struts and wheels about in the most pompous manner possible to imagine.

This grouse is more or less polygamous. The males only remain with the females until incubation has commenced, when these keep by themselves until the approach of winter, when they reassemble in

Figure 5.-TOES IN SUMMER AND IN WINTER

their search for food. To enable them to move upon fresh fallen snow their toes are equipped during winter with a set of bristles on each side, as shown in Fig. 5.

THE QUAIL, PARTRIDGE, BOB WHITE
(Ortyx virginianus Bonap.)

This beautiful and beneficial bird is also killed in large numbers during the legitimate war against our friends. It is found throughout the eastern portion of North America, and it has also been successfully introduced into some of the western states, where other and allied species occur. They are not migratory and rarely move away to any extent from the spot where they were hatched. In heavy falls of snow they huddle together and allow themselves to be buried. If the snow is light, they can easily extricate themselves, and run over its surface in quest of berries and seeds, but if the fall is followed by a partial thaw, and a crust forms, the birds are made. prisoners and perish of hunger. In this way large numbers are killed every winter, and in some cases are almost exterminated for years. Quails never collect in very large flocks. It prefers more or less open ground with an abundance of low trees and clusters of shrubs. Their favorite food is seeds of various plants and berries; they also eat immense numbers of grasshoppers and other insects, upon which they thrive and become very fat. They eat even the nasty-smelling chinch-bugs, and if for no other reasons they ought to be protected on that account. If not molested they become very tame, and freely approach villages, even entering barnyards to feed with the poultry.

It is too bad that this beneficial bird is esteemed a great delicacy as an article of food, and that it is sought for the market by means of traps, nets, and various kinds of snares, and by hunters with the gun

and dogs. As it is naturally unsuspicious it is easily killed, hence is gradually disappearing from large tracts where it was once quite abundant.

The male bird has a loud and very distinctive whistle, which in New England is interpreted as no more wet. Here in Minnesota, where no meteorological significance is attached to these utterances we translate this cry into Ah Bob-white, or Bob-white.

Notes on Chicago Schools

MARY C. JUDD

Those teachers who welcome a visitor cordially and do not immediately begin to extol the excellencies of the work in another room, thus persuading the chance visitor to pass along, make the best impression of their work upon a stranger. Chance visitors are not all harsh critics, and a hearty welcome is very pleasant. Total indifference on the part of teachers to chance visitors is not exactly a warm welcome. A tiny nod of welcome and a chair placed convenient for seeing will be appreciated. Visitors are human beings and civility is of very sweet savor. Angels may be entertained unawares.

There seems to be a self-evident truth in "like principal, like school." One can sometimes determine what manner of principal has charge by the greeting and manner of the teachers first met.

It is to be regretted that teachers sometimes have to contend with friction outside of the schoolroom. These cases seemed very rare, however.

One school in Chicago has bought a stereopticon for its own use. It is lighted by electricity.

Bathrooms are a necessity in several schools and have been provided, with also a regular attendant to keep order and promote general cleanliness. The baths are in constant use.

Surrounding buildings and narrow alleys help to poison the air in some buildings. A fine system of ventilation is provided in the newer buildings.

Many schools use the basement rooms with hard cement floors for a playground. Hard bumps are borne with patience. One of the best fitted schoolrooms in Chicago is in the heart of a densely populated and desperately poor district. The decorations are valuable and numerous. These and some of the improvements were paid for by the principal, with no charge to the teachers or pupils. The effect of the beautiful interior is uplifting to soul and mind, and the gentle thoughtfulness of pupils and teachers is a rich reward to the generous giver. There is a collection of over a hundred framed pictures and grasses for geography and history work and dozens of beautiful casts to illustrate myths and poetry. Such a school, with its workers, is a true center of culture. All honor to the noble missionary effort.

Drawing

Miss Josephine V. Locke, the director of drawing, is at present a strong advocate of colored chalk drawing in all grades. She is a strong opposer of what she calls "the Russian serfdom" sloyd system of manual training. She wants a system that will give more freedom to children's hands and brains. "No blind following of a master's directions without power to work out the problem alone."

Physical Culture

Physical culture in the form of rythmic movements of the muscles of limbs and body is given throughout the schools. Physical exercises in primary grades consist in marching,

skipping or running about the room; games of tag or beanbag. Sometimes simple dance movements to piano music are performed by selected pupils.

Leaping over supported sticks, races between two or more pupils and similar games are used for diversion and rest. No disturbance seems to arise from such unusual school performances, and it seems to create more sympathy between pupil and teacher.

Writing of sentences is begun in lowest primary grade. Some rooms have much blackboard writing by primary pupils with good results. Slates are used in many schools. Pupils furnish their own slates and pencils. A large proportion of the schools use paper and ink or pencil. This matter seems to rest with principals' option.

Reading

sentences.

Reading in the lower grades begins with Sentence method is preferred for beginning work. Printed work is taken after three months. Many teachers have their blackboard sentences printed for pupils' use. Word training is given with sentence method. Words are not preserved in lists upon the blackboard. Some teachers use a curtain to cover their written sentences for further reference.

Much silent reading by iowest primary pupils. They perform the act which they read. In higher grade reading and in all grades one sees much careful drill in enunciation and articulation in many buildings. Many different readers, "sight reading," are used in the various grades.

Lessons in grammar are given in nearly all grades. Special German teachers are provided.

Short quotations from famous poems or speeches are learned in many rooms from second grade upward and recited in the short interval that may occur between classes.

Number

In number work the ratio method or Speer system is largely adopted throughout the city. A mental arithmetic is placed in the hands of all pupils from second grade up. The chief difficulty found with it is the inability of primary pupils to read the words.

The ratio method has been a marvel to all. It would puzzle many an expert arithmetician to follow the rapid expression of ratio existing between prisms and plinths, cubes or cylinders as given by many pupils in lowest primary rooms or by those of higher grades. The vexation seems to have gone out of the multiplication and other tables for multitudes of pupils and hundreds of teachers. Hand and brain have a most excellent chance to work together in the ratio system.

Some buildings have their number table covered with denim or flannel to prevent noise of failing blocks.

Men Teachers in the Grades

Men teachers are found in all grades as low as the fourth. They are a rarity, however, and sometimes an oddity. Sometimes their success in discipline is equal to that of women teachers, but more often it is not. The effect of the masculine mind and muscle upon boy or girl pupils does not seem to be the success that many advocates would claim for it.

Decorations

Decorations in many of the buildings are numerous and excellent. Many rooms, indeed most rooms, have excellent photographs of famous pictures or people. Hundreds of beautiful plaster casts have been bought by teachers for schoolroom decoration. They can be obtained at an absurdly low price from Italian street vendors. Cold water easily cleanses these casts. Donatello's "Laughing Boy" (life-size bust), extremely good casts of rampant lions, tigers and wolves were common. quisite bas-reliefs of "St. Cecilia," "Singing Angels," "Dancing Children," "The Madonna and Child," and fifty different

Ex

subjects were seen in the schoolrooms. Sometimes a bracket shelf at the upper line of the blackboard made a choice place for exhibiting the casts and other treasures of the school

room.

Seat Work

Seat work varies much in different buildings and seems to be as often originated by the principal as by the teacher. In one school netting had been taught, and tiny doll hammocks exhibited in the principal's office showed the pupils' skill. Sometimes home work had produced large hammocks or nets. Weaving is a popular pastime or employment for otherwise idle moments in primary grades when reading or writing is finished. Slate frames, purchased at the shop, filled by teacher or pupil with tacks at either end, upon which cord for warp is fastened, serves as the loom. A stiff paper shuttle filled with heavy worsted carries the filling for the weaving. Two shuttles and two colors are always used. The expense to each pupil for entire outfit is about ten cents.

The woven products are fastened together for blankets and sent to the children's hospital. Doll blankets, they call them. The merits claimed for this occupation are pleasing combination of colors, soft touch of the wool, occupied time, no harm to the eyes, thoughtfulness of others by quiet attention to work, and by the gift made. It may be all that is claimed for it. Certainly, the children like it.

Colored slat weaving into ten-inch squares of white oilcloth prepared like weaving mats is another excellent idea. The work cannot be preserved, however, and pupils draw out and collect slats and mats at the end of each session. Pupils use two colors of slats and weave in any correct manner which they may choose,

Stick laying, work with pegs, paper cutting, and drawing, seemed to be the popular forms of seat work with primary teachers.

Music

Music is a part of the regular school course and is well taught by the grade teachers The thought of the rhythm is often suggested and taught to pupils and they are required to make a diagram representing the certain kind of rhythm sung or played during the lesson. In one room during the music period, one child played a simple waltz tune; two other children made two diagrams of it on the blackboard, one by using straight lines, the other by loops of different lengths, while a fourth beat the accent upon a triangle. The pupils in their seats unconsciously beat time with their fingers upon their palms. This was in a second grade room.

In some rooms pupils sang notes played upon the piano by another pupil. A little toy instrument called a metallophone served instead of a piano in some other rooms. The various scales were represented by ladders with scale names written upon them. Different tones were easily found by pupils.

Voices in singing were usually well modulated and songs were pleasing in music and words.

The musical director marked a star upon the blacboard to show approval after a visit and the various stars were retained throughout the term. An excellent incentive for better work each time.

Schoolroom Pets

Living pets, in cages or out, may be found in many schoolrooms. Kittens, squirrels, birds, goldfish and chameleons were some of these pets for the little ones. They are cared for during vacation by certain careful pupils. Flowers grow in abundance in pots or boxes in the windows. Some of the districts are veritable deserts from their lack of green things, even to grass, and the sight of the growing, living plants is a delight to all.

Study of Noted Pictures

THEODORA CUNNINGHAM Washington, D. C.

RICHARD NORRIS BROOKE

Any representation of life among the Southern Negroes is always interesting, if truthful. As Thomas Nelson Page, a Virginian, has made for himself an enviable reputation by his stories of Southern life in the United States, so has Richard N. Brooke, also a Virginian, made negro life interesting to us by his brush.

One of his earliest efforts in this line hangs in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. It is called "The Pastoral Visit," and represents a negro family in "Ole Virginny" dispensing hospitality to that great dignitary, their preacher. The details of the picture are carried out with great truthfulness to the negro character and mode of living. The parson's longtailed coat, silk hat, and baggy umbrella, tied near the top with a piece of string, are characteristic, while the head of the family, evidently almost overwhelmed with the great honor being done him, is listening intently to what the old man has to say.

His wife, who looks like one of the bustling, capable kind, is helping the parson from a gray and blue crockery bowl that graces the center of the table, and the children, with their company manners foremost, are casting "sheep's-eyes" at the great man. The little frouzy gray kitten on the hearth looks perfectly at ease.

Mr. Brooke finds his models and the setting for his pictures around his native place, Warrenton, Va., a few miles from the Greenbriar White Sulphur Springs. He tells some funny stories of his experiences with the darkies, who seem to have a deeprooted objection to being painted.

Personally, Mr. Brooke is a very fine type of the southern gentleman, and welcomes his friends most hospitably to his studio in Washington. His first work, in an artistic way, consisted of illustrations. that he made for his own poems when a boy. A local editor, happening to get hold of them, published the poems without the illustration, much to the boy's disgust, as he considered the pictures the best part of the production.

Mr. Brooke is a noted art critic. It is due to his excellent taste and judgment in selecting that Mr. Waggaman's collections of paintings, bronzes, stat

uary and art curios form one of the best private galleries of America.

The study of this picture makes a good introduction to the study of negro life to be undertaken in connection with the study of the history of the civil war. Such a study could be pursued along the following lines:

The Negroes.-Condition of Negroes in Africa; Slave Traffic in the Eighteenth and First Half of the Nineteenth Centuries; Condition of Negroes in America; Abolition of Slavery in Northern States; Leaders of Both parties in and Before 1860; Emancipation of Slaves; Effect of Freedom on Negro Character; Effect of Mingling with White Men; Negro Question of To-day.

Primary Nature Study for the Fall

DELLA JUSTINE LONG

State Normal School, Dillon, Montana

So many suggestive outlines and courses of study are being arranged continually for the use of teachers, that there is no longer any difficulty in knowing what to teach. The question at the opening of the year is how to begin work so that school may be a happy and satisfactory change after the long weeks. of freedom.

As a matter of fact, most children are eager for school when the first day comes in September. It is only after the first few days are gone that the listlessness begins to appear, with lingering allusions to vacation. Then it is, after the first novelty has worn off, and before the working spirit is really settled, that the teacher must rise to the occasion in the matter of how things are to be done. That she herself is glad to have vacation over must be taken for granted; not that she need say anything about it, but unless she feels in her heart the real joy of beginning work again, it is not going to seem worth while to the children.

In the primary grades so much of the work is based on the nature study that something of the happy vacation connection with the outdoor world may be kept. But this is only possible when the facts that are taught are made incidental, and the acquaintance with nature, which comes through interested personal meeting and seeing and touching, is made the foundation; knowledge will surely follow.

The teacher well knows what facts are involved and doubtless has them jotted down in her month's plan. Even in all their bareness they are helpful to her as a skeleton, but they are only the skeleton; and if, as the result of a September morning's lesson, the child says, "The clover has a white flower head, there are many little flowers, the leaves

are green, they have three parts," we feel that the skeleton of apparent facts is all that there is to the lesson, and that the life of the clover, which includes the life of the bees and reaches as far as the food element given to the soil and needed for the farmer's crops, has been left out.

One way to help keep the "hard-fact" side out of the work, and to have always in view the basis of natural relation with the children, is to make your plans so elastic that they may be adapted to what the day or the week brings. The general scheme of the primary year's work is usually made, nowadays, in harmony with the life of the seasons. In order to have this relation between the children's school life and the outdoor life genuine, there must not only be the broad connection, provided for in the course of study, but connection with the concrete little pieces of the nature-world which the children are able to appreciate.

Suppose, for instance, that part of the geography work outlined for the fall is evaporation and condensation, as shown in dew, rain, clouds, frost, snow and ice. The days continue to be bright and sparkling with never a vestige of evaporation visible to the naked eye. The teacher waits anxiously for a rainy or foggy day to help her with the correlation whose virtues have been engraved upon her very soul. It does not come, and at last anxiety over her course-of-study duties forces her to give the first lesson on "natural phenomena and forms of water (see outline, page 6, first primary geography, fall term)." She gives it with the help of a boiling teakettle, condensing the moisture on a cold slate. It is an excellent lesson and well given. She is that kind of a teacher. But in the meantime the soft October breeze is bringing to the ground a perfect carpet of crimson and golden and brown, the last of the autumn leaves. To be sure the children have gathered the leaves as they fell. They have sung about them and have had the joy of seeing their own sentences about the maple and oak written on the board for the whole class to read. But in geog. raphy they have studied evaporation. Why not have learned something about the soil, and the work the leaves are doing for it? The children would so love to go out for half an hour with their trowels and dig down under the bright colors into the mold where last year's decaying leaves are turning into rich black earth. And besides, it would be a true nature lesson, a bit of geography study at first hand. The different stages of soil-making would be seen by the children, they would come face to face with this part of the great economy of nature and realize that the decaying twigs and roots and leaves are only being changed so that they may help new buds and

grass and flowers to grow. Perhaps the soil-making is to be studied in a country school, or near a city park where a grove of trees can easily be reached. But if not, the little row of trees along the front sidewalk, or the solitary oak at the corner, knows the same lesson; and occasional visits to the real country are happily within reach of all.

The study of the leaves themselves comes more naturally in September, when the foliage is still fresh and green and there are many kinds to be gathered. It is then that the principal work of the leaves, their breathing for the trees, is studied. Although this may have been taken as language material, there are no real divisions in the elementary science; and where the broader geography connection of the leaves is taken up in the soil-making, their work in giving moisture to the air may be enlarged upon in preparation for the climate study which is to come later.

*

After the leaf-mold, it will be interesting to find other kinds of soil, letting the children work out for themselves the connection between the sandy soil and the rocks made of sand in the bluff above, the wet clay along their path and the clay rocks near by, the fine black earth along the stream and the stream itself.

It may not be possible to find good localities for all these out-of-door lessons, but there would hardly be a school near which the history of at least two kinds of soil could not be traced. Then as many indoor lessons, based on the out-door study, may be given orally or in writing or drawing or modeling, as the invention of the teacher and the interest of the class will allow.

The most fertile material is furnished the primary grades in the fall by the long line of harvest activities. The country children know all about the cornhusking and the gathering of the winter vegetables. Even the city children have a glimpse of the harvest wealth in the whole bushel basketful of plums or crabapples that comes at preserving time. From the stories of gathering and storing the harvest may grow the larger thought of preparing for winter.

There could be no better time for the stories of the Pilgrims' coming and their getting ready for winter. The hazy Indian summer helps to make real the tales of Indian life, those best stories of all, about the Indian games, and the fishing and hunting, and the tepees, and canoe-making. When they are connected with those same Pilgrims who came to the Indians' land, the charm of reality becomes even greater.

All the autumn ideas, including the harvests and the getting ready for winter through the work

of many hands, both on the farms and in the cities, may be gathered together and connected with the Pilgrim stories at Thanksgiving time, which will then become the culminating point of the fall work in history.

The work of a primary grade is so closely connected that the history and geography are often different sides of one set of lessons, and there may be as much opportunity for sand work in the history as in the geography. The little people of the first and second grades will delight in making the Indian village in sand, or landing the Mayflower and having a real Plymouth Rock on the molding board.

But to return to the course of study and the matter of departing from the outline.

One has but to try for a week the experiment of working with no thought of the morrow to realize how hopeless such work becomes. One of the objects of a course of study is to connect, with reference to the child's growth, not only the work of the year, but the work of all the school years, and any digressions made must be made with an appreciation of the general purpose underlying the year's plan. We are, of course, taking for granted courses of study which attempt to adapt subject matter and manner of presentation to the age and general development of the children. On the other hand, the very character of such an outline makes it impossible to prescribe exact methods or dates in the nature-study lessons. The one condition is that they be a study of Nature. To make a study of forms of water, for instance, when forms of water are not an apparent part of the child's world, is to teach mere physical laws. There would hardly be a time, however, when some part of such a study, based on reality, could not be carried on. Though the dew may be gone before nine o'clock, the children will be eager to look for it early in the morning, if it is suggested to them.

There is no one day or week when any such study can be finished and laid aside as a thing apart. One of the principal hopes of the elementary science is that the children may be led to understand, in some measure, the interdependence which underlies the natural world. Any following of the course of study which arouses in the children a sympathetic interest in the growth and life around them gives promise that this object is to be accomplished. The results of various kinds of nature study and nature teaching show that this can be looked for only when the work is guided by an intelligent and thoroughly genuine interest on the part of the teacher; and no amount of professional conscientiousness, which considers the letter of the law and does not know its life, will take the place of such an interest.