methods and means with the college | student which are the more practicable. Foot ball represents this method or means; foot-ball absorbs and compels. The objector might possibly say it absorbs too completely and compels too arrogantly. In the case of some students I should agree with the objector, and assent to the value of his objection. But for most men, under conditions existing, foot-ball represents a wholesome method for calling out a compelling interest on the part of the student. For the student, like certain ranges of society, is in peril of the evil of indifferentism. Dry rot is one of the dangers. Nil admirari is a not uncommon motto. A lackadaisical lassitude easily touches him. In such a condition foot-ball does for him what calomel did in the old pharmacopoeia for the permanent invalid. Speaking of a lazy boy, Emerson said, or is said to have said, "Set a dog on him, send him West, do something to him." Football accomplishes a result of the kind Emerson wished to accomplish. A father, himself a distinguised publisher, said to me recently that his little baby, of a few days old, seemed at one time to be dying or dead; no breathing could be distinguished, no pulse found. But the nurse took the little weakling by one heel and flung it around several times, making a full circle in the air. The currents of life were set in motion; it revived; it is now living in fatness and health. Football arouses, absorbs, compels interest.

Fourth.-Foot ball, further, embodies the process of self discovery. Self discovery is a condition, but it is more than a condition, it is also a means. All the early years of one's life are years of the revealing of self to self; they are years of self-revelation both as a cause and as a consequence of self-enlargement. What rapture belongs to the true soul in finding he is a larger, stronger, better man than he believed himself to be; what remorse, or at least regret, belongs to the noble soul in finding he is less large, less strong, less good than he believed himself to be.

One recalls the chagrin which John Inglesant in Shorthouse's great story experienced in finding that near the close of his career he was inclined to play fast and loose with a temptation which in the earlier time he had sternly resisted. Foot-ball proves to many a man what he is. It makes known to him that he has more or less physical strength than he

believed he had. In intellectual vision or provision it shows him whether he is more or less alert; in executive planning and detail it shows him whether he is more or less prompt and able; in heart it shows him whether he is more enthusiastic or more indifferent; and in conscience it also proves to him whether he is more or less righteous than he believed himself to be. Every foot-ball game is a crisis. It not only creates and develops power, it also discovers the possession or the lack of power.

Fifth. The last of the five points of the ethical Calvinism of foot-ball to which shall allude is self restraint. Foot-ball develops self restraint. develops self restraint. Self-restraint, or more broadly self-control, is one of the primary signs of the gentleman. represents the subordination of the less worthy to the more worthy, of the relatively good to the relatively better, of the relatively better to the absolutely best, of meanness to nobility, of the temporal to the eternal, of the narrow to the broad, of indifferentism to the cardinal virtues, verities and graces. Foot ball demands self-restraint, and therefore it develops self-restraint. For it teems with temptations to be mean. It affords manifold opportunities to do nasty things. These temptations yielded to, these opportunities embraced, character becomes mean and nasty. Some men cannot resist such opportunities and temptations, and such men should never set foot on the gridiron. I recall that in one foot-ball season a Junior, who was one of the best men on the eleven, said to me he had decided to quit playing. In answer to my inquiry respecting the reason, he said he could not keep himself from doing mean things to the man opposite. I was surprised, for I had always judged the student to be a man of fine character. I asked: "But don't the officials keep you from breaking the rules?" "Oh," said he, "I can slug the fellow or kick him, or do him up easily enough, and no official ever be the wiser." I may add that my advice to the student was to stay in the game, and, staying, to make himself a man worthy to play the game. He did stay. In answer to inquiries of mine afterward made, he said he thought he was doing better. The gridiron is a small ethical world, marked all over with the white lines of moral distinctions. It is like an experiment in the laboratory in which certain natural phenomena are segregated

in order that the understanding of these phenomena may be more readily acquired. It is a moral apprenticeship, an ethical practice school. It is in ethics what the Socratic thinking shop was supposed to be-a training of the individual. Foot-ball thus develops the superb quality of self-restraint. It thus helps It thus helps to make the finest type of the gentleman.

I know perfectly well that the game of foot-ball as played in American colleges is subject to very serious evils. Let no attempt be made to depreciate the evil of these evils. But these evils, be it said, relate rather to the conduct of the game and its incidental conditions than to its essential elements. Before and above these evils I would emphasize its functions in developing the gentleman of ethical character and conduct. For foot-ball represents the inexorable, it teaches the value of the positive, it illustrates the worth of a compelling interest, it promotes self-discovery, and it disciplines self-restraint.-North American Review.

BACKBONE AND OTHER BONES.

A

PHYSIOLOGY IN PRIMARY GRADES.

BY ELIZABETH LLOYD.

S the law of Pennsylvania requires that physiology and hygiene shall be taught to all pupils in the public schools, it follows that those not old enough to use a text-book must be taught orally. But many of the teachers in our state have only a text-book knowledge of the subject, and are at a loss what to teach and how to teach it. They give a few lessons on the anatomy of the human body and think they have done their full duty. This kind of teaching has given rise to the stories of children who their bones" for the edification of visitors. Only the other day I asked a little girl in whose home I was entertained if she had studied physiology, and she replied, "Oh, yes, I know all about my bones," and then added, "But I don't like physiology; I'd rather study arithmetic and spelling."

say

There is no reason why children should not learn the common names or the uses of the bones; they are certainly as curious and interesting as the parts of a leaf or flower. This is an age of nature study,

and the human organism is the most wonderful of nature's works. But having taught the names and uses of some of the bones and how to take care of them, and having shown how well they are adapted to human needs, it is better to pass on to some other parts of the body. As the general subject is to be continued for eight or nine years, it is not necessary to teach any portion of it exhaustively (or exhaustingly) to the primary pupils.

Let us suppose that the teacher wishes to give a lesson on the backbone. By way of preparation she should draw on the blackboard or on a sheet of manila paper a picture of the backbone. She should also obtain from the butcher a few vertebræ of a sheep or pig, and ask the pupils if some of them cannot bring the backbone of a fish or chicken.

A glance at the picture of the entire backbone, and a study of the individual vertebra, with its hole in the middle and its projections, will occupy the time of one lesson; when the children return to their seats they can draw the vertebra from memory. The manner in which the vertebræ are fitted together, with a description of the cushions between, and a reference to the "telegraph wire" that runs through the whole to the brain, will form another lesson. A third lesson may easily be devoted to the flexibility of the backbone, and the importance of sitting and standing properly. The children should practice the proper standing position, with the chest and the crown of the head high, and the weight resting on the balls of the feet.

Having taught the children in the class how they ought to sit, the teacher should require them to form the habit of sitting in the best position that seats and desks will allow, and should take special care that little children do not sit at bigh desks, or the reverse. If some of the little folks have to sit on seats so high that their feet swing in the air, a foot-rest should be provided, if it is only a store box.

An interesting subject for a few more lessons would be the comparison of man with other animals that have backbones, noting which of them can stand erect, or nearly so, and which never do. Lead the pupils to see that one reason why man is superior to all other animals is because he is able to stand erect, walk on two feet, and use his hands to do things with. The article by Dan Beard in the

October St. Nicholas on Mother Nature and the Jointed Stick," will be very help ful to the teacher in arousing an interest in the backbone and also in the hands and feet, especially if she is enough of an artist to make a rough enlargement of the drawings.

Having aroused an interest in the backbone, some lessons may be given on the other bones, and the way in which they depend upon or support the spinal column. The teacher should acquaint herself with the kinds of food that are needed to make good bones, and make them the subject of a lesson, too. She should explain that some children are naturally larger and stronger than others, but that improper food and bad habits still keep such from growing to their full size, while wholesome food and good habits will help those who are puny to become large and strong. In this connection she should teach that alcohol and tobacco stunt the growth of the bones, and encourage the pupils to let them alone altotogether, so that they may become welldeveloped men and women. A high ideal of physical perfection formed in early childhood will make it easier for the boy or girl to resist the influences that lead to disease and death.

INTERESTING PROCESS.

N English writer thus describes the

various changes that take place within an egg. The hen has scarcely sat on her eggs twelve hours before some lineaments of the head and body of the chicken appear. The heart may seem to beat at the end of the second day; it has at this time somewhat the form of a horseshce, but no blood yet appears. At the end of two days two vesicles of blood are to be distinguished, the pulsation of which are very visible; one of these is the left ventricle, and the other the root of the great artery. At the fiftieth hour one auricle of the heart appears, resembling a noose folded down upon itself. The beating of the heart is first observed in the auricle and afterward in the ventricle. At the end of the seventieth hour the wings are distinguishable; and on the head two bubbles are seen for the brain, one for the bill, and two for the fore and hind parts of the head. Toward the end of four days the two auricles already visible draw nearer to the

heart than before. ward the fifth day. At the end of a hundred and thirty-one hours the first voluntary motion is observed. At the end of seven hours more the lungs and the stomach become visible; and four hours afterward the intestines, the loins and the upper jaw. At the hundred and fortyfourth hour two ventricles are visible, and two drops of blood instead of the single one as seen before. The seventh day the brain begins to have some consistency. At the one hundred and ninetieth hour of incubation the bill opens and the flesh appears on the breast. In four hours more the breastbone is seen. In six hours after this the ribs appear, forming from the back, and the bill is very visible, as well as the gall-bladder. The bill becomes green at the end of two hundred and thirty-six hours; and if the chicken be taken out of its covering it evidently moves itself. The feather begins to shoot out toward the two hundred and fortieth hour, and the skull becomes gristly. At the two hundred and sixty-fourth hour the eyes appear. At the two-hundred and eighty-eighth the ribs are perfect. At the three hundred and thirty-first the spleen draws near the stomach and the lungs to the chest. At the end of three hundred and fifty-five hours the bill frequently opens and shuts, and at the end of the eighteenth day the first cry of the chicken is heard.

The liver appears to

THE BOOK FLOOD.

BY HENRY VAN DYKE, d. d.

THE big world is cumbered with them!

complained the wise man, who lived two thousand years ago. "There are books here in Jerusalem, and in Thebes, and in Babylon, and in Nineveh; even in Tyre and Sidon among the Philistines no doubt one would find books. Still men go on scribbling out their thoughts and observations, in spite of the fact that there is nothing new under the sun. Where are the readers to come from, I wonder? For much study is a weariness of the flesh, and yet of making many books there is no end."

But what would the writer that was king say if he were alive to-day, when the annual output of books in this country alone is between 4000 and 5000, and when the printing press multiplies these

thoughts go out to them from this little workshop-a deserted farmhouse, with nothing but a table and a chair for furni ture, and with a tranquil outlook from the open door over rolling hills and shining water-my thoughts ramble away to the other writers who have been busy with their books during these summer days, and who are now probably putting on the last touches in the way of a preface, the garnish of the feast.

After all, is it not better that a hundred unnecessary books should be published than that one good and useful book should be lost? Nature's law of parsimony is arrived at by a process of expense. The needless volumes, like the infertile seeds, soon sink out of sight; and the books that have life in them are taken care of by readers who are waitiing scmewhere to receive and cherish them.

Reading is a habit. Writing is a gift. Both may be cultivated. But I suppose there is this difference between themthe habit may be acquired by any who will; the gift can be developed only by those who have it. How to discover it and make the best of it, and use the writing gift so that it shall supply the real needs and promote the finest results of the reading habit-that is the problem.

I do not know any ready-made answer in the back of the book. The only way to work it out is for the writers to try to write as well as they can, and for the publishers to publish the best that they can get, and for the great company of readers to bring a healthier appetite, a clean taste, and a good digestion to the feast that is prepared for them. If one partakes not wisely but too much, that is his own fault.

I have been thinking to day of the preparation of the feast. How much hard and pleasant labor has gone into the making of the books that will come out this autumn! The group of workers is not large compared with the number of people who live in these United States, and of whom perhaps 20,000,000 are in some sense readers. But this small company of literary folk have had a good time with their work, I will warrant, in spite of the fact that some of it has been difficult.

Not a few of them I know, good com

Scholars have been sifting and arranging the results of their studies in great libraries. Observers of men and manners have been traveling and taking notes in strange lands and in the foreign parts of their own country. Teachers of life and morals have been trying to give their lessons a convincing and commanding form. Students of nature have been bringing together the records of their companionship with birds and beasts and flowers. Story-tellers have been following their dream-people through all kinds of adventures to joyful or sorrowful ends. And poets, a few, have been weaving their most delicate fancies and their deepest thoughts into verse.

In what different places, and under what various conditions, these men and women have been working! Some of them in great cities, in spacious rooms filled with books; others in quiet country places, in little "dens" of bare and simple aspect; some among the tranquillizing influences of the mountains; others where they could feel the inspiration of an outlook over the tossing, limitless plains of the ocean; a few, perhaps, in tents among the trees, or in boats on the sea-though, for my part, it is difficult to understand how any one can actually write out of doors. The attractions of nature are so close and so compelling that it is impossible to resist them. Out of doors for seeing and hearing, thinking and feeling. In doors for writing. It is pleasing to reflect upon the great amelioration which has been made in the "worldly lot" of writers, by the increase and wider distribution of the pecuniary rewards of authorship. It is not necessary to go back to the age of Grub Street for comparison. There has been a change even since the days when Lowell wrote, "I cannot come (to New York) without any money, and leave my wife with 62% cents, such being the budget brought in by my secretary of the treasury this

week;" and when Hawthorne's friends had to make up a purse and send it to him anonymously to relieve the penury caused by the loss of his position in the Custom House at Salem. Nowadays, people who certainly do not write any better than Lowell or Hawthorne, find life very much easier. They travel freely; they live in a comfortable housesome of them have two-with plenty of books and pictures. The man who would begrudge this improvement in the condition of literary workers must have, as Dr. Johnson would say, "a disposition little to be envied." Why should not the author share in the general prosperity?

Besides, it should be remembered that while there has been a certain enlargement in the pay of literary workers, it has not yet resulted in the creation of opulence among men of letters as a class. The principal gain has been along the line of enlarged opportunities and better remuneration for magazine, newspaper, and editorial work. Setting these aside, the number of people who make a good living by literature alone is still very small. I will not even attempt to guess how many there are; it might precipitate a long correspondence. But it is safe to say that there are not two score in America. What a slight burden is the support of thirty-five authors among 75.000 000 people! Your share in the burden is just one-half of one-millionth part of an author. What is that, compared with the pleasure that you get out of new books, even though you are one of those severe people who profess to read none but old ones?

As a rule, it may be taken for granted that plain living is congenial to high thinking. A writer in one of the English periodicals a couple of years ago put forth the theory that the increase of pessimism among authors was due to the eating of too much and too rich food. Among other illustrations he said that Ibsen was inordinately given to the pleasures of the table. However that may be, it is certain that the literary life, at its best, is one that demands a clear and steady mind, a free spirit, and great concentration of effort. The cares of a splendid establishment and the distractions of a complicated social life are not likely, in the majority of cases, to make it easier to do the best work. Most of the great books, I suppose, have been written in rather small rooms.

The spirit of happiness also seems to have a partiality for quiet and simple lodgings. "We have a little room in the third story (back)," wrote Lowell in 1845, just after his marriage, "with white curtains trimmed with evergreen, and are as happy as two mortals can be." There is the highest authority for believing that man's life, even though he be an author, consists not in the abundance of things that he possesses. Rather is its real value to be sought in the quality of the ideas and feelings that possess him, and in the effort to embody them in his work. The work's the thing. The delight of clear and steady thought, of free and vivid imagination, of pure and strong emotion; the fascination of fishing for the right words, which sometimes come in shoals like herring, so that the net can hardly contain them, and at other times are more shy and fugacious than the wary trout which refuse to be lured from their hiding places; the pleasure of putting the fit phrase in the proper place, of making a conception stand out plain and firm with no more and no less than is needed for its expression, of doing justice to an imaginary character so that it shall have its own life and significance in the world of fiction, or working a plot or an argument clean through to its inevitable closethese inward and unpurchasable joys are the best wages of the men and women who write. And beyond a doubt, in spite of cynic's sneer, these rewards have already come to many of the authors who have been busy this summer preparing the autumnal feast of books.

The next best thing to the joy of work is the winning of gentle readers and friends who get some good out of your book, and are grateful for it, and think kindly of you for writing it. The next best thing to that is the recognition, on the part of people who know, that your work is good. That is called fame, or glory, and the writer who professes to care nothing for it is probably deceiving himself, or else his liver is out of order. Real reputation, even of a modest kind and of a brief duration, is a good thing; an author ought to be able to be happy without it, but happier with it. The next best thing to that is a good return in money from the sale of a book.

The best writing is done for its own sake. In the choice of a subject, in the manner of working it out, in the details