Introductory American History | Page 4

or advertising folders, pictures of ocean steamships. Collect pictures of sailing ships, ships used now and those used long ago.
2. Collect from persons who have recently come to this country stories of how they traveled from Europe to America, and from ports like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to where they now live.
3. Let each boy and girl in the schoolroom point out on the map the European country from which his parents or his grandparents or his forefathers came.
4. Let each boy and girl make a list of the holidays which his forefathers had in the "fatherland" or "mother country." Let each find out the manner in which the holidays were kept. Let each tell the most interesting hero story from among the stories of the mother country or fatherland. Let each find out whether the tools used in the old home were like the tools his parents use here.
CHAPTER II
OUR EARLIEST TEACHERS
ANCIENT CITIES THAT STILL EXIST. In Ancient Times the most important peoples lived on the shores of the Mediterranean. The northern shore turns and twists around four peninsulas. The first is Spain, which separates the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean; the second, shaped like a boot, is Italy; and the third, the end of which looks like a mulberry leaf, is Greece. Beyond Greece is Asia Minor, the part of Asia which lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.
The Italians now live in Italy, but the Romans lived there in Ancient Times. The people who live in Greece are called Greeks, just as they were more than two thousand years ago. Many of the cities that the Greeks and Romans built are still standing. Alexandria was founded by the great conqueror Alexander. Constantinople used to be the Greek city of Byzantium. Another Greek city, Massilia, has become the modern French city of Marseilles. Rome had the same name in Ancient Times, except that it was spelled Roma. The Romans called Paris by the name of Lutetia, and London they called Lugdunum.
RUINS WHICH SHOW HOW THE ANCIENTS LIVED. In many of these cities are ancient buildings or ruins of buildings, bits of carving, vases, mosaics, sometimes even wall paintings, which we may see and from which we may learn how the Greeks and Romans lived. Near Naples are the ruins of Pompeii, a Roman city suddenly destroyed during an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius.
For hundreds of years the city lay buried under fifteen or twenty feet of ashes. When these were taken away, the old streets and the walls of the houses could be seen. No roofs were left and the walls in many places were only partly standing, but things which in other ancient cities had entirely disappeared were kept safe in Pompeii under the volcanic ashes.
The traveler who walks to-day along the ruined streets can see how its inhabitants lived two thousand years ago. He can visit their public buildings and their private houses, can handle their dishes and can look at the paintings on their walls or the mosaics in the floors. But interesting as Pompeii is, we must not think that its ruins teach us more than the ruins of Rome or Athens or many other ancient cities. Each has something important to tell us of the people who lived long ago.
ANCIENT WORDS STILL IN USE. The ancient Greeks and Romans have left us some things more useful than the ruins of their buildings. These are the words in our language which once were theirs, and which we use with slight changes in spelling. Most of our words came in the beginning from Germany, where our English forefathers lived before they settled in England. To the words they took over from Germany they added words borrowed from other peoples, just as we do now. We have recently borrowed several words from the French, such as tonneau and limousine, words used to describe parts of an automobile, besides the name automobile itself, which is made up of a Latin and a Greek word.
[Illustration: RUINS OF A HOUSE AT POMPEII The houses of the better sort were built with an open court in the center]
In this way, for hundreds of years, words have been coming into our language from other languages. Several thousand have come from Latin, the language of the Romans; several hundred from Greek, either directly or passed on to us by the Romans or the French. The word school is Greek, and the word arithmetic was borrowed from the French, who took it from the Greeks. Geography is another word which came, through French and Latin, from the Greeks, to whom it meant that which is written about the earth. The word grammar came in the same way. The word alphabet is made by joining together the names of the