never be possible to attain a certainty or even any probability that the children will remember these precepts when writing without supervision. Sloping Writing, and this is its fundamental fault, can be written in many different postures, and by preference in the most distorted of all; Vertical Writing, however, possesses a kind of automatic steering apparatus, whereby it avoids bad sitting during writing.
Let what has been said suffice to indicate the scientific basis of the writing reform in its main points. At the present day, after we have accumulated several years’ practical experience in schools with regard to Vertical Writing, detailed investigation of many of the more difficult divisions of the preliminary inquiry may well be omitted; especially it seems to me unnecessary in this place once more to enter into details on the alleged law formulated by Berlin of the rectangular intersection of downstroke and eye-base line, since I venture to consider it contradicted by numerous measurements of my own which were confirmed by Schenk, Daiber, and Ausderan, and since besides it has no bearing whatever on the practical solution of the question. In our writing-reform, as in all the departments of Hygiene, no matter how thoroughly theory may have prepared the way, the decisive word is always to be looked for only from the test of practice. The earliest experiments in schools were undertaken in Middle Franconia, the cradle of the Vertical Writing question in its present form; individual teachers of Fürth and Schwabach have now been practising Vertical Writing for three years, those of Nuremberg for two years, and what those men say, who have not employed Vertical Writing only cursorily and superficially for a few weeks, but have used it exclusively in their classes throughout the full school-year from the first stroke on the slate to copy-book writing, what judgment these competent critics give, in this lies the decision with regard to Vertical Writing as a school writing. The teachers of our district know that these tests have turned out exceedingly favourable.
Written reports from the gentlemen at Fürth and Schwabach, as well as the lecture of Herr Wunderlich at the last Nuremberg District Teachers’ Conference, allow me to cut short my account of the proceedings at home, and the more so as the results obtained here coincide in all essential points with those collected abroad. There is only one thing I should like to mention, that my photographs of children writing vertically and obliquely, which caused some sensation here as well as in Munich, show better than many words the difference in the posture of body. The objection raised from many sides that an attentive teacher would not allow such awkwardness even with Sloping Writing, rests on a complete misapprehension of
