I. IN REGARD TO SCHOOL HOUSES. Whatever the structure and conveniences of the first school houses in New England were, there is no account of them to my knowledge handed down to the present generation. It is sufficient praise for our ancestors that they established free schools, and provided accommodations for them of any kind. Nor is it necessary that we should go farther back than fifty years, to find structures, between which and the modern ones a comparison sufficiently striking for our purpose may be traced. Indeed may go no farther than to some existing relics of a past generation, and it may be that all who hear me have already in their own mind, and perhaps have had, at some past time connected with their own school-day experience, the very pattern, which will answer our present purpose. In examining quite a large number of these declining monuments of ill-adapted ingenuity, I have found that a few prominent characteristics mark them all. It seems to have been deemed essential that these edifices, built for the accommodation of all, should have a place in the very centre of the district, determined by actual admeasurement; and wherever the rods and links should fix that point, whether hill or valley, forest or meadow, "highway or by way"-there, and there only must the edifice go up, and thither must the children wend their course, perhaps far away from the village, far away from the principal road, (an object of no small consequence, particularly in winter), far away from a suitable site for any building, to gain their first impressions of school. It would seem also to have been considered quite essential that each of these buildings should be furnished with the most ample fire places "gaping wide;" and at the same time with slanting floors the seats rising one above another, suggesting to the modern visitor the idea that they were designed for vast roasting places, in which each victim could have an equal chance to see and appreciate the towering flames, as they rose in columns to the elevated mantel piece and roared up the incandescent flue. Of the capacity of these fire places, none can better judge than those who have taken their "turn” of a winter's morning, to "make the fire" for a country school, some twenty-five years ago. Who does not well remember the rotund back-log of a fathom long; the ample bowlders from a neighboring stone wall for andirons; the "forestick" of a sled's length, to support the superincumbent mass of clefts, small-wood, chips, &c., to the amount of the third part of a cord, to be consumed for an ordinary day's warming of the district school house? Who does not recollect the merry sound of axes, when the larger boys spent most of the afternoon in chopping at the door the fuel for the next day's burning? I have mentioned the sloping floor upon which it was difficult to stand at ease, if not to stand at all; and which in the ascent might remind one of the worthy Pilgrim's Hill of Difficulty, and in the descent, of his approach to the Valley of Humiliation, in which, in the quaint language of Bunyan, "it were dangerous for one to catch a slip." I might go on to mention the inconvenient fixtures of these rooms; the seats from which dangled many an aching limb, hopeless of finding rest or a resting place; the forms without backs, upon which many a weary urchin sank-to sleep, and slept-to fall, and fell-to electrify the little community with the extempore solo, in which like some discarded politician, he deigned to "define his position." I might also mention the ill-jointed wainscoting by which the room was on all sides amply ventilated; the shattered ceiling; the scanty light; the marks of juvenile industry, in the shape of scorings and engravings upon the desks; the grotesque and even obscene drawings upon the walls; the scanty play-ground; the absence of all out-door accommodations; the dreary aspect about the premises of many of these buildings; the gloomy loneliness of the location, where, at certain seasons of the year at least, in the language of Sprague, "the rank thistle nodded in the wind, and the wild fox dug his hole unscared." I might allude to the absence of taste, either in the style of the buildings themselves, or in any little decoration about them. But all this would be but repeating what has been well and justly said before, and what every observing person has so often witnessed as to render the recital unnecessary. But I gladly turn from a topic so unflattering to the taste and ingenuity of those we otherwise cheerfully applaud, and would point you to the very many new and elegant structures which now adorn our towns and villages. By the agency of several associations and several distinguished individuals, a correct taste has been diffused through the community so generally, that an unsightly, ill-constructed new school house is almost an anomaly. Much ingenuity has been concentrated upon the items of ventilating, lighting, warming and furnishing the school room, so that in all these respects, little is left to be done, certainly little to be known. It has been again and again demonstrated that a small sum of money, expended in ornamenting a building of this sort, particularly in the way of painting both within and without, is capital well invested; and that a good return will be realized in the preservation of the property, not only from the wastes of the weather and the trespasses of time, but also from that swifter and more deplorable spoiling, which is the result of youthful activity coupled with youthful destructiveness. While an unsightly, illcontrived and unornamented structure will, as it were, invite their depredations, they will reverence good taste and a fair finish so far, as to restrain the love of mischief, ere it desecrates and despoils. The fitness of things has now become the question, and so widely diffused is the information on this point, that we confidently set down the improvement in the construction of school houses as one of the greatest achievements of the age, and one of the strongest proofs of advancement in the enterprize of public instruction.* II. A COMPARISON OF OLD AND NEW SCHOOL BOOKS In the schools of the Puritan Fathers, the book in English chiefly relied on was the Bible. In those *Those who wish to see the most able essays on the structure of school houses, should obtain the address before the Essex County Teachers' Association by Rev. G. B. Perry, and the excellent Report of the Hon. Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. schools little else than reading, writing and a very little of arithmetic, was aimed at. The writing was taught by the written copy of the teacher, and arithmetic was taught by his dictation and by exercises written by himself in the cyphering books of the scholars. In these books he usually transcribed the more important rules, so that each scholar's manuscript book was little other than an arithmetic on a very small scale. Authors of new systems were not then found going about the country, proposing to supply schools with entire new sets in exchange for old ones, in order to get their works introduced. All branches of learning beyond those above enumerated, were confined to the Grammar schools or the University, where Latin and Greek were perhaps more thoroughly taught than they have ever been in this country since the days of Cotton Mather. All who in that day learned grammar, learned it through those languages. This account of the studies and school books of the earliest New England schools will apply with very little alteration to the whole period down to the Revolution. The Psalter and Dilworth's Spelling Book and the New England Primer had been added to the list; but the branches taught, and the manner of teaching them, continued very much the same down nearly to the close of the last century. It has indeed been said that writing and spelling were better taught in those schools than they are at present. If this be true, which, (judging from the orthography to be found in most of the old Record Books, and those books, it is presumed, were the work of chosen men,) may be fairly doubted, I say if this be true, it is no more than should be expected of them, as |