Faults in former modes of education. It is unnecessary, in our day, to dwell on the obvious faults of the obsolete practice of confining young children within doors at all seasons, compelling them to remain long in one attitude or posture without relief, condemning them to long periods of silence and constraint, and forcing them to con unmeaning and irksome tasks. These injurious practices are now, for the most part renounced; and more genial and rational modes of early education are beginning to prevail. As yet, however, we have only made a beginning. We have reformed our modes of school architecture, and have a 'owed children the unspeakable benefits of space and air, and more frequent change of place, and posture, and exercise. Objects and pictures are now employed, to some extent, as instruments of mental culture; and the wisdom of all these changes is proved in the greater happiness and better health of our little pupils, and, more particularly, in their greater docility, and their superior intellectual progress, as, contrasted with the state of things under the former regime of irksome monotony, restraint, weariness, and stupidity. We are very far, yet, however, from approaching the bountiful variety and delightful novelty furnished in the great model school of infancy and childhood, as established by the Divine founder.

Intellectual furniture of school-rooms.—Our primary school-roomsshould be so many cabinets of nature and art. Every inch of wall not indispensably required for blackboard exercises, should be secured for educational purposes, by specimens of plants, minerals, shells, birds, and whatever else can be appropriately placed before the eye. The arranging, classifiying, and describing of these, should precede any analysis or study of letters or syllables. Pictures representing such objects, should form a second stage of exercises in attention, observation, and description, before any alphabetic drilling whatever. The examination of objects and of pictures, should, in a word, form the natural preparatory training of the perceptive faculties for the more arbitrary and more difficult exercise of studying and recognizing the unmeaning, uninteresting forms of alphabetic characters with their phonetic combinations.

Injurious effects of mere alphabetic drilling.-Curiosity, the natural incitement of intellect, is easily awakened when we obey the law of the Creator, and direct it to His works,-the natural and aropriate stimulants of the perceptive powers of infancy; but when, leaving our proper sphere, and restricting our educational efforts to the mechanical training of eye and ear, we use these organs, and the informing mind, for the limited purpose of recognizing the complicated and irregular geometrical combinations of line and angle, pre

sented in alphabetic characters, and repeating the sounds so arbitrarily associated with these, we take the mind out of its native element; we consequently force and distort its growth, dwarf its stature, and enfeeble its powers.

Effects of the salutary excitement of the feeling of wonder.-But it is not in the first stages only of mental culture, that the influence of novelty and variety is required as an incitement to observation, by the frequent presentation of new and fresh objects of attention, by the agreeable surprises occasioned by new forms and new stages of animal and vegetable life,-all tending to excite a lively curiosity, which leads, in turn, to careful attention, close examination, and successful study. Curiosity should often be awakened by the yet more. powerful influence of wonder. Objects rare and strange, combinations intricate and even puzzling, should sometimes be called in, to excite a yet more energetic action of the perceptive intellect, in its endeavors to grasp the objects of its contemplation.

Whatever in nature is wonderful,—whether we employ the microscope, in revealing the intricate structure of plant or insect, in the minuter and closer examination of the works of the Creator; or the telescope, in the contemplation of the starry heavens, and the study of the magnitudes and motions of the bodies which people the depths of space, all should be brought to bear on the young mind, to call forth that sense of wonder which so delights and inspires it, and prepares it, at the same time, for the influence of those sentiments of awe and reverence with which the advancing intellect learns to trace the signatures of Deity.

(3.) OBSERVATION, AS THE TENDENCY OF MENTAL Habit, under

THE INCITING INFLUENCE OF CURIOSITY.

The natural effect of intellectual instinct.-The motive power, or impelling force, by which, in the ordinations of the mind's omniscient Author, its perceptive faculties are incited to activity, and induced to render their tribute to the resources of intelligence, consists in that restless desire to observe, to examine, and to know, which constitutes man a progressively intelligent being. Impelled by this insatiable mental thirst, he is led instinctively to those streams of knowledge which constitute the waters of intellectual life. His perceptive powers thus stimulated, acquire a tendency to ceaseless activity, a trait which forms the peculiar characteristic of the early stages of his mental progress, and which is greatly quickened by the vividness of sensation in the constitution of childhood. Hence the promptness and versatility of attention at that period, and its remarkable susceptibility to the influences of cultivation and discipline.

These aids, it is true, are, as yet, too scantily furnished in the processes of education; and, even without them, the human being, as be advances under the promptings of instinct, and the guidance of self-intelligence, attains, as in the case even of the savage, to a high degree of perceptive power. The keen, quick, and penetrating glance of his eye, the acuteness and certainty of his ear, the readiness and exactness of his observation of every object within the range of his vision, the searching closeness of inspection with which he examines everything new or uncertain, often furnish an impressive lesson on the value of training, to those whose means and opportunities of intellectual culture are so superior to his own.

Effects of cherishing the habit of observation.-The habit of observation, duly cherished in early years, by the judicious care of the parent and teacher, becomes the security for ample acquisitions in the field of knowledge, and for the daily accumulation of mental resources and of intellectual power. The observant mind, like the close-knit net of the skillful fisherman, encloses and retains the living treasures within its sweep, and deposits them, for use, in their appropriate place. The undisciplined, inattentive, unobservant spectator seizes and retains nothing in his slack and ineffectual grasp.

Suggestive significance of terms in intellectual and educational relations. The etymology of the word apprehension, (seizing, grasping, laying hold of,) suggests an important lesson regarding the value of intellectual training, as dependent on the habit of attentive and close observation. The word attention, (tending, reaching, or stretching toward,) is not less instructive in its signification, implying the tendency, or the gravitating of the mind's perceptive power toward the object of notice, for the purpose of cognizance, as the first stage of intelligence. The term observation, (watching, with a view to obey or follow,) is yet more monitory to the teacher; as it intimates that the true study of external nature demands vigilance, docility, and fidelity; in one word, the devotion of the whole mind to the busi ness of intellectual acquisition. Perception, (taking, through a medium,) refers us back to the humble office of sensation, as indispensable to the process of taking into the mind the treasures of knowledge offered to the grasp of sense, for the purpose of transmission to the percipient power, the inner principle of intelligence. All of these terms, in the nomenclature of mental science, tend to the same important end, in the uses of practical education: they all point to the appropriate discipline of the perceptive faculties, by means of objects addressed to the senses, as the primary stage of intellectual culture.

Educational errors.-Former modes of education rendered the use of terms such as the preceding, a nullity, or an absurdity. The child shut up within the naked walls of a school-room, seated on his uncomfortable bench, and mechanically conning by rote, the ill-fitting names of alphabetic elements, or trying to piece them into syllables, had little use of the precious gift of sense, but a few lines and angles to perceive,—unless a friendly fly should happen to alight upon the page of his primer, no inducement to attention but the fear of Solomon's prescription for “minds diseased," nothing half so interesting to observe as the little winged being accidentally crawling on the page before him, displaying the curiously constructed mechanism of its form, its gauzy wings, and many-feathered little limbs, or stopping now and then, to dry-rub instead of washing them, and its tiny head, and flexible bit of neck, almost too diminutive to be seen. But woe to the little student of nature, in the genuine act of observation, if he should lift his eye from his book, and follow his brisk little visitant flying off to perform the visible miracle of walking up the perpendicular plane of the window pane, or the yet more puzzling feat of walking the ceiling with bis head downward.

Rational method. The child, in the case supposed, indicates the real want of his nature, and mutely, but most eloquently, pleads for a lesson on insect life, (entomology,) before one on the alphabet. Furnished with the data which the lesson on insect life and form, character and motion, would present to his eye, he would be receiving a rational preparatory discipline of attention and observation, in the close and careful examination of all the details of shape and configuration, exhibited in the living and attractive object before him. His recognition of figure and outline, thus secured, he would, in due season, transfer, easily and willingly, to the artificial display of them in the forms of printed characters.

Benefits resulting from the early formation of habits of attentive observation. The early training of the perceptive faculties, by a varied and genial discipline of the power of attention, so as to render the habit of observation an unfailing characteristic of the man, becomes doubly valuable, as a result of education, when we regard its effects on the intellectual tastes and pursuits of individuals. A taste for the study of nature, early formed, leads to the practice of collecting specimens, and thus furnishing the means of successful study to the person himself, who collects them, and at the same time to all whom he is disposed to aid in such pursuits. Were even the elements of botany, geology, mineralogy, and zoology, generally adopted, as they ought to be, as subjects of attention in primary education,

a knowledge of natural science, would, ere long, be diffused throughout our community; a taste for the study of nature would become an intellectual trait of our people; the pursuit of agriculture, abroriculture, and horticulture, would be more intelligently and more advantageously followed; the citizen would doubly relish his season of respite in the country; taste and intelligence would extend their influence over all modes of life; and science would be unspeakably a gainer, in its noble purposes and offices, by the multitude of active minds and busy hands called in to collect, and contribute materials for its various forms of investigation. The field of human knowledge might thus be indefinitely enlarged, and its advantages and enjoyments be more extensively diffused.

But it is not merely as a matter of scientific progress, or of taste and enjoyment, that the proper training of the perceptive faculties, by means of objects and observation, rather than by the materials furnished in books, becomes an important consideration in the planning of modes of education, and methods of instruction. Practical utility, also, has its claim to urge in this relation. The larger number of persons, even in the most advanced communities, as regards civilization and refinement, are occupied in some form of active exertion, as the daily vocation of individuals; and while no generous mind can ever look on education as a benefit or a blessing, if it is to be used as a means of training for the occupation of a given caste, it is not less true, that every individual, in whatever class of society, would be vastly benefited by an early course of cultivation on all subjects akin to those which are to form the staple of his mode of life. Botany, geology, chemistry, entomology, for instance, all have their relations to agriculture; and a few hours devoted weekly to the elements of these sciences, will, by their inspiring influence on the young mind, expedite rather than retard the ordinary processes of school education.

Importance of commencing early the study of Nature.-But while no formal or extensive study of these branches can be rationally attempted in primary education, it is most emphatically true, that, in the study of nature, more than in other forms of intellectual action, nothing can be advantageously done but on condition of an early beginning, and the judicious improvement of the opportunity afforded during the period of leisure and susceptibility which occurs to all human beings but once in life. Childhood and youth are, by the Creator's appointment, the period for forming taste and acquiring habits. The most resolute struggles in after years, seldom succeed in effecting a change of mental occupation, or in lending attractive inter