student did know, and still more at what he was expected to know. I should like to see the subject an essential part of all secondary education in England, just as the knowledge of Bible history was in my young days and may be still. If proper text-books were forthcoming, to which I again direct the attention of enterprising publishers, there would be no difficulty in making this subject an accompaniment of nearly every literary lesson. … The advantage would be the enlargement of the mind by the contemplation of the majestic march of human events and the preparation for any future course of historical study. 'Boys come to us,' said a German professor once to me, 'knowing their centuries.' How few English boys or even English men have any notion of their centuries! The dark ages are indeed dark to them. I once asked a boy at Eton, who had given me a date, whether it was B. C. or A. D. Being hopelessly puzzled, he replied that it was B. D. Many of us, if we were honest, would give a similar answer." _O. Browning, The Teaching of History in Schools (Royal Historical Society, Transactions, new series, volume 4)._ HISTORY: The Importance of Local History. "From a variety of considerations, the writer is persuaded that one of the best introductions to history that can be given in American high schools, and even in those of lower grade, is through a study of the community in which the school is placed. History, like charity, begins at home. The best American citizens are those who mind home affairs and local interest. 'That man's the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best.' The best students of universal history are those who know some one country or some one subject well. The family, the hamlet, the neighborhood, the community, the parish, the village, town, city, county, and state are historically the ways by which men have approached national and international life. It was a preliminary study of the geography of Frankfort-on-the-Main that led Carl Ritter to study the physical structure of Europe and Asia, and thus to establish the new science of comparative geography. He says: 'Whoever has wandered through the valleys and woods, and over the hills and mountains of his own state, will be the one capable of following a Herodotus in his wanderings over the globe.' And we may say, as Ritter said of the science of geography, the first step in history is to know thoroughly the district where we live. … American local history should be studied as a contribution to national history. This country will yet be viewed and reviewed as an organism of historic growth, developing from minute germs, from the very protoplasm of state life. And some day this country will be studied in its international relations, as an organic part of a larger