Mr. Bently at last gives his consent, and Joe enlists as an apprentice in the Navy.  The story of his journey, his examination, his experiences, on board ship and his adventures while lying in foreign ports is very graphically told, and the boy who reads it gets a clear and actual idea of what a boy must go through on board a man-of-war before he can graduate as an “able-bodied seaman.”  The writer shows a thorough acquaintance with every thing on board ship, even to the minutest details.  The book ends with the promotion of Joe, and a promise to continue his adventures in another volume.

THE EVOLUTION OF DODD.  By W.H.  Smith.  Boston:  D. Lothrop & Co.  Price $1.00.  Here is a book we should rejoice to see in the hands of every teacher of youth in the country.  It is a living, breathing protest against certain features of the present school systems which obtain in various parts of the country, from that of the kindergarten to the grammar school.  The points of the author are so well taken, that the reader is forced not only to admit the reality of the evils he denounces, but to acknowledge the justice of the conclusions at which he arrives.

In the evolution of character the public school has come to be a most important factor.  To it has been assigned a task equal to any other agency that deals with human nature.  But in multitudes of cases it has become a mere mill for grinding out graduates.  The “system” has largely lost sight of the grandest thing in all the world—­the individual soul.  It addresses itself to child-humanity collectively, as if characters were manufactured, like pins, by the million, and all alike, and it attempts to grind out this great mass, each individual like every other, as if its members could be made interchangeable like the parts of a government musket.

To illustrate his ideas, the author selects a representative boy, Dodd Weaver, the eldest son of a Methodist clergyman, and carries him through the various schools and grades of schools from the time of his entrance to his graduation.  He does not make him a model boy to begin with, and strive to show how he was spoiled by the school system.  On the contrary he endows him with a good many disagreeable qualities; he makes him bright, sharp, and full of vitality, with a strong bent for mischief.  He is high-tempered, quarrelsome, and disobedient, and yet in the hands of one who understands his mental peculiarities plastic as dough.  It is the aim of the author to show how utterly useless it is to treat such boys—­and our schools are full of them—­in exactly the same manner as those of different character and temperament, and to demand that teachers have the right to adapt their methods according to individual demands.  He says: 

It is not a system—­any set of rules or formularies—­that can make our school, any more than it is forms and ceremonies that make our churches.  These may all be well enough in their proper places, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in them, per se.  It is the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees in the one case, and the dry bones of pedagogy in the other.