with Abercombie in Egypt, and, after all his battles and sieges, was dying at home. "Yes," said the sick man: 'ye will find baith the Bible and Bobbie Burns on the shelf yonder; ye may read to me a little oot o' them-for there's aye something in Rab that does me guid!" Burns is one of the men who have had all their faults condoned by posterity. "I found," says a Canadian writer, a friend of mine," that in Scotland you must not meddle with Robert Burns or John Knox. These two names are sacred."

Burns has done two things for Scottish literature; he has fixed the form of the vernacular, and he has purified the popular songs of the nation. Just as Dante and Petrarch, by the influence of their writings, made the Florentine the classic dialect of Italy; and Luther, by his German Bible, made the Saxon the literary dialect of Germany-so Burns has made the "Ayrshire" the accepted dialect of the Broad Scotch. And perhaps more than in any other nation their songs and music have influenced the thought and character of Scotchmen. Burns ("Highland Mary;" "A man's a man for a' that"), Hogg ("When the kye comes hame'), Lady Nairne ("The Land o' the Leal"), Scott ("Young Lochinvar"), Tannahill ("Braes of Balquidder''), Ballantine ("Castles in the Air'), Motherwell ("Jeanie Morrison'), and many others, living and dead, have spoken the truest thoughts of their countrymen, and been accepted by them as their literary prophets. The older songs-strangely enough, all anonymous, except two or three by Ramsay and others -passed under the master hand and eye of Burns, and emerged purified and glorified; as witness "Auld Lang Syne." Before leaving this point, Professor John Stuart Blackie should be mentioned. Whatever is Greek and whatever is Scotch commands his most intense enthusiasm. He has established a Celtic chair in Edinburgh University, having collected £12,000, from all classes from the Queen downward, to endow it; and he has long reiterated in the ears of the Scottish people to sing their own songs, and cultivate their own music, and keep up their own national thought and life. He insists (as in a letter to the writer, a few days ago) that "a lesson may be taught in a song as well as in a sermon.' And at last the people of Edinburgh and Scotland generally are coming, in the "higher" and more fashionable circles, to a better appreciation and use of the incomparable body of music and song that belongs to Scotland,

and ceasing so much to copy and ape London.

In no other nation have so many volumes of sermons and so much religious literature been produced and used. In lonely shepherds' cottages, under a thatch of heather, I have found the book-hawker, on his regular rounds, leaving them their religious monthly magazine; and the writings of Boston, and Venn, and the Erskines, Baxter, Bunyan, Rutherford, Chalmers, and the Bonars, with many a recent name, are found almost everywhere. When not engaged in hearing sermons, a Scottish household is very apt to be employed, on Sunday, in reading sermons, or other devotional or doctrinal works. In the evenings the young men will be studying some good, solid book out of the public library, instead of "skylarking" about, or thronging the public house; and though too much of the latter is found in the cities and towns, yet the rule of spending the evening in study maintains its place. Hence rise men who have learned to think, and whose thought (and its results) now become their capital. And so it comes to pass that a young Scotchman is almost sufficiently recommended, in any part of the world, by his nationality alone. And they are found everywhere, and generally in positions of trust. The captains and engineers of steamers about the Mediterranean and Asiatic ports, engineers and superintendents of foreign railways, bankers at foreign places, the leading statesmen in all the colonies, are sure to be Scotchmen. few years ago a young fellow went to Calcutta to "push his fortune." He knew no one there except a countryman named McDonald, who was in Goverment employ. So he went to the Government building to find him. Entering the courtyard he sang out "Mac!" and from every window popped out a head, asking, "What are ye wantin'?" They were all Macs. In a recent report of the free Mitchell Library in Glasgow, it is stated that four-fifths of the books taken out are religious, or philosophy, science, history, travels, etc., and only one-fifth fiction. In mentioning this to one of our librarians, he said, "It is very different here; out of every five books given out, four will be fiction!'

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The highest development of a man is in his power of thought; but thought, to its highest development, must be trained by the aid of speech. And here is where the Scotch somewhat fail. They are silent and reserved people. It is like a merchant who never exposes his wares to the estimate of

the buyer, or the competition of other sellers, and may hold them at far too high a price. So a Scotchman, while apt to be a man of large and varied information, is also somewhat likely to be opinionated and obstinate. If the fires of persecution should ever again be lighted, Scotland would give | far more than her share of martyrs-most of them to principle, a few of them to prejudice. Scotchmen excel more as authors and thinkers than as orators. A Scot is not, like a Welshman, a born orator; but he is a born poet. Dr. Charles Rogers, of Edinburgh, brought out, about thirty years. ago, a work called the "Scottish Minstrel," in which he gave brief biographies and specimens of all the noteworthy Scotch poets since Burns. In the course of his sketches he specified two hundred and twenty-seven volumes of poetry during the half-century under review. Mr. Edwards, of Brechin, about ten years ago began where Rogers left off, and is now getting out his twelfth three-shilling volume of his "Modern Scottish Poets," having thus brought forward more than a thousand writers of verse, most of them still living.

Of prose writers other than those already alluded to, we have William Black, George Macdonald, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as the best Scotch representatives of modern fiction; Macaulay and Gladstone (of Scottish blood, though not of birth), in history and classical criticism; Carlyle in a sphere all his own; Candlish, Hamilton, Fairbairn, Cunningham, Geikie, Drummond, Robertson, Morison, and a host of others, as commentators and polemical writers; and men who have filled or are now filling places in every possible department of human learning and research.

In former days there was a much sharper distinction between the inhabitants of the Highlands and the Lowlands than at present. All feel that they are Scottish, and one nation. The first are Celtic in blood and language; the others, the "Lowlanders," are descended from the Picts (mingled somewhat in the south with the Saxons), and, to go farther back, from the Scandinavian Goths. The Highlanders are a naturally polite, easy-going people, gregarious, taking naturally to being directed by superior intelligence or authority, faithful unto death, and, if aroused, terrible in their bravery and strength of purpose-the most admirable soldiers in the world. The Lowlanders are more silent and cautious, not at all impulsive, lacking in bonhomie, but persistent, firm, unyielding, generally well-princi- |

pled, and always pushing and industrious. America has proved, on a very wide field, Dr. Johnson's admission, "You may make a good deal of a Scotchman, if you catch him young;" for they hold their own in America wondrously well.-Sunday School Times.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE APPROPRIATION.

MR EDITOR: This is now a pressing question in our state. Three million dollars poured into the hands of our School Directors as a free gift to the Schools! What shall they do with it? What can they do with it? What ought they do with it? Certainly, use it to improve the schools and to benefit the children, all will say. But how? The general trend of opinion seems to be to do one thing at least. This is to lengthen the school term to at least eight months. Another is to make textbooks free to all the students. The writer will not combat either of these propositions, but he offers what he thinks is a more important one. It is: Let directors establish,

in each township, a high school. Let it be modeled so far as possible on the plan of the old academies, once so common throughout the State.

There was a time when in almost every portion of the State were to be found academies in which boys and girls could secure an excellent education. They have disappeared, and absolutely nothing has arisen to take their places. The Normal Schools and the town high schools do not do their work. Their loss has been a heavy one to the State, and any means which will restore them, or anything like them, ought to be eagerly sought out.

We may keep the ungraded country schools open the whole year, and it will not improve matters in the direction of which we speak. We need a high school or academy to which the older boys and girls can go, after they reach say fourteen years of age, and where they can study geometry, mensuration, surveying, the elements of Latin, algebra, etc.

There is no use in denying it, the rural schools have declined and they continue to decline. If on the decline, what good will result from lengthening the school year. Rather, instil new life into the system? Give the older boys and girls a chance. Give them as good a chance as their fathers had. Give them as good a chance as boys

in town have to attend school, after they have advanced beyond the primary grades. Give country teachers some incentives to advance themselves, by having these academy positions ever open to them when qualified. GEO. G. Groff. Lewisburg, Pa., June 27, 1892.

COLUMBUS AND FREE SCHOOLS.

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HE project of converting Columbus Day into an American school festival will be heartily commended by thoughtful minds. The dedication of the Exposition buildings and grounds will be a National event of crowning importance; but in order to emphasize the significance of the discovery of the New World and to render it intelligible throughout the length and breadth of the land it is proposed to make every schoolhouse a local centre for commemorative exercises.

This broad plan has received the sanction of the World's Congress Commission and of the American Superintendents of Education. An Executive Committee has been appointed to organize a National movement by which thirteen million school children in every village and town in the Union can unite in carrying out a simple but effective programme on that historic anniversary. There is nothing impracticable in the scheme. It will only be necessary for every school to have a flag of its own to raise and salute on the morning of the celebration, and then to be prepared to listen to an address and to join in singing an ode prepared for the occasion under the direction of the National Committee. A holiday will be put to the highest educational use if all the school children of the country can be brought together at the same hour to commemorate the greatest event in the modern world.

The voyage of Columbus was a protest against the ignorance of the mediæval age. The discovery of the New World was the first sign of the real renaissance of the Old World. It created new heavens and a new earth, broadened immeasurably the horizon of men and nations, and transformed the whole order of European thought. Columbus was the greatest educator who ever lived, for he emancipated mankind from the narrowness of its own ignorance and taught the great lesson that human destiny, like divine mercy, arches over the whole world. It a perspective of four centuries of progress could have floated like a mirage before the eyes of the great discoverer as he was sight

ing San Salvador, the American schoolhouse would have loomed up as the greatest institution of the New World's future. Behind him he had left mediæval ignorance encumbered with superstition and paralyzed by an ecclesiastical pedantry which passed for learning. Before him lay a New World with the promise of the potency of civil and religious liberty, free education and popular enlightenment. Because the schoolhouse, like his own voyage, has been a protest against popular ignorance, and has done more than anything else to make our free America what it is, it would have towered above everything else in that miragelike vision of the world's progress.

The public school celebration on Columbus Day is to be commended, therefore, not only as a unique method of diffusing among local centres of American life, from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate, the significance and spirit of a memorable anniversary, but also as a practical expedient for emphasizing the value of the most characteristic of National institutions, the free school.

As

When the New World of America was discovered by Columbus, Spain was the greatest Power in Europe and England was an obscure and petty State. During the first century after the landing on San Salvador a great Spanish Empire was founded stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Patagonia. Slowly and laboriously the English speaking race obtained a foothold in North America. Liberty was the breath of its life, and free education was its most precious bequest to succeeding generations. The Spanish conquerors never opened a free school. time passed their empire revolted against them, and the constitutional forms of the English speaking race in the North were roughly copied by one Southern republic after another. Popular education was neglected, as it had been under Spanish Viceroys, and consequently the moral force of enlightened public opinion was lacking in the Southern Hemisphere. What has made the American Republic the great power in modern civilization, which it has been for a century, is the free-school system. Because it has given form and direction to American progress, the school house is a proper theatre for celebrating the great event of October. If thirteen million public-school children can be taught on that historic festival to value aright the inestimable benefits of free education, it will be a good augury for another century of more enlightened progress.-N. Y. Tribune.

Her repose is that of conscious power, a reserved strength that is equal to great emergencies when they arise. She has been what her title implies, the balancewheel of the Union. She is as rich in mental as in material resources, and that public officer or aspirant for place who under-estimates the general intelligence and practical sagacity of our people will find himself prodigiously mistaken in the outcome of his calculations.

What is the moral to be inculcated upon all pupils in our public schools? Not an insatiable and unpatriotic greed for office for the sake of office, but a love of learning for its own sake, and an ambition to fit and qualify themselves for the performance of every duty from a sense of duty that may be devolved upon them, whether it be in private life or public station. The ambition should be to become good and useful citizens, and, if anything more conspicuous offers itself, a desire to be equal to the responsibility which it imposes.

the site of the Lick Observatory in California, is unobstructed in every direction, there being no higher ground within a radius of a hundred miles. As an illustration of the transperency of the atmosphere in this region, Prof. Davids, one of the U. S. Coast Survey, says that when at work on the Sierra Nevada, at an altitude of 10,000 feet, he "was able to see with the naked eye the five-inch mirror of a heliotrope one hundred and seventy five miles distant."

a Pennsylvanian, born August 25th, 1796, at Fredericksburg, Lebanon county. His ancestors came originally from the Palatinate, Germany. His grandfather was a soldier in the war of the Revolution, and the story of the sufferings of that aged veteran made a deep impression on the mind of the boy, as he listened to their recital. In after years he erected a noble monument to the memory of this grandfather. And this same feeling of admiration for patriotic service caused him to present to the city of San Francisco a grand memorial in bronze, costing upwards of a hundred thousand dollars, to the honor of Francis Scott Key, author of the Star Spangled Banner.

His opportunities for school training were meagre, and he was early at work with his hands. He worked for a time at Hanover, in York county, at his trade of organ-making. In 1819, he was in Baltimore in the employ of a leading maker of pianos. Here he met Conrad Meyer, afterwards the celebrated piano manufacturer of Philadelphia, and this acquaintance ripened into a life-long friendship. In 1820, having gone to New York to engage in business, lack of capital caused him to abandon the project, and at the end of the year he joined an expedition to Buenos Ayres, which having recently be come independent promised a grand future.

For ten years in this new country he prospered in the manufacturing of pianos. In 1832, he surprised his friends in Pennsyl vania, by returning home a man of large means, bringing with him some forty thousand dollars' worth of South American skins and hides. Soon he sailed again for South America, stopping for a short time in Buenos Ayres, but later passing around to Chili. In 1833, his home was in Valparaiso, and he was hard at work at his old trade, at the same time engaging in new ventures. In 1837 he went to Peru. While here, where he remained for several years, on one occa. sion he sent $1400 in gold doubloons to his friend Meyer, of Philadelphia, for the inside work, or action, for twelve upright pianos which he wished forwarded to Lima, Peru. When the United States seized upon Cali

scope in the world in the hands of experts in astronomical work under such favorable conditions, insure results of extraordinary value to science.

The requirement of James Lick was, that the new instrument should be "superior to and more powerful than any telescope ever yet made.' Who was this man? He was

El Dorado. A difficulty presented itself, the surmounting of which shows the character of the man. He had on hand a contract for a number of pianos when his workmen suddenly left for California. To violate his word was not for a moment to be considered; his contract must be fulfilled; and he personally did the work, although it

required two years' hard labor to perform it. Then turning everything into money, at a great sacrifice, he sailed for San Francisco, arriving there in 1847.

In the following spring the city contained barely 1000 inhabitants. It had just emerged from its pristine condition and primitive name of Yerba Buena, and was becoming under American rule a valuable seaport. When gold was discovered nearly everybody went to the mines. James Lick remained in the city, which he saw must soon become a great metropolis. Quietly and carefully he invested his money, the sellers often exultant at the prices he paid then. None knew the extent of his purchases or the amount paid for any of them. The usual contests over titles were encountered, and he at times enforced his right against squatters in those days with levelled pistol. The risk was great but he accepted it, and having planted his money in the ground he quietly awaited the return upon his investments. As the city grew, in the heart of the place were seen large vacant lots, apparently forsaken, which the inquirer found belonged to James Lick.

Meanwhile he branched off into other pursuits. In 1852, he purchased a property in San José and built a mill which attracted much attention. The wood was of mahog. any and the machinery of the finest description.

It cost him $200,000, but it turned out the finest flour in California, and his brand commanded the best markets everywhere. With his own hands, also, he planted a very large orchard of fruit trees, in itself a fortune in those early days. During all this time he did not forget his old handicraft, and in 1872 addressed a characteristic letter to his friend Meyer, discussing methods of piano making, and giving his views as to their relative merits. The Lick House in San Francisco is another of his enterprises.

In 1874, he placed his property, aggregating several millions of dollars, in the hands of seven trustees, to be devoted to public and charitable purposes. The Academy of Natural Sciences, of San Francisco, was a large beneficiary under his will, as also the Society of California Pioneers, of which he was president at the time of his death, October 1st, 1876.

We are indebted to the Philadelphia Press for the following account of the famous American telescope makers-all the more interesting in this connection-and the work done in the making perfect these wonderful instruments.

THE MAN WHO MADE THE TELESCOPE.

There is nothing made by human hands that is more nearly perfect than the object glass of a great telescope. Each slender thread of a spider's web is composed of many thousand strands, each strand so fine that four millions

of them would make a thread no thicker than a human hair. In other words, roughly speaking, a spider's strand is as much smaller than a a hair as a hair is smaller than a telegraph pole. Yet in the lens of a great visual telescope a deviation of the breadth of a spider's strand would be noticeable, and in a photographic telescope it would be fatal to the purpose of the

glass.

Americans, accustomed to hear their countrymen accused of slipshod methods in the manu. facture of their wares, cannot but take pride, then, in the fact that the man who makes the greatest refracting telescopes the world has ever known is an American of the ninth generation. Mr. Alvan G. Clark, of Cambridgeport, Mass., is a descendant directly along the male line of Thomas Clark, the mate of the Mayflower.

'Mr. Clark's father, the founder of the famous house of Alvan Clark & Sons, telescope makers, was a very remarkable man. Until after his fortieth year he devoted himself to portrait painting, and so accurate was his eye, so delicately skillful his hand, and so inexhaustible his patience, that his portraits stand to day almost unexcelled in point of likeness and wellnigh unsurpassable in point of exquisitely careful finish. In everything that required keen vision and close exactitude he was successful. It is related that once he watched a game of billiards, saying at the close that he believed he could play, and although he had never before handled a cue, he played a game far above the average of ordinary billiardists.

A WONDERFUL MARKSMAN.

But perhaps the most wonderful of his many accomplishments was his marksmanship. It is Isaid that with a rifle he could put bullet after bullet through a distant board with such precision that one would say only a single shot had been fired, and this is partially explained by the fact that he made his own rifles with his own hands, and used that same marvelous exactitude in the boring of the barrel, the setting of the sights and the cutting of the bullets, that afterward gave him his world-wide fame as a lens maker.

It was not until 1843, when Alvan Clark was more than 40 years old, that his attention was turned toward telescope making. In that year the accidental breaking of a dinner bell at the Phillips Academy, Andover, prepared the way for the most important advance that the science of practical astronomy has ever made. George Bassett Clark, son of Alvan and elder brother of the present Alvan G., was a pupil at the academy. Gathering up the cast away fragments of the bell he took them home, put them into a crucible with some tin, and proceeded to melt them in the kitchen fire, informing his mother that he was going to make a telescope.