In preparing for recitation, students should get an outline of each lesson by the use of the paragraph headings and then work out the lesson by the use of the questions that follow. If the reference books suggested are available, additional reading should be done. A good plan is for the teacher to assign one or two paragraphs to a pupil and have the latter bring in such other information of interest as can be secured. Some questions may be grouped and pupils directed to prepare a short essay to be read before the class. In regard to dates, the suggestion is that pupils take turns, lesson by lesson, in presenting a plan by which to memorize them. When the period is one that can be related to some well-known event in general history, as the life of Charlemagne, the Norman Conquest of England, the Crusades, the Wars of the Roses, discovery of America, invention of printing, etc., it is well to do so; or make a well-known musician a contemporary of some artist, statesman, king, scientist, man of letters, etc. The teacher should be prepared in this manner for each lesson. Events before the Christian Era may be related to some event or character in Biblical history. LESSON I. MUSIC OF THE CHINESE, JAPANESE AND HINDOOS. =Sources of Our Knowledge=.—When we study the music of the early period of the human race, we find no records such as we are storing today in our libraries. We must depend upon the discoveries of archæologists in the buried cities of early civilizations. Of contemporaneous books, properly speaking, tablets of music explaining the construction and methods of playing the musical instruments then in use we have few; if they exist they are in dead languages to which scholars are but slowly finding the key. It is true that some instruments have been found, but we can have no certainty that they are in perfect condition. The principal sources of the information we possess have been the paintings, decorations and sculptures on monuments and on the walls of buildings and tombs that have been unearthed. Early languages were largely pictorial, and records kept in this manner furnish us representations of the religious, martial, and social life of the early races.