"Their uses are mere conjecture. Some judge them the seats of punishment where sinners suffer the extremes of heat and cold. Mr. Whiston says a comet approaching the sun brushed the earth with its tail and caused the deluge, and that another will cause the conflagration."
Let us not be too eager to jeer at these ancient school-books. Pope wrote nearly two centuries ago:
"Still is to-morrow wiser than to-day
We think our fathers fools so wise we grow.
Our wiser sons no doubt will think us so."
Perhaps the series of text-books which have chased each other in and out of our nineteenth-century public schools under the successive boards of commissioners and school committees who have also flashed briefly on our educational horizon, may cut no better figure two centuries hence than do those of Lilly and Pike and Cocker.
CHAPTER VII
PENMANSHIP AND LETTERS
Ink alwais good store on right hand to stand
Brown paper for great haste or else box of sand.
Dip pen and shake pen and touch pen for haire
Wax, quills and penknife see alwais ye beare.