average standard of ministerial education, it works very unsatisfactorily.

But the essay that gives character to this publication is the last one, entitled "Outlines of an Institution for the Education of Teachers." It is distinctly creative in character. In nothing that had appeared from the press thus far had this subject been so carefully thought out and presented, so far as the United States are concerned, as in this celebrated essay. It justifies the title that George B. Emerson bestowed upon the author, "Father of Normal Schools." Mr. Carter contends that insufficient stress has been laid upon the professional preparation of teachers. A teacher must know how to impart knowledge. Education is a science, and must be taught as such. To do this work, the State should found and support an institution that would be free to all its pupils. This institution should embrace (1) an appropriate library and philosophical apparatus; (2) a principal and assistant professors in the different departments; (3) a school for children of different ages, embracing both those desiring a general education and those fitting for teachers; (4) a board of commissioners representing the interests and the wishes of the public. The proposed institution would set the standard of qualifications for teachers, and would give stability, influence, and dignity to the teaching profession. The proposed school bears no distinctive name; the words "normal" and "normal school" do not occur in the essay, nor is there any recognition whatever of similar schools that have been founded in Europe. In a foot-note to one of the letters to Prescott, Mr. Carter gives some account of Pestalozzi, drawing his information from the Edinburgh Review and a work on Switzerland. The philosophers whom he mentions are Stewart, Locke, and Dr. Watts. A bill that Carter prepared embodying his ideas was introduced into the legislature in 1827, and failed of passing only by a single vote in the Senate.

Mr. Carter's two pamphlets attracted immediate attention. Professor George Ticknor reviewed the Letters to Prescott in The North American Review, and Dr. Orville Dewey the Essays upon Popular Education, in the same periodical. Theophilus Parsons reviewed the Letters in The Literary Gazette. These reviews were all highly commendatory. The United States Review also contained an article on Mr. Carter's institution for the education of teachers, the writer of which says that the country schools are everywhere degraded, and that they stand so low in the estimation of their warmest friends that it is thought a mean thing for any man but the mechanic, the artisan, or the laborer to send his children to them for an education. . . .

At the session of the legislature for 1836-37 the Directors of the American Institute of Instruction had memorialized that body to consider the expediency of appointing, for a term of years, a Superintendent of the Common Schools of the Commonwealth, urging the usual arguments in favor of the measure. Besides, Governor Everett, in his opening address, recommended the creation of a State Board of Education. The whole

subject was accordingly referred to the joint committee of the two houses on education. The committee reported the text of the act which was drawn by Mr. James G. Carter of the House of Representatives. At first, the measure was lost in the House by a vote of nearly two to one, but, owing to Mr. Carter's wise management and advocacy, was finally carried. It was the culmination of the agitation that he had first aided thirteen years before, and that he had continued to promote to the utmost until the end finally crowned the work.

The first Board was made up with peculiar care. It was necessary to avoid arousing opposition as far as possible. Years afterward, in the midst of the great religious controversy, Mr. Mann explained the criteria that were followed in selecting the members. All the great parties into which the State was divided were regarded. First of all, religious views were considered, then political considerations. Preferences for men that the public had expressed by elevating them to official positions were thought important. And the element of locality, although considered among the weakest motives, was not wholly disregarded. Besides the ex officiis members, the list, when it appeared, carried the names of these distinguished citizens: James G. Carter, Emerson Davis, Edmund Dwight, Horace Mann, Edward A. Newton, Robert Rantoul, Jr., Thomas Robbins, and Jared Sparks. Carter and Rantoul, one a Whig and the other a Democrat, were taken from the House of Representatives. Mann, a Whig, came from the Senate. Dwight was a Unitarian, Newton an Episcopalian, both business men, while Davis and Robbins were orthodox clergymen. Sparks had formerly been a Unitarian minister, and was at the time President of Harvard College.

The educators of the State generally expected that Mr. Carter would be made the Secretary of the Board, and the appointment of another was the source of much surprise and disappointment. This was not without reason. If any man could be said to have deserved the office, Mr. Carter was the man. His labors as a teacher and writer on popular education were universally appreciated, and the governor very properly placed his name at the head of the list of appointive Board members. But Mr. Carter was passed by and Horace Mann chosen. Mann had done what he could to promote the bill in the Senate, and was well known to be an ardent friend of public education: he had served as a tutor at Providence, and as member of the school committee at Dedham; but he had no record that could be compared with Mr. Carter's. It was not strange, therefore, that his preferment should create surprise. The selection of Mr. Mann and his acceptance were brought about by Mr. Edmund Dwight. Mr. Dwight, no doubt, appreciated the peculiar nature of the work to be done by the Secretary, and discerned in Mr. Mann peculiar fitness for this work. A business man himself of great capacity and large enterprises, he knew that a man might be a scholar, a teacher, and an able writer on education, and yet not possess the peculiar combination of qualities that would be necessary to crown the creation of the Secretaryship and of the Board of Education with success. Mr. Carter might have made an admirable Secretary; but it cannot be claimed, at this distance, that he had ever shown the necessary capacity for the work to be done. Mr. George B. Emerson, in the able contribution that he made to the controversy growing out of Mr. Mann's Seventh Report, answered in the negative the question whether it would not have been better for the Board to choose a Secretary who was

engaged in the practical work of teaching, basing his answer on general principles as well as on special facts.-From B. A. Hinsdale's "Horace Mann and the Common School Revival in the United States."

The extract from James G. Carter's Essays upon Popular Education printed in the present leaflet gives a better idea than any other writing of the period, unless it be the same writer's Letters to Hon. William Prescott published a few months previously, of the condition of the schools of Massachusetts in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Together with the warm and just tribute to Mr. Carter by Dr. Hinsdale, reprinted from his admirable little book on Horace Mann, it is hoped that it may perform a greatly needed service in redirecting attention to a devoted and far-seeing Massachusetts educator, a pioneer in educational reform, whose fame has been eclipsed, and his revolutionary work and very name almost forgotten, through the conspicuousness of his great follower. Horace Mann's searching exposure of the condition and needs of our public schools, his eloquent pleas for better teachers and better text-books, his proposition for normal schools, and his demand for a new and more generous public spirit in the whole field of popular education are known by all. But few remember that James G. Carter anticipated him in all these points, and that he drew the bill creating the Massachusetts State Board of Education, as whose secretary Mann did his epoch-making work. All of the early chapters of Hinsdale's Life of Mann should be read by the student, especially the chapter entitled "Horace Mann's Forerunners." See Old South Leaflet, No. 109, Horace Mann's discussion of the Ground of the Free School System, from his tenth annual report. See, too, in connection with the studies of Emerson's life and times, Emerson's noble and prophetic lecture on Education. Emerson was deeply interested in the reforms urged by Carter and Mann.

Mr. Carter was instrumental in founding the American Institute of Instruction. This, our oldest existing society of the kind, was formally organized in a convention of teachers and others interested, held in Boston in August, 1830. President Francis Wayland of Brown University gave the introductory address and was chosen the first president. At this convention Mr. Carter gave a vital and stimulating address upon the "Development of the Mental Faculties and the Teaching of Geography," which appears in the first volume published by the Institute. In 1830 also he published a "Geography of Massachusetts," a little volume with a map, which to-day serves equally as a monument of advance upon things before and of the immense advance since. It enforced and illustrated a central point of Mr. Carter's. The geographies generally began with descriptions of the solar system. Mr. Carter said: "The subject is begun precisely at the wrong end." "We need to know most concerning those places which are nearest us. Hence his little geography of Massachusetts. He also wrote a "Geography of New Hampshire"; and he was the author of a work on Middlesex and Worcester Counties, besides various addresses not mentioned above. He died in Chicago in 1849. His home for many years was in Lancaster, Mass., which town he represented several years in the legislature. In the last year of his life he was bitterly attacked by a body of enemies in the town, who petitioned that his commission as justice of the peace be taken away. The legislative hearing resulted in his unanimous vindication. is of interest from the fact that he was defended by Rufus Choate and Hon. Pliny Merrick, whose speeches can be read in the libraries; and Mr. Choate's eloquent tribute to Mr. Carter's character and services makes some distinct additions to our knowledge of the details of his life and public service.

It

From President Dwight's "Travels in New England."

Boston, the capital of Massachusetts and the principal town in New England, lies in 42° 22' 23" North latitude, and in 70° 58' 53" West of London. It is built on a peninsula at the bottom of Massachusetts Bay. This peninsula is one mile, three-fourths, and fifty-seven rods in length, and one mile and forty-two rods in breadth; of a very irregular form, and not easily described. It contains between seven hundred and eight hundred acres, and, with a population occupying the whole ground and conveniently spread, would contain seven thousand houses and from sixty to seventy thousand inhabitants. To the main it is united by an isthmus, in length one mile and eleven rods. The whole length of the township is almost three miles. The isthmus is already built upon to a considerable extent, and at a period not very distant will probably be covered with houses.

Boston contains one hundred and thirty-five streets, twentyone lanes, eighteen courts, and, it is said, a few squares; although, I confess, I have never seen anything in it to which I should give that name. The streets, if we except a small number, are narrow, crooked, and disagreeable. The settlers appear to have built where they wished, where a vote permitted, or where danger or necessity forced them to build. The streets strike the eye of a traveller as if intended to be mere passages from one neighborhood to another, and not as the open, hand

some divisions of a great town; as the result of casualty, and not of contrivance.

It deserves to be remembered that almost all the great cities in the world have been formed in a similar manner. London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Madrid, Vienna, Moscow, Constantinople, Cairo, Aleppo, etc., are all principally built on wretched streets and with a deplorable confusion. The founders of Nineveh and Babylon seem to have been the only ancients who understood this subject. Whence these men acquired such largeness of heart it will be difficult to determine, unless we suppose Nineveh to have derived its noble form from traditionary remains of antediluvian improvement, and Babylon to have been a copy of Nineveh. The Chinese have, indeed, formed their cities with regularity; but their streets, except a few of those in Pekin, are very narrow and inconvenient.

Why the Greeks, who readily adopted the improvements of other countries and originated so many of their own, neglected an article of such importance,- an article, too, with which they were perfectly acquainted,—it is not easy to explain.

It is remarkable that the scheme of forming public squares, so beautiful, and in great towns so conducive to health, should have been almost universally forgotten. Nothing is so cheerful, so delightful, or so susceptible of the combined elegancies of nature and art. On these open grounds the inhabitants might always find sweet air, charming walks, fountains refreshing the atmosphere, trees excluding the sun, and, together with fine flowering shrubs, presenting to the eye the most ornamental objects found in the country. Here, also, youth and little children might enjoy those sports, those voluntary indulgences, which in fresh air are, peculiarly to them, the sources of health and the prolongation of life. Yet many large cities are utterly destitute of these appendages; and in no city are they so numerous as the taste for beauty and a regard for health compel us to wish.

We are not, however, to wonder that so much imperfection should be found in the plan of Boston. Those who formed it were in a sense exiles, forced to leave their country on account of their religion. In many instances they had been plundered of their property, and in many were poor from other causes. They were few, ill-furnished with the means of living remote from supplies, and in doubt and distress concerning the future subsistence of their families. At the same time, they were sur