"What! don't you learn anything at school?"

"Oh, yes, I'm learnin'

a heap o' what I allers knowed" Just so. Just so. In getting down to the child's years we fail to come up to the child's experience. And so in teaching him geography we often obscure his intelligence, and tax his good nature with a world of cant called "developing." The facts of geography are plain facts, and they should be taught to the child in a plain way. This knowledge has no occasion to be elaborated or perfected by any mysterious process of incubation.

Again, the essentials of geography should be comprehensive enough to lay a good foundation for history. The geography of the elementary school should prepare the pupil to see that man's condition in life, his habits, his customs, his government are largely determined by the physical condition of his native land. The relation of the natural features of a country to its government is illustrated by the rich alluvial valleys of the Tigris and the Nile, whose slavish inhabitants were ever the willing subjects of a despot. And, again, in little Switzerland, whose spirit of liberty was born in the shadow of the Alps, and which yet lives personified in a Winkelried and a Tell. So, too, the geography of our own Atlantic slope implies many things which characterize the American people. Their spirit of independence and love of liberty grew out of their struggles in the conquest of the wilderness. For nearly two hundred. years they waged constant warfare with primeval forests, wild beasts and savage men. The patriot soldiers of Greece and Rome who won fame on a hundred glorious fields were never trained in such a school of hardihood as the New England hills and the wood-crowned Alleghanies furnished us. Our Bryants, our Websters, our Fenimore Coopers, our Henry Clays are in some degree the children of our country's geographical sublimity. The sounding shores of her mighty inland seas echo it. Her grand old mountain peaks, whose summits are ever wet in clouds, tell it to each other, while her great rivers all carry the same message on their restless bosoms to the sea.

IMPORTANCE OF GEOGRAPHY.

Geography demands a more important place than it has ever yet had in our elementary schools for the sake of its culture value. Its fundamental relation to other branches of knowledge, and especially to the current literature of the day, makes it an important element in our estimate of what a man knows.

Its relation to the social and political affairs of our country demands for geography full and accurate knowledge as well for intelligent voting as for wise statesmanship. We are citizens of a republic. We govern ourselves. When the boys who are at the desk to-day reach manhood they must manage the affairs of a ship of state carrying two hundred million passengers, according to the settled laws of our increase. Every

man who is to have a hand in such an enterprise as that must know not only the size and location of his own ship, but of other ships as well, to avoid collision and disaster.

There will, no doubt, long be a dispute as to where geography stops and its related branches begin; but we can all agree, I think, that its es sentials for the elementary school should include everything of place necessary to localize, without effort, the facts of current reading, as well as those of history and geology, and various other branches which belong to the secondary school.-School Journal.

The Museum as a Factor in Education.

[From an address delivered at the dedication of the Thomas Memorial and Art Hall, of Richmond College, September 22d, 1887, by Rev. John A. Broaddus, D. D., LL.D.]

To build a museum in connection with a public library, and as part of an institution for higher education, is but a return to the original elevated application of that term. A museum among the Greeks was, primarily, any haunt of the Muses; next, a place for the study of objects dear to the Muses, such as art, poetry, history and eloquence. Plato and Aristotle erected each a building called a museum, containing rooms for the study of philosophy, and then, first in the history of culture-a public library, open to students and visitors. This was imitated on a much larger scale by the great museum at Alexandria, collecting a library that became one of the wonders of the world, and furnishing to the students lecture rooms, grand porticoes and beautiful out-door walks, suited to the favorite Greek method of peripatetic instruction, together with a common hall or mess-room, in which the professors and students might dine together, and thus, at the same time, supply to each other a feast of reason. From this celebrated model of a museum down to the now current use of the term to denote a mere collection of curiosities and monstrosities is almost as great a degradation as in certain current uses of the term professor. But there are still instances in which a museum, though no longer comprising halls of instruction, denotes something elevated and dignified. The British Museum contains one of the great modern libraries, far surpassing in number the collection at Alexandria. And even when the library is excluded there are not a few great museums in Europe and America which are designed to furnish means of education. They do this in two principal ways. They collect objects of natural history, in its three great departments of mineralogy, botany and zoology, and arrange these according to strict scientific classification, so as to offer facilities for scientific study. In the foremost collection of this kind in America, the Agassiz Museum, at Cambridge, there is in the first

room a complete set of skeletons and preserved objects, beginning with the very lowest forms of animal life, which it is difficult to distinguish from vegetable, and ascending in regular order to the highest animal, i. e., man. What a privilege for eager students of biology or for juvenile classes with their instructors to enter freely, again and again, this noble "Synoptic Room." In the Metropolitan Museum of New York and in the Smithsonian Institution pains are also taken to render the grand col lection accessible and available for the instruction of visiting classes by their teachers. Elementary knowledge of natura! history is easily within reach of pupils ten or twelve years old, or even younger pupils where they can behold the actual objects; and it is worth considering whether elementary botany and zoology ought not to be much studied by such children, especially those who can occasionally visit a museum, instead of pushing them into English syntax, which scarcely any child of twelve can really understand, or into mathematical studies, for which only. a few are at that age prepared. Perhaps it will not be many years before various classes from private and public schools in Richmond and vicinity will be repeatedly seeking access to the collections that shall here be formed. At any rate the college students and all adult minds disposed to inquire into geology and biology will find such collection not only helpful, but necessary.

COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES.

The other way in which a museum furnishes material for education is by the collection of antiquities. There is perhaps no department of knowledge in which object lessons are of greater value. The implements of ancient warfare, the utensils and ornaments of ancient life, the shrunken features of some mummied Egyptian, will give wings to historical imagination, and in a moment transport the student into the very midst of ancient life. Nor is our comparatively new country without its objects of antiquarian interest. That relics of the Indians and of the moundbuilding race in this country may form an extremely interesting collection, very stimulating to historical inquiry and reflection, may be seen at the home of a well-known Richmond gentleman. There are also many relics of ancestral history in Virginia and adjacent States that might be gradually collected, and would greatly help in reproducing the life of the early settlers and the colonial times. Our gifted and lamented romance writer and historian, John Esten Cooke, appears to have fairly proven in his volume, entitled Virginia, that the story of Pocahontas saving the life of John Smith must, after all, be accepted as historical. The skeptical mode of dealing with history, which Niebuhr rendered fashionable, has led to much valuable research, but has gone to greater extremes, and the inevitable reaction is already visible in many directions. No part of American colonial history is so thoroughly romantic as that of the Old

Dominion; and much remains to be done in collecting its antiquities and digesting its documents and traditions. In like manner there must be many memorials of Virginia's share in the Revolution, and of her great series of Presidents and other statesmen, that ought to be collected into a museum at the State Capitol. And there is another great and mighty conflict in which Virginia bore an unequalled share of suffering and was not backward in achievement, which already for the rising generation is a thing of the past, and whose precious and often perishable relics ought to be rapidly gathered. The confiict is over, its animosities have been quite laid aside, and we are contented and patriotic citizens of the United States; but the relics of that great civil war are sacred for us and for our children, and its heroes, its splendid heroes, shall be famous for

ever.

We greatly need, in this still new country, to cultivate the historical spirit-to cherish a glowing love of the past; and to this end antiquarian collections are of real importance.

ART IN HIGHER EDUCATION.

What part have collections of art in the work of higher education? We need not dwell upon the fact that at least a few students of every session will be naturally capable of artistic creation, and upon them these collections and instructions will exert the most delightful and inspiring influence. You will never know, as you casually enter such a hall but that one of the quiet youths who, perhaps, make way for the visitor and retire, or perhaps remain in absorbed contemplation, may be just now receiving impulses that will carry him in coming years to high artistic achievements and fame. Let no one think lightly of these few. Some of the older States of our Union would have been able to retain during the last two or three generations many choice young men who have gone West, if the controlling public opinion had more strongly favored the development among themselves of the industrial arts and the fine arts. and of the artistic in literature, and all the complex pursuits and products of high and complete civilization. But a point of more general interest would be the educational effects of art collections upon the students at large. Nearly forty years ago a young Virginian, who had never before been out of the State, went to spend some days in Philadelphia, and twice gave several hours to the old Academy of Art, especially to the paintings of Benjamin West, and to plaster casts of the most celebrated Greek statues. It was a revelation; it opened up a new world and invested life with new possibilities of delight. Such single and powerful impressions are more distinctly remembered, but unspeakably greater in educational value is the opportunity of frequent and leisurely observation of such inspiring objects. Familiarity never breeds contempt where the object is one of elevated character and interest, and where the soul is at

all susceptible, but the frequent contemplation becomes an ever-growing educational force, shaping the intellect, coloring the imagination, stirring the deepest, sweetest emotions. Happy those whose childhood and youth are spent in full view of great mountains or beside the sounding sea; doubly happy if they enjoy both together, like the people of Palestine, Greece, Italy, Scotland. In like manner, happy the students who, just at that interesting point when intellect is approaching maturity, when culture is broadening the range of imagination and varying the objects of passion, spend several years amid the perpetual influence of architecture and landscape, and with the opportunity of daily visits to an inspiring collection of statuary and painting, and let it be remembered that a few works of high excellence, even a few good plaster casts or marble copies of the great statues and a few copies of the great pictures will kindle the susceptible observer and awaken those unutterable but quenchless yearnings which become a moulding power in the character and life, while a mass of poor stuff would but degrade the taste, if it did not fortunately repel and disgust. May it be not many years before the young of both sexes who come on some brief visit to Richmond shall not only delight in its varied hills and splendid streets and noble river, and beautiful, peaceful Hollywood; shall not only gaze on the exquisite symmetry and homely grace of the old Capitol, and search out the Houdon statue; not only stand entranced before the equestrian Washington and his grand Revolutionary comrades-a work of art with which not many of its kind in all the world can be compared-but shall presently come out along a street that more and more deserves its name, to behold the new statue of one whom all Virginians to the remotest ages must delight to honor, and then entering Richmond's own College, shall find that all these beauties of nature and glories of architecture and triumphs of the modern chisel have but prepared them somewhat better to appreciate even copies of those immortal works in which the old Italian painters and the ancient Greek sculptors still remain supreme in the highest domains of art.-Religious Herald.

[For the JOURNAL.]

An Exhumed Language.

The spirit of true scholarship is aggressive. It not only seeks to understand and utilize all that is known, but it is continually exploring new fields. It is the friend of discovery. The announcement recently made in the newspapers that the University of Pennsylvania is equipping and will soon send out an expedition to explore the ruins of ancient Babylon, is, in itself, an interesting fact. It indicates the strong public interest felt in the movement, now engaging so largely linguistic scholars