Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 17.djvu/319

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CORRESPONDENCE 311

of from one to two hundred dollars. We think by these means, if the friends in the States could raise $200, so that he could provide his family clothing at N. York, we can sustain a good teacher. We would suggest that he leave his measure for all his clothes with you, as it costs 30 dollars in California gold to get a coat made at a tailor's shop in Oregon and all other sewing is proportionately high. $200 in New York is worth $1000 here in the line of clothing, etc. We must have a teacher well qualified to be a popular teacher in a New England Academy and one who wishes to make teaching his business for life. It would be desirable that he have a wife qualified to teach in the primary depart- ment, or to teach a ladies' school. It will be of little use to send us a stupid, half-educated man, with little common sense and ignorant of human nature. Should he be a good singer, and preacher too, it will be all the better. We can find him work. We want and must have, if possible, almost every- thing necessary to afford facilities for students to prosecute their studies without serious inconvenience. We need a system of common school books so that we can furnish our scholars with the best approved books at moderate prices, when they enter the school. Our school will soon have scholars commencing a preparatory course and we must therefore have text books. We then want common school books, from the spelling book to the rhetorical reader. Perhaps Saunders' series is as good as you can furnish us. We are now using these as reading books, but there are no more to be obtained in the country. We are using Thompson's Arithmetic; per- haps that is as good as you can send us. 2 3 We use Brown's and Wells' English grammar. We have a few in natural phil- osophy; we use Olmsted's. We have some in algebra and

203 James B. Thomson had a number of works on arithmetic published by Clark and Maynard, New York.

Denison Olmsted, of Yale, had a number of works on natural philosophy by the same publishers; and by R. B. Collins and E. D. Truemin of Cincinnati. Amer- ican Catalogue for 1876, and O. A. Roorbach, Bibliotheca Americana. W. H. Wells' Grammar was published in Boston, and Goold Brown's Grammar was pub- lished in New York. Ibid,