometer in those localities. In regions where the movement of the air is downward the barom. eter is high, and no rain falls. There is no artificial way of creating these immense upward movements of air and vapor. It has been proposed to cool the upper regions of the air by setting free liquid carbonic acid. But to get one-half

inch of rain on a single acre would cost $600,000 for the carbonic acid alone, to say nothing of the cost of the appliances necessary to carry this immense quantity of liquid into the upper air.

He shows that there is not a scintilla of evidence, which any scientific man would accept as evidence, that any rain-maker was ever the direct or indirect cause of the falling of an ounce of rain. The rain-maker's proposition to his victims to pay if the rain comes, and pay nothing if it does not, sounds fair, and if he can make contracts enough in widely separated localities he has a pretty good thing, provided the barometer shall not insist upon spoiling his chances.

Prof. Sanford explains one of the mysteries of the formation of rain, which has always been a mystery to even the most intelligent and thoughtful people who are not professional scientists.

The unanswered question has been, what makes the vapor in the free air condense into water, even when the dew point is reached? Recent research has revealed the fact that each particle of dust in the air is a solid body, to the surface of which the molecules of vapor attach themselves, when the temperature is reduced, just as they do to the cola surface of the ice-pitcher on a hot summer day, when the air is moist. When so much water accumulates around this dust center as

The

to make it heavy enough, it begins to descend, and may gather similar drops to itself on the way. A cloud is the first stage of the formation of a rain drop. It is composed of dust particles, surrounded by their films of water. heat and dryness of the air below the cloud may be so great as to evaporate the water on these dust particles as the cloud slowly sinks downward toward the earth because of its weight. Then the cloud is dissipated. But when the lower air is saturated with moisture, these dust particles gather more moisture, as they descend, and strike the earth as drops of rain. There may be an ascending movement of the air over large areas for days together without rain, because the air may be very dry and the vapor has to rise to a great height before the dew point is reached. And, then, it all may be evaporated again before it reaches the earth as water.

The number of these dust particles varies from 34,000 in a cubic inch of air at the top of a high mountain, to 88,000,000 in a cubic inch of air taken from a room near the ceiling. So it seems that the air is generously supplied with dust, which has a new and unexpected value to the world. What we thought a curse bas suddenly changed to one of our greatest blessings.

Here is another picture that I gave, the other day, into the hands of one of those modern artists who make "halftones" of old prints by the million, "so that anybody can see it, anywheres," as "Little Joe" used to say. Perhaps your school would like to look at it with you.

It is a very old piece of furniture. Not one century, or two, can number the years of its existence. Grandfather's grandfather made mention of it in his will, made in the early seventeen hundreds, and speaks of it then as "ye olde rockynge chare." That was in the days when every man spelled according to the dic

*Copyright by Wm. Hawley Smith, 1894.

tates of his own conscience, and no man said aught to the contrary. Blessed days of freedom and individuality in the spelling book, but days that can no more return than the sun can go back on the dial.

The old chair bears the marks of the days of its birth. Its back is straight and strong, and made of unyielding oak. It is a stranger to the voluptuous curves and billowy softness of the modern lounging chair. It has rockers, to be sure, but they are curved but little, and check the swinging motion of the rocker with a jerk, both fore and aft, as if to remind him, in the midst of each pleasurable