puncheon floor, and some attempt at clumsy furniture. This type of school-house is not yet extinct. A few specimens of it may still be seen, though I am not aware that any are now used for school purThere is one standing in District Number 2, Wayne Township, Warren County, Ohio, two miles west of Waynesville. This I visited in June, 1886. It was built in the year 1814. It is sixteen feet square and nine high, with a fire-place eight feet wide, and a huge stone chimney now half fallen down. The roof is covered with clapboards, and the heavy door is fastened with a padlock. The small windows, formed by sawing out sections of logs, are said to have been covered with greased paper as a substitute for glass. The writing desks consisted of broad planks fastened to the sides of the house by wooden pins. The seats were rough slabs supported on legs driven through auger holes into the bench. No nails were used in the building, wooden pegs took the place of nails.

When this house was built it was stipulated that no school should be held during sugar-making, the owner of the grove in which it stood reserving the use of it in that season for boiling the maple syrup, and "stirring off" his sugar. Since 1827, no school has been kept there, but the process of making sugar is still carried on, every year, where the girls and boys used to assemble at sunrise and stay until set of sun. When I visited the place, crocks to hold the sweet sap were piled on the floor, and I saw the big "stirring trough," reposing in the loft, like an inverted canoe. Timothy Flint, writing in 1834, describes the school-house in which Daniel Boone learned his letters, in North Carolina, and says it "stood as a fair sample of thousands of west-country school-houses of the present day. It was of logs, after the usual fashion of the time and place. In dimensions, it was spacious and convenient. The chimney was peculiarly ample, occupying one entire side of the building, which was an exact square. Of course, a log as long as the building could be "snaked" to the fire-place, and a file of boys, thirty feet in length, could all stand in front of the fire on a footing of the most democratic equality. Sections of logs cut out here and there, admitted light and air, instead of windows. The surrounding forest furnished ample supplies of fuel. A spring at hand, furnished with various gourds, quenched the frequent thirst of the pupils. A ponderous puncheon door, swinging on substantial wooden hinges, and shutting with a wooden latch, completed the appendages of this primeval seminary."

Many of the back-woods teachers were Irish,-others Scotch or English. In many cases, they were fair scholars but worthless men, -drifting adventurers, addicted to the bottle. In time, the Yankee

schoolmaster asserted himself in the wilderness, giving the "people's colleges," a new character. The pedagogue "boarded round," as in the East he had done. (Nicolay and Hay allude to an early schoolmaster who, in his professional rounds, lodged at a house, consisting of one room, which he occupied with "Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, ten children, three dogs and two cats."

)

Rude and coarse practical joking, roystering games and contests of physical strength, wrestling, racing, fighting, prevailed in the formative period of western society. The god Thor was worshipped, in fact, if not in name. A series of fist-fights was the staple diversion of the big boys at school. The teacher himself was always liable to be attacked, and was always on the defensive. On two pins, behind his throne, rested the weapons of his authority, half a dozen long, tough rods of beech or hazel or hickory. The custom of flogging was almost universal.

Little attempt was made at system or classification in teaching. The pupils brought to school such books as they could obtain, and each one studied in his own way, and learned what he wished to, with irregular and incidental help from the "master." There were as many classes in arithmetic as there were pupils studying it. The ambitious ran races to try who should first get through old "Pike." The schools were noisy. Permission was given, at times, for the whole school to "study aloud," when each and all exercised their lungs to the utmost until they were quite out of breath. At a set hour all engaged in writing copies which the master had "set" beforehand, beginning with "pot-hooks," and ending with moral sentences. With pen knife sharpened to the keenest edge the master skillfully fashioned into pens the goose quills brought to his desk. But the culminating exercise was the spelling lesson, which usually closed the duties of the day. The entire school stood up, ranged in order along the walls, and spelled or "missed" the words pronounced with syllabic precision by the teacher, who stood with ferule in one hand and " Dillworth" in the other, like the deity of education, holding up the emblems of power and knowledge.

Harsh, crude, direct, simple, irregular, was the pioneer method of schooling. Nevertheless, the children learned to spell and to read, to write and to cipher. They learned in order to read, write and cipher in practical life. An odd miscellany of books they brought from their cabin homes. Besides Dillworth's Spelling Book, the English Reader, the Columbian Orator, and Pike's Arithmetic, which were designed for school text-books, it was not unusual to find Aesop's Fables, or Gulliver's Travels, or even a Dream Book, used to read

out of. The Bible was in common use, and numerous are the instances recorded of ludicrous blunders made by pupils reading scripture aloud.

Supply is always prompt to make the acquaintance of Demand, and Competition is never idle. Dillworth divided sway with Webster and Walker. Compilers in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, put themselves to the task of satisfying a “long felt want," by preparing textbooks for the use of schools, and soon rival authors and publishers appeared in the West. In 1795, John Wood, of New York, put forth his "Mentor, or the American Teacher's Assistant," a popular reading-book. In 1811, appeared from Philadelphia, William Duane's "Epitome of the Arts and Sciences, being a Comprehensive System of the Elementary Parts of an Useful and Polite Education." Morse's Geography was issued from a Boston press in 1789, and by 1811 had passed through sixteen editions. Albert Picket's series of "American School Class Books," including books on spelling, reading, grammar, geography and penmanship, came out early in the century, published by D. D. Smith, New York. Murray's Grammar held the field as the popular text book until about 1830. Young men desiring a practical knowledge of surveying,-a subject of much importance in new countries, bought the treaties of John Gummere, published at Philadelphia in 1814. Perhaps the best known Latin Grammar of the period was that of James Ross, A. M., of Philadelphia, which came out in 1814.

The school books which I have named, and others from the East, were used in the schools of the Ohio Valley, and stray copies of them may be picked up in second-hand book-stores in any of our cities. They are now dead leaves, fallen from the deciduous tree of educational literature.

There lies before me as I write, a copy of "Dillworth's Schoolmasters Assistant," ninety years old. The frontispiece is a frightful wood cut of the venerated Dillworth himself,-frightful and grim. On one of the fly leaves is written, in a sprawling hand, the inscription, "Martin Augspwiger, his assistant, Williamsburg, Virginia." What manner of man, what style of school-master was Martin ? and how did "his assistant" find its way from Williamsburg to Cincinnati? Martin Augspwiger's queer name, perchance, exists only on a tombstone and on this dingy fly-leaf of old Dillworth's fossil book. But the names and the volume and its migration from Virginia to Ohio tell a suggestive story to him who has the historic fancy to repeople the past, and to reconstruct Pioneer Schools around a visible fragment of things that were.

MISSION OF THE CONSERVATIVE TEACHER.

BY J. A. SHAWAN, MT. VERNON, O.

Read before the Central Ohio Teachers' Association.

In a recent number of the OHIO EDUCATIONAL MONTHLY, there was in substance this statement: "The pendulum of educational progress ever keeps vibrating from one extreme to the other." A glance at the methods of the past and present and a comparison of those now used in different schools show that our editor was right. Innovation expresses the educational spirit of the times. It is the "reform" emblazoned upon the school-master's banner by which he hopes to move his community, village, town or city. We are not sure that the methods of to-day may not be wholly ignored to-morrow, and revived again a few days later. Are these the signs of progress? Is there nothing permanent in the midst of these changes? Is every educational quantity a variable? Are there no fixed principles to which may be referred the great problems of mental, moral and physical development? Is there not a work for the conservative teacher whose mission shall be to restrain vacillation and to change fickleness into constancy? By the conservative teacher, we do not mean one who is opposed to progress, and has become a radical in his allegiance to old forms and ideas; but one, rather, who takes an intermediate position, clinging to that which is good in old and well established methods, and waiting until the new have gained character, either by their success in practice, or by their standing the test of scientific investigation.

Not long since, I heard a prominent minister make this assertion: "Conservatism is a grand fraud. It has blocked the wheels of progress in all ages. To it may be attributed the delay of many of the greatest reforms the world has ever attempted."

Macaulay has somewhere said that "there is a difference between assertion and demonstration." Progress is often in the direction of delay. A man may be sincere enough, but lack good judgment. If sincerity is in the line of sound judgment, a mistake is improbable. Cotton Mather, the talented New England preacher, not only stood by and allowed the Salem witchcraft outrages to be perpetrated, but even wrote in justification of the act. Who doubts his sincerity, and who, at the present time, commends his judgment?

Paul believed that he was doing God's service when he went about persecuting Christians. But the same Paul, after his conversion and with more mature judgment, said, all things lawful are not expedient.

Radicalism is ever guilty of indiscretion and mismanagement. The term is not synonymous with progress. The Crusades cost millions of lives, and yet their great object, the deliverance of the Holy Sepulcher, was at last abandoned, and the name of Peter, the Hermit, must go down through the ages, linked with the failure of the greatest fanatical movement that the world has ever known.

We grant the innovator has his mission in arousing interest in any line of thought. Even the conservative is bent from his course by the forcible presentation of a special phase of work. We grant too, that

those who adhere steadfastly to old ideas may do much good in the world by keeping constantly before the public those methods which have proved successful in the past. But we believe that the true course is to steer between these two extremes, appropriating, without prejudice, whatever is good in either.

Hooker was right when he said: "The love of things ancient doth argue stayedness, but levity and want of experience maketh apt unto innovation." It is not an uncommon thing to see a young and inexperienced teacher, full of enthusiasm and eager to be regarded as progressive, put into practice half digested ideas gathered from our educational papers and at our country institutes. With but a vague notion of their meaning, he is unable to apply them correctly and fails in the attempt, and a reaction is the result.

It is not a fault of the papers, but it may be in part the fault of the institute instructors, who try to cover too much ground in a given time. Unfortunate reaction! His enthusiasm dampened and his ideals fallen, the young teacher would better give up the work at once than experience the evil consequences. The prejudice thus aroused against good methods is incalculable. A little more careful thought might turn a failure into complete success. All great reforms are brought about slowly. "One may as reasonably expect oaks from a mushroom bed as great and durable profits from small and hasty efforts." To rush thoughtlessly in advance of public sentiment is not wise; to lag behind it is criminal. Lincoln, though an abolitionist, did not immediately proclaim the emancipation of the slave when he became President; to have done so would have defeated his cherished object. He could afford to wait until public sentiment was ready for it, but he could not afford, by a rash movement, to prepare the way for its failure. So every young teacher should make haste slowly, establishing every step before the next is taken, and thoroughly digesting and assimilating each new idea before attempting to use it. He should be especially careful to visit the best schools within his reach, inquire into the secret of success, and observe the best methods of governing