Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/283

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
LITERARY NOTICES.
271

In encouraging the teacher to patience and advising the school board to generosity in regard to this work, Mr. Howe says, "If the children are learning 'to think to a conclusion,' if they are becoming observant, if they are interested in their school and go home full of the 'things they have seen and done, do not criticise because those 'things' are 'bugs and weeds,' nor complain because more words are not learned, or arithmetical problems solved. The 'words' may be meaningless and problems mechanical, but active, willing seeing and thinking is in the line of all that is desirable."

Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. To the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-'89. Pp. 822. Eleventh Annual Report, 1889'90. Pp. 553. By J. W. Powell, Director. Washington: Government Printing Office.

The work of this bureau is substantially continuous, so that these two noble reports may be treated as one. In this work the lines of investigation which have appeared from time to time the most useful or the most pressing have been confided to persons trained in or known to be specially adapted to their pursuit. During the period covered by these reports, the work of exploring the mounds of the eastern United States was carried on under the superintendence of Dr. Cyrus Thomas; during the latter part of the time Dr. Thomas was engaged in preparing a final report on his work. Colonel Garrick Mallery visited Maine, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick in studying the pictographs of the Abnaki and Micmac Indians. W. J. Hoffman gave his attention to pictographs, petroglyphs, and birch-bark records in the Northwest, and to the records and ceremonies of the Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwas, an order of shamans professing the power to prophesy, to cure disease, and to confer success in the chase. H. W. Henshaw and Jeremiah Curtin collected vocabularies and myths on the Pacific coast, and did other linguistic work. James Mooney investigated the customs, languages, etc., of the Cherokees at their reservation in North Carolina, made a collection of the plants used by them in medicine, and studied their antiquities. Victor Mindeleff explored ruins and collected potteries in Arizona. The Rev. J. Owen Dorsey prepared many papers embodying the results of previous studies. A. S. Gatschett completed his Klamath Grammar, and embodied in literary form the fruits of his other investigations among the Klamath Indians. The illustrations for the publications of the bureau were edited by W. H. Holmes, who was also active in his studies of aboriginal archaeology. The publications of the bureau for the two years include the Bibliographies of the Iroquoian and Muskhogean Languages, by J. C. Pilling; The Problem of the Ohio Mounds, by Cyrus Thomas; Textile Fabrics of Ancient Peru, Ancient Art of the Province of Chiriqui, Colombia, and A Study of the Textile Art and its Relation to the Development of Form and Ornament, by W. H. Holmes; Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices, and the Circular, Square, and Octagonal Earthworks of Ohio, by Cyrus Thomas; Osage Traditions, by the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey; and the Central Eskimo, by Dr. Franz Boas. The volume containing the tenth report is nearly all occupied with the elaborate work, richly illustrated, of Colonel Garrick Mallery, on the Picture Writing of the American Indians. The volume of the eleventh report contains papers on The Sia (Pueblo), by Matilda Coxe Stevenson; Ethnology of the Ungava District, by Lucien M. Turner; and A Study of Siouan Cults, by J. Owen Dorsey.

School Management. By Emerson E. White, A. M., LL. D. American Book Company. Pp. 320. Price, $1.

The subject emphasized in this volume is character training. The author considers that the proper end of school government is to prepare pupils for self-control and self-direction in life. Good order and application in study are essential conditions in attaining this result, but must not be substituted for the goal itself. From this it follows that the well-governed school depends more upon what the teacher is than what his method may be. If only one law were written above the door of every American schoolroom it ought to be. No man or woman shall enter here as teacher whose life is not a good model for the young to copy.

The elements of governing power are described as fresh knowledge, skill in in-