Bishop Creighton, of London, has characterized the present English idea of education as embodying the supposition that "all the child had to do was to sit still like a pitcher under a pump while an expert hand poured in the proper amount of material for it to hold." His own view was that the only education anybody really obtained was that which he gave himself. "The idea prevailing at the beginning of the century was that men should read a good book, master its contents, and pursue for themselves the lines of thought it suggested, and talk it over and make its ideas the subject of discussion among themselves. No system could surely be better." VINLAND AND ITS RUINS. SOME OF THE EVIDENCES THAT NORTHMEN WERE IN MASSACHUSETTS IN PRE-COLUMBIAN DAYS.[1] BY CORNELIA HORSFORD. [Footnote 1: A paper read before the Viking Club of London on December 16, 1898; also before the Section of Anthropology of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Boston meeting, August, 1898.] The evidences that Northmen were in Massachusetts in pre-Columbian days are drawn from two sources, geography and archæology. The archæological evidence is found by comparing certain ruins in Massachusetts with ruins of the Saga-time in Iceland, and also with the native and early European ruins on the coast of North America. The geographical evidence is found by comparing the descriptions of the country called Vinland in Icelandic literature with the coast of North America. The geographical data for this paper are taken from each and all of the three oldest manuscript versions of the story of Vinland, because they complement each other where the descriptions vary in detail. These are called the Flat Island Book, Eric the Red's Saga, and Thorfinn Karlsefni's Saga. If the coast of North America should repeat the same geographical features, it would obviously be impossible to determine the site of Vinland by geography alone. Let us see if this is so. It is stated in Eric the Red's Saga that Karlsefni's party, which consisted of one hundred and sixty men and their live stock in three vessels, after sailing southwest from Greenland for a number of days and seeing two new countries, came to a certain cape. "They cruised along the land and the land lay on the starboard.... There were there an open, harborless coast and long strands and sand banks. And they went in boats to the land and found there the keel of a ship, and they named it Keel Cape. And they gave a name to the strands and called them Wonder Strands, because they were long to sail by. Then the land became scored with bays, and they steered the ships to the bays."[2] They remained here for some time, but they had not yet seen the Vinland which Leif Erikson had found a few years before.