done as a teacher? The person who has not done this for the child, is merely a lay figure, occupying the place where there should be a living worker.

It might be easier for women to enter upon this larger work if the relation of principals and assistants were different, if more responsibility were placed in the hands of the assistants, so that their position and work should fit them for entering upon the larger round of cares and duties which belong to the principal, and so the work of the last would be lightened.

I suppose the present relation between the two is the result of the general feeling in the community, that the principal represents the school, and he is the one who is responsible for its character and progress. So he feels naturally enough that all the teaching must be conducted by his methods; and there is no opportunity for the development of individual power in the assistants. They must work after a set pattern, and the school life becomes merely routine and drudgery, and the teaching is comparatively mechanical and lifeless. So this change in the relation of the assistant to the school would equally benefit the pupils. For it is certain that those are the best schools in which each person is obliged to manage her own classes, and is left free to follow her own individual methods of teaching. It is the contact with different minds, working in different ways, that will develop in the pupil natural and good modes of thinking and working.

A single and set method answers only for an inanimate machine, not for a living organism.

Another obstacle to the success of women in the work of teaching, is the fact that so many enter the ranks for one, two or three years, as a temporary employment. These recruits cannot have much esprit de corps, and they leave the ranks just when they begin to understand how to work. Of course this must serve to lower the standard of teaching by women. Those who go to take charge of families of their own we would not desire to retain. They only pass from one department of the work to another. They are not lost to us. But there is still a large number who are only waiting for something better to offer, who, if they continue to work, if no other way opens to them, remain only as day laborers. They do

not devote themselves to teaching as a business in which success is to be attained only by consecration and sacrifice. The hardness of the way, the smallness of the compensation, discourage them, and they do not attain to real excellence as workers, nor to the experience of the truest reward,- delight in the work, for one cannot understand this delight, this reward of teaching, till the apprenticeship is over. Much of the work accomplished by the true worker she never knows. But then in quiet hours some pleasant recognition of her work greets her. Some dull and stolid face lightens with a gleam of intelligence, and after long effort the teacher rejoices in the establishment of a new relation with her pupil. In some wayward spirit over whom for years she has spent hours of anxious thought and labor, she sees the germ of a new desire for truth and right unfolding. From some pupil long gone from her care into the work of life comes the acknowledgment, "It was your word that first set me to think what I was placed on earth for." Then she feels a humble and wondering gladness that such lot has been hers. She turns hopefully to her work again, and sees now in her young and wayward pupils the germs of noble souls to be helped to their development by her fostering care.

The unwillingness of many young teachers to work wherever they are needed, is another obstacle. After having spent some time in training at school, they feel as if they must immediately have lucrative places. Now the truth is, the training of the professional school must be supplemented by experience as assistant in the primary and grammar school-rooms, or even in the country district, which is perhaps the best place of trial, and the graduate must prove by actual handling, that she can use the weapons with which she has been supplied.

She must be willing to work wherever she can get a place, thankful for the opportunity, and must do the very best work that she is capable of in any place, without reference to pecuniary compensation. Let that take care of itself. First prove that you can do the thing. "The men, and women too, who do anything that is worth doing seldom think about reward of any kind. You can get their best work from them whether you treat them well or ill."

But the ill treatment seldom follows the good work. To women

as to men the pecuniary reward of faithful labor comes in due time; perhaps it is sometimes a little overdue before it comes, but it comes at last, if we with patience wait for it, still working.

It is true that the reward is not as large for women as for men, that the money question is not as yet rightly balanced between the sexes; but one of the most efficient ways in which women can help the adjustment of this question is by the improvement of their work.

Quiet women workers are needed to prove what the talkers are daily asserting of woman's power:

"Soft my sister! not a word!

By speaking we prove only we can speak,
Which he the man here never doubted. What
He doubts is whether we can do the thing.

Whoso cures the plague,

Though twice a woman shall be called a leech;

Who rights a land's finances, is excused

For touching coppers, though her hands be white,
But we, we talk."

So let us be quiet. Women are needed to work who are not so anxious for recognition, as for a chance to work, who do not so much feel that the world waits for them, as that they need the privilege of working in the world, the opportunity of doing something that they may so fulfil the end of their being that "the one talent which is death to hide may not be lodged with them useless,"

And this work of women should be womanly work. When compared with that of men in the same department of labor, it should have a distinctive character. It would be too difficult a task for women to attempt to compete with men in producing the same results, till we have better opportunities for training. It is unfair to require us to make bricks without straw. No New England College opens its doors to a woman, no scientific school admits her except incidentally. She gains such opportunities only as a privilege, and if she asks for them, thrce-fourths of her brothers stigmatize her as forward and unwomanly, a name which every true woman shrinks from even when it is given undeservedly. Woman should take and use all opportunities of culture which she can grasp; let no one slip; there is need for the utmost that she can attain to in fitting

herself for the work before her, and even then she is far behind the man who has used the means in his power for training himself. We do not know yet what the powers of woman are intellectually. It is a question to be settled otherwhere than in the lecture room. When she has the same or equal opportunities of training with men, if she fails then it will be soon enough to proclaim with authoritative voice her mental inferiority. Nor can we yet assert the opposite, only actual experiment with more than one generation can decide this vexed question.

Meantime it should never be the aim of any true woman to have her work such that it cannot be distinguished from that of the man. It is not to add more labor of the same sort that woman is to-day invited to stand by her brother's side as a worker.

She must bring some new element in her work which shall distinguish it and make it valuable. Let her not measure her success or failure by the likeness her work bears, in its method, to the pattern set her by the man. Let each one follow her womanly instincts in the plan of her work, and if she is a good worker her labor will be worth the most for that in it which marks it as the work of a woman. If she have womanly tact, let it accomplish for her in the school-room what manly strength has too often failed to do in controlling wayward spirits. If she have a tender and loving heart let it move her to warm and active manifestations of interest in the obstinate, stupid and neglected ones of her flock. If she have great quickness of insight into human nature, and power of persuasion, and ready mother wit, let them all be brought into requisition as weapons given her of God, that she may use them to foster, develop and guide the infinitely varied characters which are committed to her for moulding to varied excellence. If the women who are today entering upon the work of teaching in Massachusetts alone will fit themselves in the best way open to them for their work, if they will accept the cares and responsibilities that are offered to them, will work faithfully and long wherever a chance of work comes, thinking more of the quality of the work than of the amount of pay, being less anxious to adjust their wages on an equality with those of men, and more desirous to make the work of equal or greater value, they will furnish some of the best facts for a basis on which

to settle the difficult question of women's work and women's wages, - and better than that, the young men and women of the next generation shall show, in the beauty and worth of their lives, the nobility of the work of those who trained them.

[The author desires it stated that the latter part of this paper has appeared as an article in the "Maine Journal of Education."]

ON A POINT IN LATIN GRAMMAR.

BY JOSEPH H. ALLEN, OF CAMBRIDGE.

It is not easy for us at this distance to realize that Latin was once a live and spoken language, which those who spoke it took the same liberties with as we do with our own mother tongue. We are apt to feel as if Cicero and Cæsar wrote it by rule, as we do; as if gender, number, case, and so forth, were inflicted upon them as they are on us, by rote, and the prescription of grammarians not remembering that Cicero and Cæsar were only beginning the analysis of their native speech, while what we call grammar was the invention of a much later stage. It is a particular merit of D'Arcy Thompson's books, that they help, more than any we know, to overcome this difficulty of the imagination. They bring the language back to us, so far as that is possible, as a living tongue. And, in choosing Plautus for the first classic author he introduces in his course, Prof. Thompson takes a bold step towards breaking down the rigid prepossession that has taken hold on us from our exclusive reading of the more stately and artificial writers interpreted by the strict rules of our formal grammars.

What is perhaps hardest of all for us to understand is, that inflection, by gender, number and case, mood, tense and person, should ever have been, instead of the weary formality we find it, an easy habit of the tongue, and a craving of the ear. Not to go into the philosophy of it, with Max Müller- not to insist, with D'Arcy Thompson, how much simpler a thing it really was in common use than we find it in printed books-there are one or two very common usages which show how it entered into the genius of the