English as She is Taught Page #3

								

  the number of the feet. The product is the result.

Right you are. In the matter of geography this little book is unspeakably rich. The questions do not appear to have applied the microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor Ravenstein; still they proved plenty difficult enough without that. These pupils did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted with a shotgun; this is shown by the crippled condition of the game they brought in:

  America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi
  valey.

  North America is separated by Spain.

  America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.

  The United States is quite a small country compared with some other
  countrys, but is about as industrious.

  The capital of the United States is Long Island.

  The five seaports of the U. S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.

  The principal products of the U. S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.

  The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.

  The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.

  Cape Hateras is a vast body, of water surrounded by land and flowing
  into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Mason and Dixon’s line is the Equater.

  One of the leading industries of the United States is mollasses,
  book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber, manufacturers,
  paper-making, publishers, coal.

  In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.

  Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.

  Russia is very cold and tyrannical.

  Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.

  Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the
  Mediterranean Sea.

  Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and
  green.

  The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon the
  surrounding country.

  The imports of a country are the things that are paid for, the
  exports are the things that are not.

  Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

  The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.

The chapter headed “Analysis” shows us that the pupils in our public schools are not merely loaded up with those showy facts about geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state; no, there’s machinery for clarifying and expanding their minds. They are required to take poems and analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get at. One sample will do. Here is a stanza from “The Lady of the Lake,” followed by the pupil’s impressive explanation of it.

               Alone, but with unbated zeal,
               The horseman plied with scourge and steel;
               For jaded now and spent with toil,
               Embossed with foam and dark with soil,
               While every gasp with sobs he drew,
               The laboring stag strained full in view.

  The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument
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