Page 11 - English

In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society, Professor
Ravenstein quoted the following list of frantic questions, and said
that they had been asked in an examination:

Mention all the names of places in the world derived from Julius
Caesar or Augustus Caesar.
Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon,
Mulde?
All you know of the following: Machacha, Pilmo, Schebulos,
Crivoscia, Basecs, Mancikert, Taxhen, Citeaux, Meloria, Zutphen.
The highest peaks of the Karakorum range.
The number of universities in Prussia.
Why are the tops of mountains continually covered with snow [sic]?
Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from
the Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.

That list would oversize nearly anybody’s geographical
knowledge. Isn’t it reasonably possible that in our schools many of
the questions in all studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil
is?—that he is set to struggle with things that are ludicrously beyond
his present reach, hopelessly beyond his present strength? This
remark in passing, and by way of text; now I come to what I was
going to say.
I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity. It is a
little book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler sent it to me
with the request that I say whether I think it ought to be published or
not. I said Yes; but as I slowly grow wise, I briskly grow cautious;
and so, now that the publication is imminent, it has seemed to me
that I should feel more comfortable if I could divide up this
responsibility with the public by adding them to the court. Therefore
I will print some extracts from the book, in the hope that they may
make converts to my judgment that the volume has merit which
entitles it to publication.
As to its character. Everyone has sampled English as She is
Spoke and English as She is Wrote; this little volume furnishes us an
instructive array of examples of “English as She is Taught”—in the
public schools of—well, this country. The collection is made by a
teacher in those schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none
of them have been tampered with, or doctored in any way. From time
to time, during several years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself
of anything peculiarly quaint or toothsome in the course of his
recitations, this teacher and her associates have privately set that
thing down in a memorandum-book; strictly following the original,

9