sum so low as to cause the doors of the institution to be closed
for five years.

Dr. McGuffey returned to Cincinnati and was for two years a professor in
Woodward College, now Woodward High School.

[University of Virginia]

In 1845 he was appointed professor of Natural and Moral Philosophy in
the University of Virginia. This position he filled with credit to
himself and with great acceptance to the students in that institution
for more than a quarter of a century and until his death on May 4, 1873.

Dr. McGuffey's classes in the University of Virginia were well attended.
His lectures were delivered extempore, in language exactly expressing
his thoughts. His illustrations were most apt. He taught "with the
simplicity of a child, with the precision of a mathematician, and with
the authority of truth."

[Method of Teaching]

A portion of the lecture hour was given to questioning the members of
the class. In this he used the Socratic method, leading the pupil by a
series of questions to the discovery of the incorrectness of his
reasoning or the falsity of his grounds. By this process the students
were led to question their own reasoning, to think clearly and to
express their thoughts accurately.

Dr. McGuffey once told a pupil that he had preached three thousand
sermons and had never written one. Until late in life he had never
written his lectures. Shortly before his death he began the preparation
of a book on Mental Philosophy. This was never completed.

Dr. McGuffey was twice married. By his first wife. Miss Harriet Spinning
of Dayton, he had several children. One daughter, Mary, married Dr.
William W. Stewart of Dayton; another, Henrietta, married Professor A.
D. Hepburn who was for a time president of Miami University. Professor
Hepburn's son, in turn inheriting his grandfather's faculty of teaching,
is a professor in the University of Indiana.

[Interest in Public Schools]

In 1837 Professor Calvin E. Stowe went to Europe to investigate the
organization and method of elementary schools. On his return he
published, in 1838, his report on the Prussian system. Subsequently Dr.
McGuffey labored in Ohio with Samuel Lewis and other public-spirited men
for the passage of the general school law under which the common schools
of Ohio were first organized. He carried to Virginia the same zeal for
the education of all the children of the state to prepare them for the
duties of life. One of his first acts on assumi