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the moment for change has arrived, and pursue the object of its aim with whatever velocity of motion may be requisite to reach it, in due

season.

Speed and despatch, however, not haste and burry, should be the ends at which the teacher aims in all drilling processes. A wakeful and lively attention, ever on the alert for action, implies sound and healthful and invigorating training. A harassed and exhausted mind, dragged or driven along the path of exercise too arduous, or too long continued, can never yield the results of genuine discipline.

With very young pupils, especially, the obvious indication of nature is, make free use of striking and attractive objects, illustrations, and remarks. One object at a time; words few and well chosen; no lagging or drawling on the part of either pupil or teacher, yet no hurry, no impatience, no impetuosity; proceeding smoothly and swiftly, but quietly and gently in all movements; yet sometimes, for the purpose of arresting attention, adopting the grateful surprise of a sudden change, briskly executed :-these are the characteristics of skillful and genial training, such as quickens the life power of intellect.

Earnestness of attention.-The power of earnest attention is another trait of mental habit to which the successful teacher directs his endeavors, as an invaluable attainment to be secured, through his agency, by his pupils. To this end, he avoids carefully all exercises not interesting or inviting to the young mind. Objects, pictures, penetrating questions, vigorous exertion, in varied forms, for mind and body, strenuous endeavor called forth, at intervals, to cope with difficulties, interesting facts stated, or stories told, the wonders of nature and of art exhibited, interesting conversation maintained, in which the pupils interchange thoughts with the teacher, word-pictures of peculiar power and beauty, selected from the poets, early attempts at drawing, exercises in planning and building, tangible illustrations in architecture, masonry, carpentry, or joiner-work, in juvenile style, for hours of recreation, the analysis of plants, the tracing of the anatomy of animal forms, in specimens of insect organization, in the osseous construction of birds, fishes, reptiles, &c.; all lessons made, as far as practicable, matter of active work, rather than merely passive attention; the ceaseless use of the slate, the pencil, and the blackboard, in recording, repeating, and illustrating every thing which admits of such forms of expression; these, and every other resort which ingenuity can invent, are all required in the exigencies of actual teaching.

Earnest attention and strenuous application, on the part of pupils, are the natural result and unfailing reward of the teacher's own facil ity and skill in devising and executing inspiring models of whatever

he would have his pupils execute. The efficacy of his own ear, eye, and hand, secured by his own self culture, is the only guaranty of his success, as a faithful trainer of the perceptive faculties. The general introduction of music and drawing, now in progress in all welltaught schools, together with the increasing attention given to elementary lessons in botany and mineralogy, is opening a highly beneficial course of discipline for the young mind, in whatever concerns the power of earnest and effective attention, as an attribute of intellectual character.

Closeness of attention.—The thorough discipline of attention, however, as the directing force of the perceptive faculties, implies that it is not only rendered prompt and earnest in action, but close and minute in its application. A faithful analysis is conditioned, in all departments of study, on a clear and distinct perception of every particular. Nothing must be suffered to escape notice. No analysis can be complete that is not exhaustive, to the extent of its object. Close and minute inspection is indispensable for the exact observation of many of the most instructive and the most beautiful of the details of nature, in the forms of animal and vegetable life,-for the successful watching of the processes of chemistry,—for forming exact estimations of quantity and number,—for tracing the diversities of even inanimate form, the delicate gradations of color, the minutest difference of sound and form, in the details of language, together with all the nicer distinctions, and discriminations of thought, when embodied in words, for the purposes of communication.

To secure these results, we are again directed to the early and effectual training of the perceptive faculties on the objects of nature, as the first step in the true education of the mind. The minutest point of form in the structure of leaf or blossom, the child traces with delight; and this native tendency of mental action, extended in its range of objects, and confirmed by the law of habit, becomes not only a source of intellectual enjoyment, but of conscious power and ultimate success, in all investigations, not merely of nature and external objects, but, by the inevitable law of analogy, in every department of research on which the intellect is competent to enter. The power of close attention, sharpened by judicious early training of the perceptive faculties, attains in due season, to consummate certainty and success in those processes of minute analysis which are, in many instances, the crowning glories of science.

No contrast can be more striking than that exhibited in the two cases of neglect and culture, in this relation of mental action. On the one hand, we have the loose, superficial, imperfect attention, which

glides listlessly over the surface of things, without note, and consequently without knowledge; on the other we see an acute, keen, penetrating, searching inspection, which nothing escapes,-a mind whose knowledge is exact and complete, whose information is the result of narrowly examined and well ascertained particulars.

The intelligent teacher, knowing that the keenest exercises of discriminating judgment are, by the law of mental constitution and habit, not unfrequently dependent on the close examination of details, on the power of tracing and detecting the minutest shades of difference in objects and their component parts, leads his pupils, by the closeness of his questioning, to follow the minutest ramifications of diversity, amid apparent similarity, in the objects which he uses as instruments for sharpening their perceptions to the keenest inspection of every feature which is accessible to the discernment of sense. Beyond this point he passes to the use of the microscope, one of the most valuable implements ever devised as an aid to the processes of human culture. A cheap instrument of this description, in the hands of an attentive teacher, has a power which no degree of mental inertia can resist. It has been known to convert, in a few days, a whole school of uncultivated, thoughtless, turbulent children into an attentive, thoughtful, inquiring, docile, and orderly company of little students of nature.

A few minutes occupied daily in observing and tracing the forms of objects, in detail, is, in addition to its ultimate effects on mental habit, of the greatest service in the humble relations of alphabetic teaching. A ground work is thus laid for the accurate recognition of the elements of form combined in the visible shapes of printed and written characters, and a surer and more rapid, because a more intelligent, progress secured, as regards the accuracy of the eye in recognizing, or of the hand in repeating the lines, angles, and curves, which constitute the complex forms of letters. Accustomed to the close and minute analysis of form on visible objects of different sorts, the child, if permitted to treat his alphabetic characters in a similar way, takes delight in detecting and naming their constituent parts; and, particularly, when he is permitted to try to delineate them for himself, and thus, as it were, bring them under a kind of ideal subjection to his power.

The discipline of particular observation and searching attention, early secured, becomes, in due season, a complete guaranty for the correct and successful performance of the various gradations of mathematical problems in which a well trained and exact attention is required, whether for the relations of form or those of numbers; and hroughout the successive stages of education, in all its departments.

The well trained mind becomes ultimately like the thoroughly magnetized instrument, which leaves no stray particles of the steel-filings scattered abroad, but agglomerates them every one to itself; with a certainty which renders the act no unfitting analogy for illustrating the universal law of gravitation.

Tenacity of attention.-Having used his best endeavors to render the faculty of attention prompt, earnest, and close, in its action, as the guide of the perceptive faculties, the teacher has yet another character to stamp upon it. He would have it not only quick and vivid, and searching, but tenacious and persistent. From an element volatile, fluctuating, and superficial, in its first manifestations, he would have it become, at length, a power fixed, and steadfast, and unfailing. Patiently training it through its incipient stage of short, feeble flights, he inures it to lengthened excursions and sustained exertions, such as all valuable mental attainments demand. Here, again, Nature comes to his aid, furnishing him liberally not only with numerous instruments of discipline in her manifold forms, as objects, individually, attractive and interesting, but with those complexities of shape, and color, and number, those organic relations, and organic contrivances, those compound bodies, those intricate combinations of elements and processes, which all require not only an earnest and close, but a longsustained, unflagging attention, as the only condition of faithful and exact observation and accurate knowledge.

The intelligent teacher watches carefully the progressive development of his pupil's power of attention, and exercises it according to the increasing force and firmness of its grasp, so as to secure a perpetually growing power of retention, through all the successive exercises which he contrives for its discipline, on natural and artificial forms, their various combinations, numbers, powers, and characteristics, of whatever denomination in the vocabularies of science and art.

Regarding attention as the master power in the grasp of the percep tive faculties, he values, most of all, its strength and retentiveness, its ability to maintain an unbroken sequence of activity, such as not unfrequently demands the incitement of the most earnest desire to arrive at the wished for result, and produce, in turn, the most resolute determination of the will to persevere in action till the result is mastered.

Here, again, the teacher finds his best resort in the objects and processes of nature; unwearied attention is in no way so effectually secured, without undue or fatiguing exertion, as in analyzing and inspecting the various parts of plants, or the anatomical mechanism of animal forms, and, more particularly, of insects. While no humane or enlightened teacher would ever propose even one half hour of

unbroken attention, on the part of very young pupils, twice that time may safely and advantageously pass in the suggestive questions of the teacher, and the ready answers of the pupils, during the examination of a single specimen of the productions of nature. In such circumstances, instruction takes its best form,—that of interesting conversation; and time flies only too fast for both parties in the exercise. Another sustained effort of attention may, by a judicious change in the form of mental action, be as easily secured by permitting the pupil to make such attempt as he can at delineating, in detail, the parts of the object which he has been contemplating; still another may be obtained by permitting him to describe in words, and at full length, what he has observed; and even the giant Despair of “composition" may be conquered by allowing the pupil to write his description.

Such processes prepare the young student in due season, for those arduous and unflagging exertions of attention by which he ultimately succeeds in solving lengthened and complicated problems in mathematics, disentangling long and inverted sentences by tracing the grammatical relations of their parts, and following, with patient assiduity, every step in extended and abstruse processes of reasoning on subjects more purely mental in their character.

The teacher who would merit the rank of an educator, and who would render all his processes of instruction not merely didactic but disciplinary, can never be too careful to accustom himself to survey the whole field of human culture in its completeness; to keep ever before his own mind the strict unity of the principle of intelligence, the analogy and cotendency of its various modes of action, and the identity of their results in the enlarging and quickening of its powers, and the strengthening of its grasp, on whatever subject it may be called to fasten. Philosophical writers, of high repute, have, sometimes, in their zealous advocacy of the value of their special studies, as instruments of mental discipline, been led greatly to underrate the disciplinary influence of all intellectual training connected with the observation and study of nature. They seem to have overlooked the fact that quick, acute, penetrating, close, persevering attention is one and the same priceless attainment, whether exhibited in the examination of an external object or in the investigation of the most abstruse of subjects that can be submitted to the action of human intellect.

The experienced and observing teacher knows well that his students who excel in the exercises prescribed in the departments of logic and metaphysics are those whose faculties have been most thoroughly disciplined in the processes of analysis, comparison, and classification,

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