[12] Draper, A. S., Origin and Development of the New York Common School System.
[13] Among the German Lutherans, who constituted nearly one fourth of the total population of the colony, a school is claimed to have been established alongside the church by each of the congregations "at the earliest possible period after its formation." The close connection between these Lutheran congregations and their schools may be seen from the following contract, dated at Lancaster, in 1774:
"I, the undersigned, John Hoffman, parochial teacher of the church at Lancaster, have promised in the presence of the congregation, to serve as choirister, and, as long as we have no pastor, to read sermons on Sunday. In summer I promise to hold cathechetical instruction with the young, as becomes a faithful teacher, and also to lead them in the singing and attend to the clock."
[14] The seventeenth-century Virginia legislation relating to education is as follows:
1643. Orphans to be educated "according to the competence of their
estate."
1646. "If the estate be so meane and inconsiderate that it will not
reach to a free education, then that orphan [shall] be bound to
some manuall trade … except some friends or relatives be willing
to keep them."
1660-61. "To avoid sloth and idleness … as also for the relief of
parents whose poverty extends not to giving [their children]
breeding, the justices of the peace should … bind out children
to tradesmen or husbandmen to be brought up in some good and
lawful calling."
[15] "Perhaps the most remarkable, because the most widespread and complex illustration of the educational genius of Calvinism is to be found in the American colonies, where the various European streams of Calvinism so converged that the seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly Calvinists—not merely the Puritans of New England, but the Dutch, Walloons, Huguenots, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish, with a considerable Puritan admixture in Anglican Virginia and Catholic Maryland." (Foster, H. D., in Monroe's Cyclopedia of Education, vol. I, p. 498.)
[16] "To illustrate how omnipresent this religious atmosphere was, I cannot do better than to cite the occasion when Judge Sewell found that the spout which conducted the rain water from his roof did not perform its office. After patient searching, a ball belonging to the small childeren was found lodged in the spout. Thereupon the father sent for the minister and had a season of prayer with his boys that their mischief or carelessness might be set in its proper aspect and that the event might be sanctified to their spiritual good. Powers of darkness and of light were struggling for the possession of every soul, and it was the duty of parents, ministers, and teachers to lose no opportunity to pluck the children as brands from the burning." (Johnson Clifton, Old-Time Schools and Schoolbooks, p. 12.)
CHAPTER XVI
[1] Thales had guessed that water was the primal element from which all had been derived; Anaximenes guessed air; Heraclitus fire; Pythagoras held that number was the essence of all things; Empedocles thought that fire and heat, accompanied by "indestructible forces," formed the basis; Xenophanes had guessed air, fire, water, and earth, and had worked out a complete scheme of creation. For an interesting discussion of these early attempts to explain creation, see J. W. Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, vol. 1, chap. iv.
[2] Among the treatises by him accepted as genuine are On Airs, Waters, and Places; On Epidemics; On Regimen in Acute Diseases; On Fractures; and On Injuries of the Head.