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Watt's beautiful "Cradle Hymn," beginning:

Holy angels guard thy bed."

"Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber,

is also reproduced. The next two and a half pages contain phabet of "Lessons for Youth," of three pages, the first of which

In Adam's Fall

We finned all.

Thy Life to mend,
This Book attend.

The Cat doth play,
And after flay.

A Dog will bite

A Thief at Night.

Praife to GOD for learning to Read.
THE Praifes of my Tongue
I offer to the LORD,

T

That I was taught and learnt fo young
To read his holy Word.

An Eagle' flight 2 That I was brought to know

Is out of fight.
The idle Fool
Is whipt at School

A PAGE OF THE ILLUSTRATED ALPHABET

The Danger I was in.
By Nature and by Practice too
A wretched flave to Sin:

3 That I was led to fee

I can do nothing well;

ខ្លួន

And whether thall a Sipner fee
To fave bimfelf from Hell,
A PAGE OF THE READING MATTER

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FIG. 42. TWO SPECIMEN PAGES FROM "THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER"

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one finds the old familiar and four pages of rhymed prayers and admonitions, among which This is followed by three and a half pages of Verses for Children,

"Now I lay me down to sleep."

stake at Smithfield, in 1554, and which was bequeathed by him ten by John Rogers, a London minister, who was burned at the Next comes a seven-page rhymed "Advice to Children," writ

to the wife and nine children he was about to leave. After a page picture, showing the event, the poem begins:

"Give Ear my Children to my Words,
whom God hath dearly bought,
Lay up his Laws within your Heart,
and point them in your thought.
I leave you here a little book,
for you to look upon,

That you may see your father's face,

when he is dead and gone."

This was evidently a much-prized poem.

Next comes a page of "Instructive Questions and Answers," of which the following are illustrative:

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This was followed by the pièce de résistance of the whole book, "The Shorter Westminster Catechism," the first page of which is reproduced as Figure 131 in the accompanying History. This required twenty-four pages of the book. Next comes a famous native production of nine and a half pages, by John Cotton, the first page of which is reproduced on page 315. The volume is now concluded with a nine and a half page rhymed dialogue between Christ, a Youth, and the Devil, which also was a great favorite in New England. The Youth declares:

"Those days which God to me doth send,
In pleasure I'm resolved to spend."

The Devil expresses great pleasure at the decision, while Christ entreats the Youth not to obey the Devil's voice. The Youth, though, will not listen until too late. After a long argument, Christ finally, out of patience, calls Death to come and take the Youth "before he has half lived out his days." The Youth, terrified, now begs to be spared, but Christ is obdurate; Death takes him; and the poem ends with the following words:

DEATH

"Youth, I am come to fetch thy breath,
And carry thee to th' shades of death,
No pity on thee can I show,
Thou hast thy God offended so.
Thy soul and body I'll divide,
Thy body in the grave I'll hide,
And thy dear soul in hell must lie
With Devils to eternity.

THE CONCLUSION

"Thus ends the days of woful youth,
Who won't obey nor mind the truth;
Nor hearken to what preachers say,
But do their parents disobey.
They in their youth go down to hell,
Under eternal wrath to dwell.

Many don't live out half their days
For cleaving unto sinful ways."

This Primer exercised a great influence on the New England character. It was used by both church and school, the schoolmaster drilling on the Catechism in the school, and the people reciting it yearly in the churches. Every home possessed copies of the book, and it was for sale at all bookstores, even in the smaller places, for a century and a half. It was also used extensively outside of New England, it being essentially the book of the Dissenters in the American colonies. Sometimes it was printed under the title of The Columbian Primer, The American Primer, or, The New York Primer, but the public preferred The New England Primer to any other title. Its total sales have been estimated to have been at least three million copies.1 It was used in the Boston Dame Schools as late as 1806, and in the country districts still later. The cities abandoned it first, and gradually it was replaced everywhere by a new type of secular reading book which developed in America, after the rise of a na

1 "For one hundred years this Primer was the schoolbook of the dissenters of America, and for another hundred, it was frequently reprinted. In the unfavorable locality (in a sectarian sense) of Philadelphia, the accounts of Benjamin Franklin and David Hall show that, between 1749 and 1766, that firm sold 37,100 copies of it. Livermore stated, in 1849, that within the last dozen years' 100,000 copies of modern editions have been circulated.' An over-conservative claim for it is to estimate an annual average sale of 20,000 copies during a period of one hundred and fifty years, or a total sale of 3,000,000 copies." (Ford, The New England Primer, P. 45.)

ever exercise the influence which this early religious text exercrude and extremely poor, but probably no modern textbook will pared with the primers and first readers we have to-day it seems tional consciousness and the beginning of the national life. Com

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keepeth me, and he can fave me. Q. What is GOD?

A God is a Spirit of himself and for himfelf.

Q. How many Gods be there?

A. There be but One GOD in three Perfons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghoft. Q. How did God make ?

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hate, faith the Lord.

XCEPT a Man be born again he
cannot fee the Kingdom of God.
OOLISHNESS is bound up in the

4. In my firft Parents holy and righteous. F Heart of a Child, but the Rod of Cor

Q. Are you then born Holy and Righteous?
4. No, my firft Parents finned, and I in them.
Q. Are you then born a Sinner?
A. I was conceived in Sin & born in Iniquity.
Q. What is your Birth Sin?

A. Adam's Sin imputed to me, and a cor-
rupt Nature dwelling in me.

Q. What is your corrupt Nature?
FIRST PAGE OF JOHN COTTON'S "SPIRITUAL MILK"

Tection fhall drive it from him.

G

H

RIEVE not the Holy Spirit, left
it depart from thee.

OLINESS becomes God's Houfe
forever.

T is good for me to draw near unto

I God.

AN ALPHABET OF LESSONS FOR YOUTH

FIG. 43. Two OTHER PAGES FROM THE "NEW ENGLAND PRIMER"

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to sin." books in the schools of the colonies. natural continuation, and constituted the main further reading It has been said of it that "it taught millions to read, and not one cised over both children and adults during our colonial period. The Psalter, the Testament, and the Bible were its

England Primer (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1899). with an historical introduction, is Paul Leicester Ford's The New An inexpensive photographic reprint of an edition of 1727,

CHAPTER XVI

THE RISE OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

THE Readings contained in this chapter deal with the rise of the study of the modern mathematical, astronomical, and physical sciences as a still further expression of the new critical, questioning spirit awakened by the Revival of Learning; the beginnings of modern scientific method, and its application to the problems of the universe; and the formulation of this method and its fruitfulness in the hands of modern investigators.

The first selection (203) is from Macaulay, and not only sets forth the fundamental defects of all ancient science, but also shows how the ancient scientific purpose differed from the modern. The second selection (204), from an old German chronicle, is a good illustration of the wonderful and miraculous, which flourished throughout the whole Middle Ages and made scientific progress impossible. The third selection (205) is an extract from the dedicatory letter of Copernicus, prefixed to his revolutionary volume (1543) on the motions of the heavenly bodies. Modern scientific methods and discovery clearly date from the publication of this book. The extract reveals the new method of thinking, and is as clear an example of the modern attitude and way of thinking as was the work of Petrarch. The next extract (206), describing how Galileo discovered the satellites of Jupiter (1610), also is a wonderfully clear example of modern scientific reasoning.

Modern scientific investigation was unfortunate in its birth, in that it was ushered into the world just as the growing tolerance of the Church, which had marked the latter half of the fifteenth century and the opening years of the sixteenth, was changing to an attitude of suspicion and critical reaction as a result of the Protestant Revolts then sweeping Europe. In lands strongly Protestant this reaction manifested itself but slightly, and in England scarcely at all, but in strong Catholic countries, and especially in Italy, it strove to suppress new thinking as dangerous to orthodoxy. The Spanish Inquisition, a sort of mediæval inquisitorial grand jury, was revived, and became zealous in tracking down and punishing offenders. One of these was Galileo

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