Samuel K. Hoshour is another sterling figure in Indiana pedagogy. He was a native of Pennsylvania, and a minister, first in the Lutheran and afterward in the Disciples Church; but he was a school-teacher first, last, and always, and taught many hundreds of the youth of Indiana. He was, in his later years, a resident of Indianapolis, and died there in 1883. Oliver P. Morton, Lew Wallace, and others of the distinguished men of the State sat under his teaching. In the eyes of two generations he was the embodiment of learning and scholarship; and he retained to the last something of the austerity and exaggerated dignity of the old-fashioned school-teacher. He was, indeed, always the schoolmaster, and a pedant, though naïvely seeking to avoid the appearance of it. He was a linguist of wide reputation, and delighted in comparative philology. He had a fancy for unusual words, and took pleasure in illuminating their meanings from obscure origins. He wrote a book, prized by many of his old pupils, called “Altisonant Letters” (1840), which, as the title indicates, was written in high-sounding words. It is in the form of correspondence, and was devised as a kind of philological primer, to be “a stepping-stone from the current everyday English to the Latin and Greek.” The plan was not a bad one, and was in some respects a forerunner of the inductive methods of teaching languages that have since been popular. CHAPTER IV AN EXPERIMENT IN SOCIALISM New Harmony, the scene of Robert Owen’s experiment in socialism, lies in Posey County, in the far southwestern corner of Indiana. The village is without direct communication with the outer world, but may be approached by boat on the Wabash River, or by a branch railroad which ends abruptly at New Harmony after a rough course through wheat fields, which are, in spring and summer, a charming feature of the landscape of this region. George Rapp gave expression to his peculiar religious ideas in the community which he established there, and he sold his large estate to Owen, who began building on the foundations left by Rapp a social structure after plans of his own. Owen’s ideas are not strikingly novel when taken in connection with the history of socialism; but the movement carried to Indiana many distinguished persons, and the life of subsequent generations in and about the village has, to this day, been colored by it.