they rank: Napa, Sierra, Contra Costa, Alameda. By the three tests combined they rank: Napa and Sierra alike, Contra Costa, Alameda.

Alameda, lowest of the four counties in the three aspects, contains the city of Oakland and has thirty school children to the square mile, and highly developed schools. Contra Costa and Napa have about five school children each to the mile, and the mountainous Sierra but two. Alameda pays annually the liberal sum of $4,500 for a superintendent, Sierra the meager recompense of $625, which represents a greater effort of the tax-payer and a greater expense per scholar than would be necessary to pay $10,000 in Alameda.

There are in New England more than five hundred schools averaging less than eight scholars each. Whatever is done with these pupils, their instruction frequently represents a vastly greater personal cost than gains credit in a comparison of teachers' monthly. wages. Consolidation by transportation of pupils at public expense costs some $25,000 a year in Massachusetts alone.

Consolidation of districts is a partial remedy for weakness, but space itself may be a barrier. Even icy Maine and balmy Florida have each a thinly settled county larger than Connecticut.

We may often strengthen the school as a coöperative agency by attention to public comfort and convenience-for example, in the improvement of highways. The whole social life, including the schools, would be elevated by facility of neighborhood association. In the great corn belt of the United States it has been a common experience for travel on the country roads to be absolutely stopped by mud. It would hardly be extravagant to say that the drain-tile factories have done more in the last generation for the rural schools of central Illinois than changes in the school law.

The child in the villages and rural districts is privileged to be trained, in a degree, in industrious habits by his parents, and he gains a stock of knowledge inaccessible to his city cousin. A noted physician of Kentucky, familiar with the classics and modern languages, pointing to a cabin with a log sawed out on the side to admit the light, said: "All my schooling was in a house just like that, about ten miles from here, in Bourbon county. I attended lectures and took special lessons after I was grown up." The Congressional Directory gives a bit of biography of some four hundred An overwhelming proportion, as boys, had only common

men.

country school privileges, but carried studious habits into mature life either with or without collegiate opportunity.

Maine, a State still quite homogeneous, with diversified rural occupations, perhaps best preserves the conditions general when Daniel Webster and his compeers had their early training in winter schools. The schools of the State averaged but little over twentytwo weeks in 1889 or 1890. Even the town high schools barely exceed an average of six months in the year, and the young people are busy on the farm and in the shops and teaching the yet humbler schools in the intervals; yet Maine does not take an inferior rank in a comparison of her men and women with those of other parts of the Union.

Within a few years industrial training has received much attention, but its popular development has been irregular and almost wholly in the line of manufactures. The rural schools of central Europe and Scandinavia have gardens and orchards for instruction; the school-house is the teacher's home, and his tenure is permanent. We omit these features in our imitation of the great European teachers, and attempt to copy Pestalozzi and Froebel's kindergartens without the gardens.

From the nature of things, professional teachers are absorbed by the strong schools. It would be helpful to all schools, including colleges and universities, if there were more opportunities for scholarly persons to devote brief terms to the best technical training before teaching. The high schools of Maine distinctly aim to be helpful to the rural teacher, and the State of New York encourages the academic and high schools to give pedagogic training. This is suggestive for parts of the country where similar work is not done. The movable Teachers' Institute does an important work, but, taking the country as a whole, it is extremely irregular in its character, more valuable in stirring up general interest than in improving individual methods.

The value of statute law varies according to its relation to the public will. While more supervision, with consolidation to township or county control, may be generally beneficial, those closely identified with the pine woods of the Southeast, the wind-swept prairies of the West, the mountain States of either slope, are the best judges of the adaptation of any step to their respective circumstances.

We must not forget the danger of too much legislation. We can force trees into beautiful hedges under rules that would destroy

building timber. Many laws secured in a period of rapid change presently bind like a Chinese girl's shoes, distorting further growth while they remain. The over-sanguine and those with special interests are too often eager for new statutes, but the tendency in our States is toward longer legislative vacations, and the community at large has a sense of relief at the adjournment of law-makers.

Necessities inexpensive in many rural districts, in the cities mean larger taxes. The annual fuel bill of the St. Louis public schools is not far from $25,000. For thousands of schools in the woods no account is made of fuel. Lots must be bought and substantial buildings must be erected in Southern cities. There are multitudes of Southern rural school-houses adequate for shelter from sun or rain erected by neighborhood effort, with so little money that they do not appear in any record.

Boarding around or distributing the cost of the teacher's maintenance in an indirect way, without contributing the money, can still be found in the effort of weak districts in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. The laws of Georgia provide for ambulatory schools in regions where pupils are too scattered to be suitably collected in a permanent school, and the Scandinavians of the Northwest have maintained more or less instruction through teachers spending successive brief periods at different farm-houses and helping those who could gather about them.

Almost anywhere in the Union there is a belief that more money would greatly improve the schools. Sometimes the expression is accompanied by a belief that the people of a locality are already paying taxes to the extent of their ability and a recognition that public expenditure means additional taxation. In other cases there seems to be a vague idea that it is only necessary to appropriate money by some public authority to secure what is wanted. The variety of details to which different individuals would apply additional funds is suggestive: Some want money for school-houses, some to improve the equipment, some to pay higher wages to teachers, some for free books, some to extend the terms of school. In certain States there is a conspicuous call for money to pay the school officers for the time spent in school business. This is most pronounced in Virginia, where, in 1891, more than one-third of the county superintendents urged that the trustees be paid for the time devoted to schools sums varying, where specified, from one dollar a meeting to two dollars a day, with various limitations from

four to twelve days in a year. It is especially noticeable that the number of superintendents making this recommendation is more. than double the number that made a like recommendation in 1890. A vast amount of work is done in the public interest by those who contribute their time for a few hours or more to the general promotion of the object in hand. Semi-public social organizations-scientific societies, for example-could hardly be maintained but for the zeal that leads members to accept official positions involving great labor without pecuniary compensation. The boundary line between the aid a citizen may fairly be expected to give a cause without pecuniary recompense and the aid which it is unfair to expect without such compensation varies with circumstances. If those directly interested are agreed in the policy of pecuniary compensation, and pay the bills thus incurred, the matter has only a general interest to students of social organization. If, however, local officers at present not paid are to be paid with funds drawn from persons not locally interested, as from a State or a national treasury or private benevolence, the effect upon the total outlay and upon general policy becomes more important.

The call for money from the denser communities, by tax or contribution, must not be too urgent. Many cities already pay a larger State school tax than is expended on their schools. This is the tendency in collecting taxes upon wealth and distributing them upon population. Cook county, Illinois, containing Chicago, pays more into the State treasury than it receives thence for its schools. Elsewhere specific grants are made to districts, as in California and Maryland, so that the strength of the strong is made positive to relieve the weakness of the weak. Many incorporated districts, both North and South, are very liberal in regard to tuition of pupils residing out of their limits.

Local interest is of prime importance. Without desire for knowledge and a marked degree of vigor in the recipients, external aid but hastens the dry rot of educational pauperism. Furthermore, thus far the rural districts have been able to concentrate their public effort mainly on their schools, while the cities must also maintain expensive water, fire, sewer, paving, lighting, and police depart. ments, and the agents of city benevolent societies scour the country for means to help those below the reach of city schools. The chief reliance must be in intense self-help and the unlimited patience of earnest friends.

It is a question whether the inadequacy of rural schools is as serious relatively as some suppose. Many cities are unable to supply room for all their pupils, and in general city schools have much teaching to do to give the pupils a knowledge of nature equal to that with which the country child begins his school days. Waiving this view, however, it is manifest that the man or the family that goes out of a community whose institutions are fully established to try the fortune of developing mines or farms in new regions cannot expect to have the old communities maintain their own current schools and churches and maintain complete duplications for isolated pioneers. The weakness of the rural school is often but the inevitable weakness of all social life in the region where there are neither numbers to inspire the band of pupils nor money for wages of the teachers. Scores of frontier counties are without organization for the simplest municipal functions. In many a location, both those hopeful under new settlement and those despondent in the decline of abandonment, there seems to be no prescription needed for the school as such. As the physician would say, the disease is constitutional and its local manifestations will diminish as the patient improves. In other words, whatever tends to the general welfare of weak communities will tend to give character and value to their schools.

SIGNALING BY MEANS OF EXPLODING LEAVES.-Among the Iroquois there is a word applied to persons of either sex who go out into the woods to meet lovers and who by this means indicate to their paramours their love or their presence. In TuskaroraIroquois this word is, for the third person masculine singular, “ra'ĕ'r'-'ähs," he strikes a leaf. To produce the sound the leaf, commonly of the basswood or other tree having large leaves, is placed on one of the hands held in the position for indicating the letter o in the "deaf and dumb alphabet," and then with the other hand · held flat striking the leaf sharply enough to cause it to burst with a report. There may be a general code of signals produced by this means to indicate the person making the sounds, his or her desires, or other like desirable things, or it may be the means agreed upon by two or more interested persons of carrying on a clandestine intrigue. Data are wanting to decide this question.

J. N. B. HEWITT.