above the transom are hung on centres, with Elsley's patent balanced levers for opening and closing the same. In respect to size, shape, and lighting, this school room cannot be considered as equal to those of the Vienna and Boston buildings. The Boston top lights are hung at the base, which is a better plan than the centre hanging.

(6) The admirable grouping of the rooms for the science department of the school, on the upper or third floor, in connection with the lecture hall, which is treated in an admirable manner, both architecturally and pedagogically.

(7) Provisions for dining and lunching the pupils, comprising a kitchen with all its appurtenances in the third story, and a dining room with its appurtenances in the basement, and a counter for the sale of cakes, buns, ginger beer, and other such delicacies for the benefit of the boys who do not take the school dinner.

(8) Two drawing school rooms ingeniously located and having extra high windows.

(9) The great hall, 100 feet by 45, with a handsome open timbered roof 60 feet high to the ceiling, to be used for an assembly of the whole school for prayer each morning. This hall contains sittings for about a thousand persons, and is regarded as the finest hall in the realm, with the possible exception of Whitehall.

(10) School desks. The pupils are seated at dual desks.

(11) Blackboard provision. A large movable, sliding blackboard at the end of the room behind the master.

(12) The corridor of the teaching block extends through the whole length of the first and second floors between the rows of school rooms, and is 3 feet less in height than the school rooms..

(13) Ventilation. Above each corridor is a horizontal foul air passage 3 feet high, connected at one end with a tall upcast shaft from furnace in basement; each school room has two openings close to the ceiling into one of these horizontal foul air passages.

(14) Sliding partitions. Three pairs of adjoining school rooms are separated by sliding partitions.

(15) The liberal size of the open air playground.

(16) The superior covered playground, occupying the whole basement of the hall block and the whole extent of the back side of the teaching block basement, with no masonry obstructions.

(17) Gymnasium. This is a detached building, 75 by 35, 20 feet high to beam, having an open timbered roof, with lantern light extending the entire length of the ridge.

(18) Fives courts, six in number, two being covered in with glass for use in wet weather.

(19) Boys' entrance and cloak room, on the playground level, 48 by 34, having eight doors opening to the street, playground, staircases, and lavatories; warmed by coils of hot water pipes beneath the floor,

provided with gas for dark days in winter, and containing racks with 680 wrought iron hat and coat pegs, each with its own number.

(20) Science master's private laboratory for the preparation of illustrative experiments and apparatus, connected with the lecture hall and apparatus room and also with the class chemistry room, the latter being provided with working benches for a class of thirty boys and furnished with every desirable requisite.

(21) Water closets and urinals. In a separate building most perfect in all arrangements and connected with the main building by a passageway.

(22) Sanitary arrangements and drainage are unsurpassed in scientific and mechanical construction.

These extended notices of the London and Boston buildings are appropriately placed here in juxtaposition as being the most conspicuous examples of the most advanced theories of school-house building to be found in the English speaking world.

WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL.

It is to be regretted that the high school-house recently erected in our National Capital should be in its planning so far behind the times. Its conspicuous absence of merit was not to have been anticipated, considering the high reputation which the city had acquired for school-house building in the erection of the Franklin and so many other good school buildings. The architecture of the exterior of this edifice seems to have been designed as a contrast to the ornate grandeur of the Government palaces. The ground plan is a simple, long parallelogram. It is three stories high and faced with red brick. It is without ornamentation of any description. The first and second floors are alike in plan. A wide corridor in the middle extends the whole length of the building; on either side of this corridor there are four school rooms and a room large enough to be called a hall. On the third floor there are four school rooms, two small halls or drawing rooms, and a large hall extending across one end. Besides the rooms mentioned there are no other apartments for any purpose whatever, above the basement. The school rooms are not patterned after the best model. The water closets are in the basement. The heating is effected by means of direct steam radiation.1

REQUIREMENTS OF THE MODEL SCHOOL ROOM.

(1) Shape. It should be oblong, the width being to the length about as three to four, with the teacher's platform at one end.

(2) Size. For primary or grammar school, with register of 54 pupils and attendance of about 50, the room should be about 33 feet long, 25 wide, and 13 high, which gives practically upwards of 200 cubic feet and 162 square feet of floor space to each pupil.

'It is understood that this building was not planned in accordance with the views of the board of education and superintendent.

(3) Lighting. Four windows on the left of the pupils as they sit, the tops being square and not more than six inches from the ceiling, the bottoms being at least three and a half feet from the floor, equally spaced, not grouped, with transom sashes hung at the base, above the sliding sashes. A window or two in addition at the back is admissible. The size of the windows on the side taken collectively should equal at least one-sixth of the floor space. The highest authorities in school hygiene require 300 or 350 square inches of glass for each pupil.

(4) On the side opposite the windows, two doors with transom windows above, hung at the base, and between these transom windows and on the same line two more windows of the same kind and hung in the

same manner.

(5) The wall should be slightly tinted, but not the ceiling.

(6) A blackboard may be between the doors, but a sliding blackboard, back of the teachers' platform, or a portable one on the platform, in accordance with the German idea, would perhaps be better than the profusion of wall blackboard now in vogue among us.

(7) Location of seats. The main rule to be observed in the placing of the seats is to carry them as far as possible towards the window side of the room and as far as possible from the opposite side; the aim being to make the arrangement such that the distance of the outer row of desks from the windows shall not exceed once and a half the height of the top of the window from the floor.

(8) Clothes rooms. There are three kinds of depositories for the pupils' clothes, all of which are more or less in vogue, namely: (1) one room for the whole school or several classes; (2) a room attached to each school room; (3) arrangements within each school room, either wardrobes or racks or pegs on the wall. The second kind is most prevalent and is thought by some to be indispensable; it has important advantages, but its use by both sexes is objectionable; it is difficult for the teacher to maintain supervision over it; it is an important item in the cost of building, and proper provision for it is a difficult obstacle to overcome in planning large buildings: hence, in some cases, as in that of the London school, the large common room is preferable, and provis ion within the room, as above mentioned, is perhaps to be preferred to the small clothes room, where the number of scholars accommodated in a room is not large. In the Boston school, above described, the third kind is provided, as is the case in the Vienna and other first class European schools.

GENERAL REQUIREMENTS OF SCHOOL-HOUSES.

(1) Height. A school-house should never exceed three stories in height above the basement. The school rooms, as a rule, should not be placed higher than the second story; the assembly hall should be on the upper floor, and so should the rooms for drawing.

(2) Size. A building large enough to accommodate eight hundred pupils should be regarded as the maximum for a school of any grade, whether primary, grammar, or high. For a grammar school, the scholars being from eight or nine to fourteen years of age, the model building should not be designed to accommodate more than five hundred pupils ; for a mixed high school the number to be provided for ought to be even less than the normal number for a grammar school. In regard to the size of the primary school-house, it would not be far from the mark to say the smaller the number of pupils it accommodates the better for the pupils, provided the number brought together is large enough to admit of a classification which does not require more than two classes in a room. Small schools are not the cheapest, but if the best results are aimed at, and not the minimum expense, the number of pupils should not exceed that required for a fair classification. The mammoth school must, from the nature of things, be a second rate school.

(3) School furniture. The day of hacked desks is gone. It is now well known that nicely made and well polished desks are easily preserved, free from injury, for many years, even in boys' schools. It is rare to find in our American schools the foot rest, which is regarded by eminent foreign authorities as highly important.

The two modes of seating found in most cities are that of the combination furniture and that with a separate chair. In the former each desk has a seat attached in front; thus the front of each desk serves as the back of a seat. This is the kind of furniture, in its various patterns, which is, perhaps, most extensively used. The desks are mostly double-that is, for two pupils. The other type of furniture differs from the combined by having the chair separate from the desk. The most approved variety of this type has the chair mounted on a single cylindrical iron support. The tendency is to substitute the single for the double desk. It is supposed by some that the single desk requires too much floor space for general introduction, but if the desks are not made unnecessarily large, and if they are placed as near together as convenience will permit, they will require no more space than ought to be allowed, whatever may be the mode of seating. The single desk with the separate chair must be regarded as the best mode of seating. It is desirable, of course, that the height of the chair and desk should be accurately proportioned to each other and to the size of the pupils for whom they are intended. But it is extremely difficult to realize the ideal perfection of this adaptation. There should be at least three sizes of desks and chairs in each room of a graded school. The number of each size can be determined only by experience. There should be at least six sizes to suit all the grades of an elementary school comprising both the primary and grammar grades. The chair should be so placed that the front edge of the seat shall be in the same vertical line with the edge of the desk lid. Our school furniture is, in general, far superior to that of foreign countries in respect to material, design,

and workmanship. Its defect consists in the want of a perfectly scientific adaptation of its proportions to the anatomy of the juvenile frame.

(4) The ground plan. If the building is of considerable size the ground plan should not be in the form of a square, parallelogram, or cross. It should be in L form or it should be built on three or four sides of a rec tangle; if very large it should have a number of interior courts thus inclosed, after the manner of the Collége Chaptal in Paris, which has five open interior courts; and the ground plan should be nowhere wider than the width of a school room and the width of the corridor added. The corridor should, as a rule, open on one side into the outer air. The school-house planned after this idea is so far a new departure as to constitute a new type, which we may denominate a court type or court plan. It has already been referred to in connection with the Boston high school block. It is illustrated in the plan of the Prince Grammar School in Boston, which was commenced in 1876 and completed several years later. This type will, I doubt not, ultimately supersede the type which originated in the Quincy School. My reason for this opinion is that it has been adopted in those countries where school architecture has been most thoroughly studied and where the best specimens of school buildings are to be found.

(5) Fire proofing. Only a beginning has been made in this direction. In buildings of more than one story in height this important safeguard ought not to be omitted.

(6) Ventilation. In the building of the court type, having transom windows, as above described, and heating by means of indirect radiation, successful ventilation is easily attained.

(7) Orientating. Wherever practicable the ground plan should be so orientated that the corners of the structure shall point to the cardinal points, thus bringing the sides which receive light to face the southeast and northwest and northeast and southwest. This position insures the admission of the sun's rays in every window at some time of the day. In particular, great pains should be taken to prevent if possible the facing of unilaterally lighted rooms to the south.

The space devoted to a school should be twice as large as the house, including all contemplated future enlargements, will actually cover. Even this amount of spare land is hardly enough for a playground, but it will at least suffice to meet the urgent demand for free space about a school-house. A belt of 30 feet on all sides that are liable to be overshadowed is the least that should be given in order to secure proper lighting and a free play of air. As regards the amount of playground required, the Germans have estimated it at least three metres for each child, which would give nearly 20,000 feet for a school of 600 pupils.-(Report on hygienic requirements of school architecture, by Dr. D. F. Lincoln.)

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The great high school of Omaha is placed in the centre of a square park of sixteen acres which is so elevated as to command a view of the whole of this more than seven hilled city of magnificent distances.