or developed some just principle of individual or social action, instead of talking forever about trout-catching or grouse-shooting; about dogs, dinners, dice, or trumps. In its moral bearings this subject grows into immense importance. How many months, may I not say years,—in a child's life, when, with spontaneous activity, his mind hovers and floats wherever it listeth! As he sits at home, amid familiar objects, or walks frequented paths, or lies listlessly in his bed, if his mind be not preoccupied with some substantial subjects of thought, the best that you can hope is, that it will wander through dream-land, and expend its activity in chasing shadows. Far more probable is it, especially if the child is exposed to the contamination of profane or obscene minds, that in these seasons of solitude and reverie, the cockatrice's eggs of impure thoughts and desires will be hatched. And what boy, at least, is there who is not in daily peril of being corrupted by the evil communications of his elders? We all know, that there are self-styled gentlemen amongst us,self-styled gentlemen, who daily, and hourly, lap their tongues in the foulness of profanity; and though, through a morally-insane perversion, they may restrain themselves, in the presence of ladies and of clergymen, yet it is only for the passing hour, when they hesitate not to pour out the pentup flood, to deluge and defile the spotless purity of childhood,—and this, too, at an age, when these polluting stains sink, centre-deep, into their young and tender hearts, so that no moral bleachery can ever afterwards wholly cleanse and purify them. No parent, no teacher, can ever feel any rational security about the growth of the moral nature of his child, unless he contrives in some way to learn the tenor of his secret, silent meditations, or prepares the means, beforehand, of determining what those meditations shall be. A

child may soon find it no difficult thing, to converse and act by a set of approved rules, and then to retire into the secret chambers of his own soul, and there to riot and gloat upon guilty pleasures, whose act would be perdition, and would turn the fondest home into a hell. But there is an antidote, -I do not say for all, but for most, of this peril. The mind of children can be supplied with vivid illustrations of the works of Nature and of Art; its chambers can be hung round with picturethoughts and images of truth, and charity, and justice, and affection, which will be companions to the soul, when no earthly friend can accompany it.

It is only a further development of this topic, to consider the inaptitude of many of our educational processes, for making accurately-thinking minds. It has been said by some one, that the good sense and sound judgment, which we find in the community, are only what have escaped the general ravage of a bad education. School studies ought to be so arranged, as to promote a harmonious development of the faculties. In despotic Prussia, a special science is cultivated, under the name of methodik, the scope of which is to arrange and adapt studies, so as to meet the wants and exercise the powers of the opening mind. In free America, we have not the name; indeed, we can scarcely be said to have the idea. Surely, the farmer, the gardener, the florist, who have established rules for cultivating every species of grain, and fruit, and flower, cannot doubt, that, in the unfolding and expanding of the young mind, some processes will be congenial, others fatal. Those whose business it is to compound ingredients, in any art, weigh them with the nicest exactness, and watch the precise moments of their chemical combinations. The mechanic selects all his materials with the nicest care, and measures

all their dimensions to a hair's breadth; and he knows that if he fails in aught, he will produce a weak, loose, irregular fabric. Indeed, can you name any business, avocation, profession, or employment, whatever,--even to the making of hobnails or wooden skewers,-where chance, ignorance, or accident, is ever rewarded with a perfect product? But in no calling is there such a diversity as in education,-diversity in principles, diversity in the application of those principles. Discussion, elucidation, the light of a thousand minds brought to a focus, would result in discarding the worst and in improving even the best. Under this head are included the great questions respecting the order and succession of studies; the periods of alternation between them; the proportion between the exact and the approximate sciences; and what is principal and what is subsidiary, in pursuing them.

There is a natural order and progression in the development of the faculties: "First the blade, then the ear, afterwards the full corn in the ear." And in the mind, as in the grain, the blade may be so treated that the full corn will never appear. For instance, if any faculty is brooded upon and warmed into life before the period of its natural development, it will have a precocious growth, to be followed by weakness, or by a want of symmetry and proportion in the whole character. Consequences still worse will follow, where faculties are cultivated in the reverse order of their natural development. Again, if collective ideas are forced into a child's mind, without his being made to analyze them, and understand the individual ideas of which they are composed, the probability is, that the collective idea will never be comprehended. Let me illustrate this position by a case where it is least likely to happen, that we may form some idea of its frequency in other

things. A child is taught to count ten. He is taught to repeat the words, one, two, &c., as words, merely; and if care be not taken, he will attach no more comprehensive idea to the word ten, than he did to the word one. He will not think of ten ones, as he uses it. In the same way, he proceeds to use the words, hundred, thousand, million, &c., -the idea in his mind, not keeping within hailing distance of the signification of the words used. Hence there is generated a habit of using words, not as the representatives of ideas, but as sounds, merely. How few children there are of the age of sixteen years,—an age at which almost all of them have ceased to attend upon our schools,who have any adequate conception of the power of the signs they have been using. How few of them know even so simple a truth as this, that, if they were to count one, every second, for ten hours in a day, without intermission, it would take about twenty-eight days to count a million. Yet they have been talking of millions, and hundreds of millions, as though they were units. Now, suppose you speak to such a person of millions of children, growing up under a highly elaborated system of vicious education, unbalanced by any good influences; or suppose you appeal to him, in behalf of a million of people wailing beneath the smitings of the oppressor's rod, he gets no distinct idea of so many as fifty; and therefore he has no intellectual substratum, upon which to found an appropriate feeling, or by which to graduate its intensity.

Again; in geography, we put a quarto-sized map, or perhaps a globe no larger than a goose's egg, into a child's hands, and we invite him to spread out his mind over continents, oceans, and archipelagoes, at once. This process does not expand the mind of the child to the dimensions of the objects, but it belittles the objects to the nutshell

capacity of the mind. Such a course of instruction may make precocious, green-house children; but you will invariably find, that, when boys are prematurely turned into little men, they remain little men, always. Physical geography should be commenced by making a child describe and plot a room with its fixtures, a house with its apartments, the adjoining yards, fields, roads or streets, hills, waters, &c. Then embracing, if possible, the occasion of a visit to a neighboring town, or county, that should be included. Here, perpetual reference must be had to the points of the compass. After a just extension has been given to his ideas of a county, or a state, then that county or state should be shown to him on a globe; and, cost what labor or time it may, his mind must be expanded to a comprehension of relative magnitudes, so that his idea of the earth shall be as adequate to the size of the earth, as his idea of the house or the field was to the size of the house or the field. Thus the pupil founds his knowledge of unseen things upon the distinct notions of eyesight, in regard to familiar objects. Yet I believe it is not very uncommon to give the mind of the young learner a continent, for a single intellectual meal, and an ocean to wash it down with. It recently happened, in a school within my own knowledge, that a class of small scholars in geography, on being examined respecting the natural divisions of the earth, its continents, oceans, islands, gulfs, &c.,answered all the questions with admirable precision and promptness. They were then asked, by a visiter, some general questions respecting their lesson, and, amongst others, whether they had ever seen the earth about which they had been reciting; and they unanimously declared, in good faith, that they never had. Do we not find here an explanation, why there are so many men whose. conceptions on all subjects are laid down on so