ceived from other schools was 91, making the whole number 16.8 as the annual average of this celebrated school, or seventy-seven who entered the school from the public schools of the city, and ninety-one from private schools. As to those who entered from private schools, amounting to more than half of the whole, it may be presumed that this great accession from schools not belonging to the public system must be due to the excellence of the Latin School, and the fact that its tuition is free to all residents of the city.

From the same report it appears "that for the forty-six years previous to 1861, comprising the masterships of Gould, Leverett, Dillaway, Dixwell, and Gardner for ten years, the average number fitted for college was 12.56 per annum.'

The report then asks, "Do not these figures show how eminently useful the Latin School has been in its highest vocation-the production of classical scholars? During the last forty-six years nearly six hundred young men from this school have been admitted to honorable standing in the several universities and colleges in New England.

Such is the claim of Dr. Shurtleff, in behalf of the Latin School of Boston, upon the sympathy and support of a city the largest, the most populous, and the wealthiest in New England. She may justly be proud of this, the oldest grammar school of the land, as the richest gem in her crown of honor as the Athens of America, the home of noble scholars and princely merchants. Let her sustain this school, for she can well afford it, as a part of her system of public instruction so often a matter of boast as the best in the United States, although from that system only seven and seventenths per annum of the graduating class of college candidates are received from the far-famed public schools of Boston. And yet this result, though put forth to the world by the Boston School Committee as a matter of boasting, will be received with surprise as very small for a city whose population in 1861 was nearly 178,000, whose valuation for 1860 was $312,000,000, in whose public schools there were 28,000 pupils in 1861, of which only one pupil in 3,636 was fitted for "ye universitie" in one year, in conformity with the ancient statutes.

Compare now, with this record, the results of classical training in the number of candidates for college annually sent forth from Phillips Academy at Andover.

We have only the statistics for the last twenty-eight years, the period of Dr. S. H. Taylor's preceptorship. We make no estimate of Dr. Pierson's administration, or of his successors, Mark Newman,

John Adams, Osgood Johnson, and others, who were at the head. of the school for the sixty years previous to Dr. Taylor's accession. We refer not to the results of the English school always sustained at Phillips Academy, of which Wm. H. Wells and J. S. Eaton have been masters, nor to the Normal Seminary connected with Phillips Academy for many years, the first established in America. We refer only to the department of the classics from which, in the last ten years, 46-9 per annum have been fitted for college. In the previous eighteen years the average number fitted was 25, and for the entire period of twenty-eight years the average has been 33+ per annum. This number does not include two hundred who advanced as far in their course of study as through the first or second term (three in a year) of the last year's course of study, more than half of whom were pretty nearly fitted for college and others within two terms of study."

Thus more than one thousand young men have been sent from Andover to the different colleges, in a little more than a quarter of a century, by one eminent instructor. This one fact is enough to show the vitality of this institution as a power in the land. But the endowment on which all the departments of Phillips Academy rest as their basis does not exceed $75,000, while the funds at Exeter do not vary much from $100,000.

But in these days all the colleges and nearly all Academies are no less schools of science than of the classics. All the best colleges have scientific departments, and the Academies having the greatest patronage are furnished with instruction and apparatus for thè preparation of young men for the higher scientific institutions. So extensive has the routine of scientific studies become, that they can not be pursued with profit unless in well endowed institutions where à course of study is established and adhered to. Hence, in Williston Seminary the amplest provision is made for this branch of studies as well as the classical department. As these branches can not be well taught without special teachers and expensive cabinets and apparatus of every kind, the best Academies have been furnished with facilities of teaching in these respects as the high schools with few exceptions have not been.

But the public schools have endeavored, not only to provide classical but scientific instruction also, in obedience to a popular demand for a class of studies deemed specially practical; and the consequence has been that in many places the public schools have been overburdened with an excess of branches of study, while the branches essential as the foundation of real mental culture have

been discarded.

This course has diminished the real value of the public schools, which have thus been made subservient to the wants of a few, while the essential interests of the many are disregarded.

The attempt has been made to accomplish too high things in what are called high schools. Not only is it proposed to fit boys for "ye universitie" without regard to the question whether they wish to be fitted or not, but to teach the outlines of nearly all the branches for each one of which a professorship is deemed a necessity in a decent college. But this is an impossibility, even in the best high schools of our largest cities and towns, without ignoring the grand idea of what ought to be, if it is not, the policy of the local high schools every where, that they are supplementary to the common schools, and are high in relation to them and not in relation to the Universities; and that they should not therefore be considered, except in rare instances, as taking the place which middle schools must occupy as intermediate between the highest local schools and the colleges, which is the proper sphere and function of the academical system.

The progress of popular education, so-called, does not consist (as it is so often falsely assumed to consist) in introducing high studies, and a great many of them, into a school having only one or two teachers, and thus make it high. For no progress is so sure as this to make a school the lowest of the low, in all the essential uses and qualities of education. The old staples of instruction, reading, writing, and arithmetic and grammar, can not be dispensed with in the popular schools; for their uses are grounded in the absolutely necessary wants of the youthful mind. Any system, then, which substitutes other studies for these, is one whose whole tendency is to deteriorate not to elevate the quality of education. We are not sure but that Latin may take the place of English grammar to some extent in the public schools, but it must be solely as a disciplinary study to teach general grammar, and not with a view to a full classical course in the local schools of any grade of excellence. Indeed, we are not sure but that English grammar had better be discarded entirely, if in the course of common school instruction it must be limited to only one or two terms, and then set aside as finished. And yet the text-books in that branch are as

Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Valombrosa; though they were all unwritten until late in the eighteenth century, when the countless progeny began to be.

How the literature of the Elizabethan age and Queen Anne's time, when Addison and his peers wrote the Spectator, could have existed, when such a branch as English grammar was unknown in any

English or grammar school, is a mystery for some modern common school superintendent to solve. In this country arithmetic was taught in all the common schools without a text-book till after the Revolution, and geography was a study high enough to be a branch of college education; and yet these were the schools in which Washington and Franklin received all their elementary training. They were taught in school-houses not decent enough for an Irish shanty now, and yet Franklin, thus "fitted" for his calling, became such a master in philosophy and civil affairs as that he held the lightnings in his grasp and hurled tyrants from their thrones. How could he do all this, when in no grammar school on earth had the merest elements of the natural sciences even been heard of! And yet he did not underrate the grammar schools of his native city, or decry, as modern sciolists do, the value of classical learning, or establish Franklin medals for some school of practical and naturalistic studies, to the detriment and discouragement of so-called dead languages and dry and "uninteresting" branches of study.

But the grand argument against the academical system of middle schools and against colleges as well is, that pupils must not be domiciliated away from the supervision of parents and placed under the entire supervision of tutorial governors and teachers. It is assumed that there is "no place like home" for the higher gradations of mental culture as well as the lower. If all homes were places for intellectual development as good as we might conceive them to be, where the parents were themselves qualified in the best manner for the work of instruction and moral discipline, then it were well that home influences should predominate in every stage of intellectual growth. But the homes of the best and most learned men are not found to be thus adapted to the purposes of education. They lack both the power to advise and direct in respect to the best methods, especially in all the higher departments of learning. Even if welleducated parents understand the value of learning, they may yet be ignorant of its processes and best methods even while they enjoy Hence it is that liberally educated men, more than others, seek the best seats of learning for the education of their own children. They understand, as others do not, how that the local influences of home often tend to neutralize the best benefits which the formative or transformative power of a college or Academy exerts on a young and wayward mind. Nor does the argument hold any better, though often urged, that the public school system is any more in sympathy with the genius of our democratic institutions than the academical system in its middle or higher grades.

its uses.

We do not deny that the public school tends strongly to modify and remove those social distinctions which it is the direct aim of home training, in many instances, to create and intensify. The boy of Beacon street may recite his lesson in the Boston Latin School on the same seat with the boy of Ann street; but the good influences of the morning session of each day, in obliterating factitious distinctions and creating good fellowship, may not last longer than the dinner-hour, when all the power of home associations resumes its undiminished sway. It is not so in those schools where the pupils come together from localities remote from each other, and from under the influence of social customs and notions most unlike. Here nothing is more common than to see the rich and the poor domiciliate together on grounds of perfect reciprocity, and forming the strongest fellowships in spite of antecedents of birth and position most diverse. If there can be found on earth a realization of that dream of politicians, a republic where there is a perfect equality of rights and privileges, and a perfect reciprocity of sympathy and social fellowship independent absolutely of the distinctions of the outside world, that realization is a community of students in an American Academy or college.

In the home or local system of schools the aim is really private education; and for ends more or less personal, though it be obtained at the public expense. In the academical or collegiate system of schools, the aim is a true public education, though it may be obtained by means legally private, that is, such as furnished by individuals or corporations.

The local system respects the parental will and dignity on the ground, that as parents, in their individual or social capacity, pay for the tuition of their children and appoint the teacher, they have a right to control all the methods and processes and influences of instruction; that is, they may say what shall and what shall not be taught. Such a policy as this, for the period of childhood during the time of rudimental training, is obviously the very best for the vast majority of pupils; since, during the earliest stages of education, the parents, who are the natural protectors of their children, are generally competent to act for them in respect to their intellectual as well as their physical wants. As the great majority of the young can never go much beyond the rudiments of all useful learning, the public school system is most obviously founded in the eternal verities of things. But the period of childhood and the training proper for that period has its natural range and limits, and these limits and the course proper for those limits can not be essentially changed so