The President, after announcing the programme for the afternoon, said he had neglected to appoint critics for the day. He would now appoint Mrs. Clapp, of San Francisco, and Mrs. Stone, of Marysville, to act in that capacity. It seemed to be absolutely necessary that there should be some critics for the Institute, and he recommended to their attention the printed placards at the doorway, in the orthography of which the printer had made a blunder.

Adjourned.

AFTERNOON SESSION.

The Institute re-assembled at one o'clock.

The Rev. A. Higbie, of Napa City, in the Chair.

Mr. Elliott sang "Hail Columbia," "Home Again," etc., accompanied on one of Badger's pianos by Mr. Gustav Scott.

Mr. Ellis H. Holmes interested the audience with some elocutionary exercises. He read Hood's "Song of the Shirt," Pierpont's "Passing Away," and other pieces.

The Rev. John E. Benton, of Sacramento, was introduced as the afernoon Lecturer.

Elocution, as a science, he said, taught what could be imparted and received. The orator was the cap stone of elocutionary instruction, and the greatest orator that ever lived described the first, second, and third requisites for oratory as "action! action! action!" Almost anybody could teach a Grammar School, but it required a very wise man to teach children how to use their powers of communicating what they know. They must be drilled immediately upon entering School. The carriage of the body came first in the gymnastics of elocution. Not one man in a thousand knew how to stand or to walk. School Masters and Mistresses, with shuffling gaits and distorted muscles, did not understand that the body was capable of expressing itself in beauty and power. Calisthenic exercises were very useful as a beginning; and children should be required to hold their heads erect, to throw their chests out, so as to give the voice freedom of emission. Then let them be drilled on the cards, upon the basis of the Philosophy of the Voice by Rush. The voice of almost any one might be made so musical that its power would be almost infinite. While giving a child voice, the Teacher should be, at the same time, training him insensibly

into all forms of culture affecting the character, lips, tongue, palate, and all parts of the body, including that action of the body which was known as gesticulation. The gymnastics of elocution embraced not only gesticulation, but the expression of the face and eye, the movements of the foot and hand. After gaining the power to give expression of sentiment in words, man had the help of all the body, the highest cultivation of which was a divine simplicity. Many great men regarded nature as the best instructor in elocution; but vocal drill was for the purpose of acting up to nature. God so ordered it that the animal was first in the order of life; mechanical action and drill came before intellectual development; but finally the soul waked up, and the intellect became enlightened and capable of receiving the great thoughts contained in the pieces to be declaimed. Spiritualists believed that the soul of an author went along with his productions to all time; that if the schoolboy would recite the words of Patrick Henry, the soul of that patriot would dwell in him, break out from every part of his body, and be capable of being communicated to others in all the beauty of oratory. The first and highest idea of eloquence was the wakening of the intellect and the drill of the body so as to communicate what had been acquired; and that was the highest idea of man, the microcosm; man, the epitome of the universe; man, the representative of all matter; man, the slave and the sovereign; man, gathering from everything instruction, that he might give back that which he had received, in increased knowledge and wisdom. Underlying all literature, and making it of value, was this soul, this rich, round, and powerful meaning. The purpose of the soul, in all that was done and said, was to add to the wealth of the universe. Instead of shooting at the sun, we should aim only at what was practicable. From experience, from the mortifications suffered at failures, in matter or manner, he knew how necessary it was that children should be drilled. He knew what it was that Emerson called the "infinite power of drill." In illustration of the false ideas prevailing, and the confusion of force, emphasis, and inflection, he referred to a Parson whom he heard a short time since bellowing and roaring at a funeral until he became ridiculous; though he felt himself ignorant enough of the great principles of elocution to sympathise somewhat even with those who habitually violated them. He committed to Teachers the charge of show

ing the children of this generation what was good speaking, and the power of expression.

Mr. Hubert Burgess, at two o'clock and twenty minutes, was introduced, to deliver a lecture on Linear Drawing. He read a lengthy extract from Chapman, to establish that every one who can learn to write, may learn to draw; and proceeded, with boxes shaped in perspective, and wires to represent lines of sight, to explain the nature of the visual ray, the horizontal line, the necessity of the latter to be always on a level with the eye, and the reason why all objects disappeared in it. At three o'clock, the subject was postponed till to-morrow.

Miss Sullivan's class of little girls, from the City Model School, was again brought forward, and exercised till three o'clock and forty-five minutes, in Object Lessons.

Mr. Swett called attention to the meeting, after the adjournment, of the State Board of Examination in the committee rooms; and read extracts from the new law on the subject of certificates. After which the programme for the succeeding day was announced. As the critics had not made any report, it was to be considered, he supposed, that the Teachers of the Institute were above criticism. [Laughter.]

The exercises concluded with singing "Old Hundred," led by Messrs. Elliott and Mitchell.

EVENING SESSION.

The President called to the Chair Mr. A. H. Goodrich, Superintendent of Placer County, who introduced George W. Minns, Professor of Natural Sciences in the San Francisco High School, as the Lecturer of the evening. We subjoin Dr. Tuthill's report for the Evening Bulletin :

PROFESSOR MINNS ON THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF OUR ONE COUNTRY.

By eight o'clock, Music Hall was pretty well filled by attendants upon the lecture announced to be delivered on Physical Geography, by Professor Minns, of the City High School. This is a new study in the Schools. Humboldt was its father. Carl Ritter has added to it, and Arnold Guyot has nobly illustrated it. It is the geography of the natural world. It explains the force of the winds, treats of the distribution of light and heat, the phenomena of atmosphere, the form and dimensions of the grand divisions of the earth, the effects of climate on its surface, the distribution of animals and men upon it, and the connection between the character of lands and the people that inhabit them. Its study leads us implicitly to believe that God made all that greets our eyes, and that when He had made it, His eye, critical beyond all created perceptions, saw it very good.

Out of all this great subject, the Professor took for the topic of the evening a single branch-the physical geography of the United States, and the proof it discovered that the whole land was designed for one and only one nation. He was unfortunate in having no good physical map of the United States-none is yet to be had in the city. The only map of the kind desired to illustrate the lecture, was one of South America, by Arnold Guyot, on which the lowlands are depicted of one color, the plains of another, the lofty table lands of another, the mountains distinctly pictured, and the rivers made much of, widening toward their mouths. With such a map of the Union before us, it would be easy to see how the great Rocky Chain, whose highest peaks are outside of our territory and its passes within it, binds, not severs us; how the Allegheny, whose least accessible heights are near its extremities in New Hampshire and North Carolina, and which, throughout the greater part of its length, is no obstruction to travel or internal commerce, shedding its copious streams with rapid falls toward the Atlantic, and affording the abundant water-power which a civilized people always embraces to build up manufactories, out of which cities and thriving towns are bred; how the great Mississippi Valley, larger than all Europe, excepting Norway, Sweden, and Prussia, is in every acre bursting with fertility, and its rivers, owing to their very slight fall, (the Mississippi itself falling but fifteen hundred feet from source to mouth,) navigable to the very springs whence they issue; and how this great valley, gathering the water from the western slopes of the Alleghanies, from the eastern exposure of the rocky range, and the slight elevations that lift themselves for hundreds of miles along nearly the line of the forty-ninth parallel, (our northern boundary,) must be the property and the home of but one people.

This physical unity of our country was exhibited very clearly by the Professor, so that the most skeptical saw it. In illustration of the ease with which water communication between the East and the West may be obtained, he referred to the proposition made to the last Congress for a canal of half a mile in extent, to connect the Minnesota River and the Red River of the North, which being completed, together with a canal to connect the navigable waters of the Illinois and Lake Michigan, vessels may pass freighted through the rivers now in use and the canals already completed from New York to St. Louis, and from New Orleans, up the Mississippi, up the Minnesota, by canal to the Red, down the Red to Lake Winnipeg, and up the Saskatchawa to within one hundred and fifty miles of the Frazer River gold fields. This transverse route, indeed, takes us out of our own land, but it only shows that we have not exceeded the bounds that nature would permit us as one people to occupy on the north. West of the Rocky Mountains we have a region hopelessly sterile, but abundant in mineral resources-a region whose life depends on its free communication with the western frontier of the Continent that looks out on Asia, and with the east that confronts Europe.

Never was there a country whose parts were so naturally dependent and beneficial to each other. The business of New England is the fisheries, and manufacturing. Is any corner of the Union the poorer because Massachusetts draws her boundless supplies of food from the Banks of Newfoundland? Is the South impoverished because New England was so good a customer for her cotton, rice, and sugar? Was Louisiana or South Carolina any less rich because from the frozen North the hated Yankees brought down their ice to cool them? And are they wise when they tell us we shall not carry ice to their parched tongues because we came from Abraham's side of the great gulf that they would establish where nature made none? Is the West or the South any less prosperous because the Middle States dig iron from their hillsides, or whiten all seas with the sails of their ships, or convert into a thousand articles of use or luxury the raw material that at home and abroad they can lay hands on? Is the North any poorer because the teeming West is prolific of grain? or because the South

gives them cotton, or rice, or sugar, which they cannot themselves produce? Is any portion less abundant in wealth because the Pacific slope and the bleak mountains of Nevada shell out such stores of gold and silver and all precious metals?

Next the Professor considered the connections of Physical Geography and the development of the human race. Presuming that the first pair were sheltered in the Eden of Asia, where revelation, ethnology, and all history concur to trace them, he showed how the Caucasus to the north and the mountain ranges on the south, forced their growing family to migrate when the land became too straitened for them along the peninsulas of the Mediterranean and of Southern Asia, and how the present distribution of the human family could scarcely have been produced from any other very distant starting point. In Asia humanity spent its boyhood. There the race spread itself, very much as that great division seems on the map to the eye: huge, shapeless, graceless. In Europe it reached its bearded manhood; in Greece attaining its most exquisite sense of beauty; in Rome clothing itself with its greatest power. The Professor showed how the very geography of Europe, crossed and intercrossed with mountains, its outlines deeply indented by the sea, and its divisions made almost impassable, fitted it for the home of distinct, belligerant, conflicting States. European history is, as it geographically might be presumed, one long series of wars. Scarcely a foot of soil but has been fought over. Yet its States that are most powerful are so by the union of smaller States which the complicated mountain ranges do not forbid to be united. Spain never was great till Castile, Leon, and Arragon were made one. France was weak till the whole Gallic race acknowledged the same Government. Great Britain assumed her imperial proportions only when all of Europe that nature would permit to be united under British sway were brought together. Still these separate nationalities were not an unmixed injury to the race. They had begotten separate and rival schools in art and science. The conflict between people so narrowly yet so surely separated was not confined to arms; but they struggled with all appliances for the mastership in every civilized art, and great advantage to the human family was the result. But when strife had wrought its work of discipline, when all was ready, the curtain of the Western Ocean was lifted, and behold, a New World! And not its bleak side turned to the Old Nations, but that coast line which is indented with scores of welcoming harbors. How different would the last two centuries of American history have read if the Pacific side had been turned towards Europe! How long they may have beaten along its shore, searching in vain for so narrow an entrance as the Golden Gate!

The lecturer dwelt eloquently upon the characteristics of our country that invited emigration from Europe, and deduced the style of man that our land should produce. He should have the endurance of the Englishman, the vivacity of the Frenchman, the phlegm of the Turk, the heart of the Irishman, the dignity of the Spaniard, the eye and ear for beauty of the Italian, and the unquenchable patriotism of the Pole. America was never destined to be the home of aristocrats or slaves. Somebody has said that Europe was the paradise of the upper classes, the purgatory of the middle classes, the hell of the poor. Our land is the poor man's home. Its destiny is to teach that all men, no matter what the conformation of their skulls or the color of their skins, may be free, happy, virtuous. It is the land for one people, and never can be the home of two nations. There was but one devil-that was slavery-potent enough to attempt to check us in the career we had started on. That monstrosity must be annihilated-that devil must be slain. [Applause.] Then nothing can prevent our progress toward the glorious goal that the reign of man, the hope of Christians, and the physical geography of the land had pointed out as ours. Break the neck of that devil, slavery, which has launched this war upon us-crush it utterly out, and nothing can disturb our peace again for years. Our people are aroused at