ternate loud and weak rumbling of thunder continued for some time after the stroke.

Lightning has an appreciable effect upon the chemical composition of the atmosphere. One noticeable effect is the increase in the amount of ozone (O3) in the air after a thunderstorm; this is a very active substance and gives the air its bracing effect and also its bleaching effect upon linen.

During the year 1899 more people were killed by lightning than in any year of which we have any record in the United States. Five hundred and sixty-two people were killed and 820 were injured. Of those killed about 45 per cent were in the open, 34 per cent were in houses, II per cent occurred under trees, and 9 per cent in barns. A dozen or more were killed from being near to a wire clothes line.

Certain reasonable precautions can be taken as a protection from lightning. If one can know that he is out of the line of least resistance he is safe. To be seated on the top of a pile of iron would not be a safe place, but to be buried in the midst of it might be. To be near to a stove which has no connection with the ground, particularly if there is heat in it, is not safe, both because of the soot in the chimney and the heated air. It is safer to lie down in an open field than to stand. It is very unsafe to lean against a tall or short tree during the passage of a storm.

The reasons for these statements and many others which the reader may work out are all based on our first postulate.

There has been some nice discussion as to the feelings of one who was killed by lightning, and the testimony of those who have survived a strong shock, but were unconscious for a time, as well as the nature of the stroke, goes to prove that when one is killed by lightning it is for him simply a blotting out of existence without à pang or a pain. The calm and placid features of those who are thus killed go to show the same. From investigations made by Helmholtz a sensation travels 100 feet a second along a nerve. If a whale is fifty feet long and wounded in the tail it would take one-half a second to transmit an impulse to the brain, one-tenth of a second for the molecules of the brain to rearrange themselves to receive the impression and then one-half second more for the motor impulse to travel back to the tail. So there would be one and one-tenth seconds before the whale would move his tail because of the wound. An impulse travels slowly along a nerve. If a babe had an arm long enough to reach the sun and would plunge his hand into that great heat he could grow to be an old man and die without ever having felt the burn, for the impulse would not yet have reached him.

We have said above that a stroke

of lightning lasts only .00001 of a second and it immediately destroys the ability to perceive or transmit

sensation. No death could be easier than that from a stroke of lightning.

Sometimes it is well to go beyond the limits of one's own bailiwick in order to a better perspective. In addition to the direct influence of such a method of study, comparison and contrast are always valuable adjuncts.

Whatever other benefits accrue from the Charleston meeting, it may be set down as a postulate that geography and history will take on new life and meaning this year in many schools of Ohio by reason of that meeting. Besides, many Institutes have already been stimulated and inspired to greater intensity in these studies through the baptism of power received en route by Miss Logan, Miss Sutherland, Wilkinson, Humphreys, Rayman, Rose, Mitchell and the others, all too few. All through the year we shall feel the thrill of this meeting and our histories and geographies will become more luminous in consequence.

Pupils in Cincinnati, Hamilton, Piqua, Urbana, Forest, Defiance, Columbus, Mt. Gilead, Ironton, Corning, and East Liverpool will gain a knowledge, through the eyes of their teachers, of many things that before they saw vaguely.

The long ride over the fields of Missionary Ridge and Chickamauga settled many questions of detail that will become the heritage of our pupils. Not one of the large company of Ohio people who stood upon the top of Orchard Knob and heard the explanation by an Ohio man of the battle in which three of our Ohio men figured so conspicuously-Grant, Sherman and Sheridan not one of that company but felt a greater pride in our state than ever before, and when Wilkinson "passed the hat" for the guide, well, there was a very patriotic clinking of coin. The contemplative mind must needs go back in thought to days when those generals were children absorbing the influences of soil, climate and educational surroundings that ultimately manifested themselves in generalship generalship there at Missionary Ridge. There were we carried back to Lancaster in search of Sherman, and to Somerset and the great oak tree beneath which Sheridan developed his sturdy qualities.

In contemplating the effect of that great military achievement, the hurrying of the two army corps to the relief of Chattanooga, we could

not but recall Mt. Pleasant, which gave to the world that heroic figure in history, Edwin M. Stanton, by whose dauntless energy this great work was accomplished. The name of Rosecrans carried us back to the little town of Homer in Licking county.

Chickamauga showed many names of men who are still engaged in the vocations of peace in many cities and towns of Ohio, and there, too; we saw the ground so recently hallowed by the presence of our cwn school-boys, whose ready response to the call for troops proved that patriotism still flourishes in the schools of Ohio. Parenthetically let it be remarked that an allday ride over these historic fields prepared the forces for another fierce engagement at the hotel on Lookout mountain. This second "battle above the clouds" occurred in the dining-room, and with no wish to belittle the achievements of Dr. Thompson and Wilkinson, it can be truthfully said that they were not the only ones who won distinction in this engagement.

A view of "Moccasin Bend" from the mountain top is a convincing lesson in physical geography and one need not wonder again how "ox-bow cut-offs" are made. Then, too, one inevitably thinks of Vicksburg and the influence of a like bend in the river at that point, and how much longer it took Grant to subdue that city by reason of topography. Had geographical con

ditions been different, Vicksburg would have fallen sooner and Gettysburg might have been less terrible.

Columbia, S. C., will hereafter be a synonym for caloric in the vocabulary of many a Buckeye teacher, for it seems not to have cooled off since the fires that were lighted by Sherman. Nor have the inhabitants themselves cooled off. Their references to Sherman are forcible to the nth power. But why not? There on the State House grounds are thousands of tons of material with which to complete the building, that has been lying there since 1853; and, naturally, Sherman seems to many of them the great obstacle in the way of its completion. Many of them are still in a dazed condition as to the causes of the war, and over at Asheville, N. C., one lean, lank countryman told the whole story in these words, "I don't see what the d-1 they fout fur anyhow."

It means much to stand where history was made, to reach the beginning of things. From such a vantage-ground the review of causes is fraught with deep significance, and the mind can range backward and forward to the primal causes and the final resultsbackward till it discovers the motives that impel men to action, and forward to our own day where we may see the working out of effects whose beginnings lie far behind us. 'Tis this that gives prophetic power

to history and gives it a potency that otherwise it could not have. Fort Sumter is more than a mere fortified rock out there at the mouth of the harbor with cannon glowering over its parapets. To the student of history, with just a dash of poetic patriotism in his composition, it is a plant whose struggle for life was pathetic; which had to withstand the buffeting of pitiless waves; over which the cutting winds raged and raved; but which finally struck its roots far down into good American soil and sprang into full bloom in that flower which is the most beautiful of all to every true American, "Old Glory." Cold, indeed, must be the man who can look upon Fort Sumter thus panoplied and not be warmed to deeper devotion to his country and a more ardent desire for her prosperity. This is one of the lessons that will come back to our schools and find expression in more incisive teaching. Not only so, but in our search for causes we shall draw upon personal knowledge of soil and climate and develop the fact that these agencies. must have wielded a great if not a determining influence upon events that have passed into history. There, too, we may see how industrial development under the

control of trained mind is subduing even the forces of nature, to a degree, and rendering them subservient to the progress of the Southland; how the cotton-mills, the railway and electricity must in time. bring about better social conditions, and eliminate much of the shiftlessness that still remains to remind one of the days of slavery.

To retire to rest in North Carolina, after riding through regions that depress by reason of rickety fences, dilapidated shanties all guiltless of paint, and animals and people to match, and then to awake in the suburbs of Washington City, is a transformation better experienced than described. 'Tis a long journey from a North Carolina shanty to the Library of Congress -a distance that is antipodal-and this is the exact distance between ignorance and intelligence.

Would that every teacher in Ohio could see this Library building, that he might gain a new and larger definition of Beauty, and realize more fully than ever before that the men who now control our government are true to the principles of the Fathers in setting a high value upon education, as typified by this, perhaps, the most beautiful building in the world.

The criticism of Mr. Thompson that I have adhered to old forms in my treatment of the Participle, I feel to be complimentary rather than unfavorable. In my articles, I have been careful to use terms with which our teachers are familiar. Having no new ideas to advance, my only wish has been to present, if possible, a few things often difficult to young teachers in a way that they might be more easily understood by them.

I realize very well that many of the new grammars make use of Bome terms that I have not employed. I have purposely avoided them. The terms express nothing new, and even the terms are not new themselves; they are old terms belonging to the nomenclature of Latin Syntax. Many books are made "to sell" as much as for anything else, and new terms often being mistaken for new ideas or principles, are sometimes the only merit of a book. I am with many of the terms in some of our fashionable texts very much like I am with a bill of fare at our fashionable hotels. The only advantage I can see, is that you are kept in suspense a while only to find out you have only what you have always known by another name, or that you have something you can't quite make

out.

I

As to Mr. Thompson's first criticism, "that the Participle does not partake of the properties of the verb and noun," the difference between us is only a preference of terms to express the same thing. In the sentence, "The pupil was engaged in studying his lesson," he says "studying" is not a Participle but an Infinitive in ing, commonly called a gerund. He is employing "Gerund" to express exactly what I prefer to express by "Participle used as a Noun." have seen fit to make the Participle a Part of Speech embodying both a Noun and an Adjective use; he prefers, as many others, to make it cover only the adjective use, and employs the term Gerund to express the other. Personally I have no objection to the use of "Gerund," but I am not "pushing" the term. I prefer not to use it in English. I studied "Whitney's Essentials of English Grammar" in school (to my notion the best work extant for advanced students in grammar) and have introduced and taught the book. I have also introduced and taught Whitney and Lockwood, Maxwell, and Metcalf, all of which use the "gerund" as pointed out by Mr. Thompson, but I have yet to find my first class that takes kindly to the term.

The other criticism, that the itali