University of Maryland Baltimore Dental School - Mirror Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

Page 20 text:

OR! : : ' Vindicatory. den ta l su ERy AYE you ever seen a slate-quarry? If not, you have missed the sight of one of the most wonderful treasures of antiquity. rSvcMil Strange as this statement may appear, you will be convinced of its correctness when you are told that recent discoveries prove beyond a doubt that these slate deposits are no more and no less than remnants of the old schools and colleges founded many thousand years ago. Paper being unknown in those days, the boys and girls cut soft stones into slices and used them for their writing and ciphering. In order that a record might be kept of the progress made by the pupils, these plates were piled up, and we now find stacks of them here and there, which are used over again by the youngsters of our day. Of the overwhelming proofs that these slates have thus actually been used for educational purposes, at least two should be mentioned. In the first place, petrified remnants of lunch, or of wrapping material for lunch, are found imbedded in this slate. The lunch containers seem to have been made from the leaves of ferns or palm trees, while fish appears to have been one of the delicacies relished universally at the midday recess, though snakes and reptiles of various kinds appear among the articles accidentally left behind by the school children and found stored away between the slates. The second proof is that the writing on these slates in many cases is yet well preserved. To the casual observer the signs and figures found resemble such impressions as would be made by the scratching of a hen,

Page 19 text:

About the year 1825 he was invited to read a course of lectures on dentistry before the medical class of the University of Maryland. He also contributed several able papers to medical journals on his physiological researches. Having; ever in mind the elevation of the dental profession, he. Dr. Chapin A. Harris and others sent a petition to the Legislature, in December, 1839, to establish a Dental College, the faculty to consist partly of dental and partly of medical practitioners. The Legislature having granted a liberal charter, Dr. Hayden, at the advanced age of seventy, entered upon the duties of the chair assigned him in that institution. The Baltimore College of Dental Surgery. In 1840, in New York, was held a meeting of the best dentists then in the profession, the outcome of which was the formation of the American Society of Dental Surgeons. This outcome was chiefly due to the labors of Dr. Hayden, and he was unanimously chosen president of the society and re-elected each year until his death. Until the illness which terminated his life Dr. Hayden continued to exercise the duties of his profession and to lecture to his class. He died on the 26th of January, 1844, m the seventy-fifth year of his age. CHARLES McMANUS, D.D.S., Hartford, Conn.

Page 21 text:

but since Mark Twain succeeded in deciphering what is most likely the oldest of these writings, scientists have made considerable progress in the reading of these old documents. The writer has been fortunate enough to unearth some slates covered with the hieroglyphics of one who seems to have been a grown up school boy living in the first century of the creation of the world. It may be of interest to the college boy (and college girl) of our era to hear how things progressed in those olden times. What this young man writes on one slate is this: O I wish the good Lord had not created so many animals and so many plants, mountains and rivers; and I wish old Grandpa Adam had not given names to all of them which we poor children now have to learn at school. It is awful to sit here for hours and hours and study what teacher calls natural history, and geography, and arithmetic, and spelling, and lots of other stuff. None of the boys like it, nor do the girls either. Other slates are filled with similar complaints and expressions of disgust, but one stone has been found on which the following remarkable and highly interesting data are inscribed: Yesterday teacher got real mad because not one of us knew his lesson, and when dinner time came he went off, locking us all up in the school-room, saying that he would not let us out until we knew it all, not if it were to take all day and all night. Well — there was great lamentation; the girls cried and the boys, too, though they tried to hide it, but this did not do any good. So we attempted to learn our lessons, but with empty stomachs and tearful eyes it was no go, and I think teacher would have had to keep us in all night had not something happened that had never occurred before. I don ' t know where they came from, but all at once there stood in the room three beings. I think they were women, though I am not sure about it. They were dressed very differently from what we are, and the girls said it was fancy, whatever that may be. Anyhow the three looked very strange and said they were