Some Observations of a Foster Parent. By John Charles Tarver.
(A. Constable and Co.) — The "foster parent," it must be understood, is the schoolmaster, who, Mr. Tarver thinks, and not without reason, knows much more about his foster-children than their natural parents. We cannot follow our author into the various subjects with which he deals. It must suffice to say that there are few questions that have been discussed for the last five and twenty years or so in the province of education on which he has not something to say. This something is always full of sense, and always expressed with force and in an incisive kind of way. Mr. Tarver has always kept an open mind ; he is not ashamed to confess that he has changed his views and his methods more than once. We shall give some specimens of Mr. Tarver's "wit and wisdom," taken almost at random :—" In my own private opinion this mania for change of air" [the subject is "Tommy's Health 1 "is a sheer superstition. Now that the means of com- munication are so abundant, we are all restless, and wish to be somewhere else." "When every possible thing has been said in favour of athletics, there remains the fact that they are bad masters, though excellent servants." "Every time that a boy writes a piece of translation from a foreign language, he gives himself a lesson in English composition ; and the mistakes that have to be corrected are quite as often mistakes in the manipula- tion of English as in failing to comprehend the language from which he is translating." This is equally true of the converse process. The worst mistakes in a piece of Latin prose come from a failure to understand the English.
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