4. I will try to be a good business man. I will use my best efforts to see that every dollar of public money is wisely and economically expended.

I will be prompt in making reports. I will not delay answering letters and vainly say I have been too busy.

5. I will try to be patient, frank, courageous, considerate and polite in my relations with the board of education. I realize that the members of the board have their difficulties. They are the representatives of the people and of democracy.

I will be cheerful under adverse circumstances and even defeat. If I am the man for the place the board will usually follow my lead and accept my recommendations.

It is remarkable that an American University should be able to establish so immense a fund of books as Harvard University has, in the Widener Library, in Cambridge, and more remarkable still that it should be possible to conduct it as it is now conducted. Students have free access to the stacks. This is a condition which is true in no other library of the size, yet it is a plan which has worked well. There are small stalls scattered among the miles of bookshelves in the library, and here daily there are hundreds of students doing advanced research work, that would be impossible for them if they were obliged to ask for the books on call slips and transport them. to some of the large reading rooms.

The ages have been kind to Harvard. John Harvard started the collection by giving his private library to a college to be established in Cambridge. Time has seen many benefactors, and none greater than the heirs of Harry Elkins Widener, a victim of the Titanic, in whose memory the immense building was given.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

So many books are sent to this department of EDUCATION that it is impossible to review them all. Naturally we feel under obligation to give preference to the books of those publishing houses which more or less frequently use our advertising pages. Outside of the limitations thus set, we shall usually be able and glad to mention by title, author publisher and price, such books as are sent to us for this purpose. More elaborate notices will necessarily be conditional upon our convenience and the character of the books them selves.

ESSENTIALS OF SPELLING. By Henry Carr Pearson, Principal of the Horace Mann School, Columbia University, and Henry Suzzalo, President of the University of Washington. The American Book Company. Price 40 cents.

The names of these authors guarantee the pedagogical correctness of the positions taken in the book. This speller attempts to teach only the essential words of the written vocabularies of children and adults, i. e., those frequently used by the majority of people. It is a book that is built on the "fewer words and more drill" principle. The lessons present about two thousand words thus commonly used and about a thousand more that are used somewhat less frequently. The selection has been laboriously made during a period of several years, in which thousands of children's compositions were gone over and use made of much other practical material. Superintendents and teachers should study this little book for its suggestiveness; and having done so, many times an adoption of it for school use will follow.

HAMILTON'S ESSENTIALS OF ARITHMETIC. First Book. Second Book. By Samuel Hamilton, Ph. D., LL. D., Superintendent of Schools, Allegheny County, Pa. The American Book Company. Price $1.52.

These two volumes cover the course in Arithmetic from the second to the eighth year. In a very effective way they help the student to master the number combinations and processes involved in all common needs of daily experience. There are frequent drills in the abstract relations of numbers, and further interesting drill work in connection with number games. The examples relate themselves to the pupil's own experience and life at home, on the playground, and on the street. The subject thus loses its formality and becomes a live subject and is made interesting and even fascinating. The pupil is encouraged to frame original problems and to discover arithmetical truths for himself. In these features the books are strictly up to date and preeminently pedagogical in their material and methods. We cannot help envying the youth of today, in contrast with the laborious lot of the boy of yesterday, as we examine these books and remember our own travails of soul in the earlier stages of our scholastic career. The durable binding, clear, clean typography, and interesting illustrations commend the series for "adoption" by any committee.

PLANT PRODUCTION. Part I, Agronomy; Part II, Horticulture. By Ransom A. Moore, Professor of Agronomy, the University of Wisconsin, and Charles P. Halligan, B. S., Professor of Landscape Gardening, Michigan Agricultural College. The American Book Company. Price $1.44.

This book will be a welcome addition to the growing list of text books for agricultural colleges and secondary schools that have vocational courses. It sets forth very clearly the principles under which the biological forces operate to produce the results which are desired by the farmer or horticulturist. The volume covers "the science and art of producing agricultural plants; the production, care and management of farm animals; the establishment and conservation of soil fertility; and the proper balance and combination of these three aspects of agricultural production in the business management of the farm." The practical farmer, as well as the agricultural student, will find wisdom and delight between the covers of this attractively illustrated volume.

SOCIALIZING THE THREE R'S. By Ruth Mary Weeks. Macmillan. Price $1.12.

We have seldom come across a more suggestive little volume than this one. We wish that every parent and every teacher in our beloved country could read and ponder its message. With remarkable discernment the author sees, and clearly sets forth so that others can see them, some of the vital defects in modern educational methods, and then suggests remedies that lie close at hand. In fact, to clearly see the defects is in many cases the chief thing that is needed. We have gone on blindly and are still doing things in an old and mistaken way chiefly from force of habit. By waking up, and by being candid, great improvements can be made, improvements which must be made if we are to keep up, educationally, with the growth of a rapidly democratizing public sentiment.

Specifically, the book shows how the English teacher, for instance, can so teach English as to deepen and broaden the sympathies of different classes of society, so that each will appreciate the ideals and life of the other. An investigation is cited, in which a teacher in a public high school had the pupils make a list of all the books they had ever read, the purpose being to discover what sort of books they had been reading and whether they were such as would broaden the pupils' sympathies and experience. They were "found to consist largely of novels by second-rate American authors, embodying commonplace ideas, dealing with a kind of life with which the students were already familiar, and offering little or no expansion of experience." "Can we wonder," goes on this author, "that the student who has thus lived imprisoned in the

narrow bounds of his own personal experience exhibits a lack of mental affability and imagination, not the flimsy make-believe of fancy, but penetrative imagination, the faculty of entering into and understanding situations other than our own." The author shows that the failure of the Russian offensive and the cause of the great World War itself, was "but the offspring of an unimaginative world bounded by national aims, habits and ideals."

In a similar way this book shows the need of socialized writing, arithmetic, history, art, play, manual training, general science, schoolhouses and classrooms, etc. It is a book for the age, and it carries a real message to each and every class of society.

AN INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMICS. By Graham A. Laing, M. A., formerly Instructor in Economics and History in the University of California. The Gregg Publishing Company. List price $1.20.

There is a real demand for a book of the character of this one, which fits into the new scheme of the Junior High Schools and of all secondary schools, which more and more generally are taking up the important study of Economics. The thought which first strikes the reviewer is that the author has very happily made plain to the student the meaning of the term "Economics," and has very clearly laid down the principles of the subject. The pupil is not left to grope blindly after an unfamiliar series of facts and principles, but is shown how to go to work to really understand the principles, facts and methods underlying American industry and finance. Careful attention has been given also to the matter of foreign exchange. There should be a course such as that covered in this well written and attractively printed volume, in every school in the land, since in such schools everywhere there are young men and women in training who will be the ones to handle the vastly extended business of the future which America is sure to transact at home and abroad.

Periodical Notes.

Those readers of EDUCATION who are interested in Lecture Courses should send for a sample coupy of The Lyceum Magazine (address 122 Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill.) It is brim full of interesting sketches, portraits, news notes, and programs of the leading lec turers. In the Bulletin of the Pan American Union for August, bird lovers will find some remarkably fine pictures and descriptions of the birds of Brazil. By the way, this magazine will prove a great inspiration in geography classes, nature-study classes, and in Com mercial Schools. The American edition is published at 17th and B. Streets, N. W., Washington, D. C. A single copy costs 25 cts. The Nation of Sept. 13 is fully up to its standard in its criticism of President Wilson's attitude on the League of Nations. See the article entitled "Black is White'', by Lincoln Colcord. Two leaders in The Outlook for Sept. 17 are entitled "Theodore Roosevelt in Hopi-Land", a personal reminiscence by Natalie Curtis; and "Turkey in Decay", by Gregory Mason, the Outlook's Staff Correspondent. "Railroading with the Giant Locomotives of 1919" is an article in The Scientific American of Sept. 13, that will interest those of our readers who are mechanically or commercially inclined. Some excellent suggestions on "The Co-operation of Home and School" are given by Dr. H. E. Piggott in the Sept. number of the English Journal of Education, which monthly journal, by the way, 1s well worthy of the attention of American educators.