Tradition Eclipsed

As most scientists know, a total eclipse of the sun will make part of England grey for a few moments on June 29.

As most Oxonians know, the tradition of centuries schedules Commencement Day for Oxford University on the last Wednesday in June. This year, the last June Wednesday falls on the 29th. So the governing board of Oxford announced last week that Commencement Day would be postponed one day.

An undergraduate, moved, wrote in his journal: "When in the course of human events, Nature frowns upon Tradition, then Tradition must give way."

New Drake

Higher education, like lower religion, was once regarded as a field for commercial exploitation. Indeed, "diploma mills" still flourish, teaching all things from ethics to how-to-be-a-Prohibition-agent.

But the day has passed when the absorption of one college by another can be seriously decried as an elimination of competition for monetary gain. None would have dared impute such a thing to the megger, announced last week, of Drake University with its fellow-townsman, the University of Des Moines (Iowa). Yet to the name of Drake, under which the merged institutions will proceed, imputations were made plentifully not 20 years ago.

In a smallish town, such as Des Moines was in 1881, of which the essential function is to serve a surrounding population of farmers, it is hard to discover what types of higher education are really in demand. Drake, organized as a nonsectarian, co-educational plant, began by borrowing the six-year-old Law School of Simpson College at nearby Indianola, Iowa, and absorbing a five-year-old Iowa Medical College. These, plus a Liberal Arts School, made Drake a "university." In 1882 a department of pharmacy was added. In 1887, the Iowa College of Physicians was affiliated and the next year a normal (teacher training) department was added. In 1908 a school of dentistry was obtained by absorbing another local college. In 1902 Drake paid for its borrowed Law School.

In those early days, people could become trustees of Drake University by paying $1,000 down. But in 1908 reformation came. Drake got a new charter and the approval of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Its endowment grew into six and later seven figures. It is striving to become as well-known for scholarship as for its annual relay races. Its latest merger is a bid for efficiency, not monopoly.

Great Influence

As it does every year, the American Bible Society last week announced how many copies of Holy Scripture it had printed and distributed in the previous year. Counting translations, such as the edition in Luba Lulua (destined for 2,000,000 black tribesmen in Africa) the year's grand total was some nine million copies--an increase of 600,000 over 1925. The Society implied this made the Bible by far the most influential book printed in the U. S. The 600,000 increase alone dwarfs the 1925 sale of any so-called "bestseller" of fiction, technical instruction, free verse or whatever.

But not everyone would agree that the Bible is, or has been, the book having the greatest influence on U. S. culture. Mark Sullivan, dean of Washington, D. C., news correspondents and careful student of U. S. folkways, would not agree.

Last week, lacking a political topic worth writing about, and having an eye to furthering the U. S. history he is writing,* and knowing that his newspaper (New York Herald Tribune) would be indulgent, and also knowing a quaint topic when he sees one, Mark Sullivan frankly substituted for political trivia a discussion and some queries about a U. S. institution called McGuffey's Readers. Were they still extant? If not, when had they died out?

A U. S. Senator had told Mr. Sullivan that no other influence had molded his (the Senator's) character and career so power fully as McGuffey's. Mr. Sullivan ventured to say that many of the Senator's 95 colleagues would feel the same way if quizzed.

Mr. Sullivan estimated loosely that some 75,000,000 McGuffey's were at one time or another be tween 1835 and 1900 in the hands of some 20,000,000 U. S. school children. But just when and just where, "like the last passenger pigeon," was a McGuffey's last seen and used?

Mr. Sullivan made it sound as though he had . expended much time and effort on McGuffey's. "There also was a man named McGuffey," he said. "I have learned enough to be able to say with some confidence that William Holmes McGuffey had a larger influence . . . than, for example, several Presi dents of the United States. . . ."

Here is the story that Mr. Sullivan will one day rediscover:

There were two McGuffeys and their series (five times revised) was last reprinted by the American Book Co. (Cincinnati) in 1901. In 1835, Dr. William Holmes McGuffey, then president and professor of "Moral and Intellectual Philosophy" at Cincinnati College, was asked by the Messrs. Truman & Smith, local publishers, to prepare a series of eclectic readings for the young. This he did, in 18 months, paying one of his students $5 to copy out the selections.

Into the first volume Dr. McGuffey put monosyllabic fables about busy bees, lame dogs, silly geese, kind cows, cruel boys, inventing the formula of printing a dogmatic MORAL at the end of each lesson, rigidly adhered to throughout the series.

The Second Reader contained more complicated animal stories, also some frightening ones -- big bears, fierce tigers -- and the im mortal legend of George Washing ton and his father's cherry tree. In Dr. McGuffey's stories, children got bright new silver dollars when good, said "No, ma'am" to their mothers. Their rooms were "cham bers." Their dog was Rover. People went "down cellar."

Napoleon bestrode his charger on the original Third Reader coyer, wherein quotations from the Bible were introduced, together with The Old Oaken Bucket and other verse, instructive articles such as "How a Fly Walks on the Ceiling," and the splendid tale of "Harry and His Dog Frisk."

The Fourth Reader was quite grown up, with more Bible selections and excerpts from Bacon, Addison, Milton, Shakespeare and an anonymous story about the woman who, by generously sharing her last smoked herring, rediscovered her long-lost son.

These four volumes were enlarged in 1838 and in 1841 the publishers felt they must issue a still more advanced reader. But Dr. McGuffey had left Cincinnati. So they engaged his smart brother, Alexander H. McGuffey, 16 years younger, a lawyer and Hebrew scholar. He it was who contributed the Rhetorical Guide which, later called McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader, easily rivaled all the original four readers for popularity and inspired the elder brother to compile a prodigious Sixth. The Guide contained selections chosen to improve inflection and memory as well as morals and sentiment. There were the "Village Black smith," "Thanatopsis," "Gray's Elegy," "Lochinvar" and Hamlet's soliloquy. Stern questions followed each selection to test the reader's attention and earnestness.

The potent McGuffey's were never without competition. There were the Goodrich, and Harvey's, and Pickett's. But not for 40 years, in 1877, were the McGuffey's seriously threatened. Then appeared the Appleton readers, prepared by the school superintendents of St. Louis and Cleveland with a Yale professor. It was a lavish series, handsomely illustrated. The McGuffey's survived this onslaught only by those sterling moral values which had made them a byword in the land, a staple commodity at every general store. That they have now vanished utterly from schoolrooms will be difficult to prove, especially since they owe their whole existence to what many claimed, at the time, was a miracle.

William Holmes McGuffey, born in Washington County, Pa., in 1800, son of an Indian scout of Scotch descent, attended the Old Stone Academy at Darlington, Pa., and .Washington College. He won fame as "mental philosopher" of Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) and at Ohio University (then as now at Athens, Ohio) and the University of Virginia. He formulated Ohio's school laws, organized Ohio's teachers; married twice, "preached 3,000 sermons but never wrote one"* and was as famed in person as in publication.

But he might have been and done none of these things had not his pious mother knelt beside her log cabin in Trumbull County, Ohio, one day and prayed loudly that God would send her boy a way of getting an education. The road past the McGuffey cabin was thickly carpeted with dust so that Mrs. McGuffey was not interrupted in her prayer by the hoofbeats of a horse that was approaching. Moreover, the dust so muffled the hoofbeats that the horseman, a clergyman who had just founded the Old Stone Academy, could distinctly hear every word Mrs. McGuffey said. Pausing long enough to understand thoroughly, he rode softly off to the next cabin, learned Mrs. McGuffey's name, rode back, answered her prayer.

* Our Times, of which the first part (through 1904) was published last year by Chas, Scribner & Sons. * Having an immense memory, a facile tongue.