sense directed toward the result. And these are precisely the instances where physiology and medical knowledge afford suggestions of much value with reference both to particular cases and to the more general methods employed.

Upon this topic, however, I cannot enter beyond one remark which bears directly on the subject before us. This is the fact well attested by experience, that the memory may be seriously, sometimes lastingly injured by pressing upon it too hardly and continuously in early life. Whatever theory we hold as to this great function of our nature, it is certain that its powers are only gradually developed, and that if forced into premature exercise they are impaired by the effort. This is a maxim indeed of general import, applying to the condition and culture of every faculty of body and mind; but singularly to the one we are now considering, which forms in one sense the foundation of our intellectual life. A regulated exercise, short of actual fatigue, enlarges its capacity both as to reception and retention, and gives promptitude as well as clearness to its action. But we are bound to refrain from goading it by constant and laborious efforts in early life, and before the instrument has been strengthened to its work, or it decays on our hands. We lose its present power and often enfeeble it for all future use.

Even when by technical contrivances the youthful memory has been crowded by facts and figures, injury is often done thereby to the growth of that higher part of the faculty which recollects and combines its materials for intellectual purposes. And this is especially true when the subjects pressed on the mind are those not naturally congenial to it, a distinction very real in itself, and partially recognized by all, yet often unduly neglected in our systems of education. The necessity must be admitted in practice of adopting certain average rules under which the majority of cases may be included. But special instances are ever before us where the mind by its constitution is so unfitted for particular objects that the attempt to force the memory or other faculties upon them is not merely fruitless but hazardous in result. It is tersely said by Hippocrates, Φυσέως ἀντιπραττούσης, κένεα παντα * — a maxim requir

*When nature opposes, our labor is lost.

ing some qualification, yet never to be disregarded in our dealings either with the mental or bodily condition of man.

In the course of my practice, I have seen some striking and melan choly instances of the exhaustion of the youthful mind by this over exercise of its faculties. In two of these unattended with paralytic affection or other obvious bodily disorder than a certain sluggishness in the natural functions, the torpor of mind approached almost to imbecility. Yet here there had before been acute intellect with great sensibility; but these qualities had been forced by emulation into excess of exercise without due intervals of respite and with habitual deficiency of sleep. Of the importance of the latter point I have spoken in a preceding chapter.— Sir H. Holland.

The pupil whose intellect has been aroused cannot help striving to understand, partially at least, what he hears or learns, and cannot fasten his attention upon sounds that are unintelligible to him. The pupil whose intellect has slumbered while his senses have been active remembers sounds with facility and is content to attach no meaning to them. He substitutes the appearance of knowledge for the reality the sign for the thing signified words for ideasanswers for information. His verbal knowledge is often so accurate as to prevent the slightest suspicion of the utter mental darkness that it veils. At a school examination he is asked (say) to enumerate the properties of iron; and he has malleability, fusibility, ductility, and so forth at his fingers' ends. Some one possibly, doubtful of the depth of his attainments, may ask what he means by a "property," but the reply that it is a quality will seldom fail to satisfy the querist. Few would suspect what is certainly often the case, namely, that none of these words represent or have ever represented any glimmering of knowledge, any sort of intellectual idea. The children who repeat them often not only do not understand or wish to understand them, but positively do not know that they can be understood; remembering and imitating what they have heard just as a little savage would the cry of a wild animal or the call of a bird to its mate.

The effect produced upon the pupils by this sensational learning may be briefly regarded in a twofold manner. In the first place

the period of school life is wasted partially or wholly according to the degree of the evil. In the second the mind is absolutely weakened. The sensorium which might be left to nature is called into activity; and the intellect which should be cultivated by art is left dormant. The child is trained towards the mental state suited to savageism, instead of that required by civilization; and in a greater or less degree the kind of mental weakness observed in the savage is the result. It would be difficult to devise a process which should predispose more powerfully than this to mental alienation under the trials of life; and I believe that the prevalence and the increase of insanity are due in great measure to the faultiness of common methods of instruction.

The cause chiefly concerned in the production of sensational learning is perhaps the absolute non-recognition by schoolmasters of the frequency or even the possibility, to say nothing of the undesirableness, of this distinct form of mental activity. Physiology has not long revealed the fact, and the fact has never been brought under their attention. In ignorance of it they take the children of the poor and stimulate their sense-perceptions, heedless of the faculties that lie dormant beneath. Or they take the children of the better classes in whom favorable domestic circumstances have produced some degree of intellectual life, and this they crush under an excess of tasks. The lessons are too long, or too difficult, or too numerous the growing mind gives up in despair, and delegates its work to the sensorium. The pupil, in perpetual disgrace as long as his learning was retarded by efforts to comprehend, reaches the head of his class as soon as he surrenders himself to the guidance of sound. The master rejoices over a pattern boy produced from a dunce; the physiologist would mourn over a possible philosopher extinguished at school.

The remedy, theoretically speaking, must be sought in a distinct recognition of the fact that the purposive excitation of the higher faculties of the mind should be the first step in education, as it forms the only foundation upon which an enduring superstructure can be laid. When this first step has been made at home the duty of the schoolmaster is easy: it being chiefly necessary to arrange that the lessons should stimulate but not outstrip or baffle the com

prehension. When the first step has been wholly neglected, as is too often the case with children attending elementary schools, the duty of the master is very difficult, requiring that he should exercise his pupils in the rudiments of thinking, comparing, judging, that he should use lessons as instruments for piercing through their sense-perceptions so as to reach minds already rendered sluggish by neglect. Practically this result is obtained at present in some of the best elementary schools, (seldom or never, I fear, through a clear knowledge of what to strive for,) but by reason of the animation and liveliness of the master, or of his quick and ready sympathy with the children, intuitively prompting him to the use of words which appeal to their intelligence. Where this is the case we commonly see that the parents appreciate the improvement of their children, and are induced to make self-denying efforts to keep them longer at school. In inferior schools, where sensational teaching prevails, I suspect not only that the children do not receive the smallest benefit, but that their parents and themselves feel that they do not; and that this is at least one among the causes of their early removal. Under a better system, even if the work of the master were prematurely stopped, the pupil would still carry away a capacity for self-education and a possibility of deriving pleasure from the attempt.-R. B. Carter.

The system of cramming is a scheme for making temporary acquisitions regardless of the endurance of them. Excitable brains that can command a very great concentration of force upon a subject, will be proportionably impressed for the time being. By drawing upon the strength of the future we are able to fix temporarily a great variety of impressions during the exaltation of cerebral power that the excitement gives. The occasion past, the brain must lie idle for a corresponding length of time while a large portion of the excited impressions will gradually perish away. This system is extremely unfavorable to permanent acquisitions; for these the force of the brain should be carefully husbanded and temperately drawn upon. Every period of undue excitement and feverish susceptibility is a time of great waste for the plastic energy of the mind on the whole.-Bain.

"COMPOSITION."

A gentleman eminent in literature told us not long ago that it had always been his custom to stipulate with the teachers of schools to which he sent his daughters, that the latter should not be obliged to write "compositions;" for he said that, as usually conducted, it seemed to him to be an exercise in the art of diluting the smallest amount of meaning with the largest quantity of words; and he thought no practice was more prejudicial than that to the attainment of good habits of mind, or real power of expression. We could not but remember the weary hours that we had spent in our younger days in the vain endeavor to make bricks without straw, and wish that we had enjoyed the benefits of such a prohibition; and it reminded us that we had had some amusing specimens of school compositions put into our hands, which illustrate the state of bewilderment in which children's minds are placed when called on to write without any help or guidance on some abstract or general subject. They were written not a hundred miles from a Massachusetts school and something less than a hundred years ago. The first is on American Scenery, and runs as follows:

We can see a great deal of this when we travel into different parts of the country and view the various scenes of antiquity.

It is delightful to travel into it, and see it, those who have money enough, but poor people must do otherwise.

There are a great many kinds of scenery, some of ghost, some imagination, and some of real life, so that we have all sorts and all kinds. We imagine one when there really is not one, and it may appear to be very beautiful to us at times, and at others not so.

The next is on the comparative utility of printing and the mariner's compass, and the young authoress endeavors unsuccessfully to consider the two branches of her subject separately.

"The comparative degree of a Mariner's Compass, and the Art of Printing:"

THE MARINER'S COMPASS.

This instrument governs a vessel at sea, and guides the mariner through the voyage. It always points north, and the vessel goes in any direction by the means of a rudder which turns it from one course to another. When a vessel is lost at sea, it is very soon known, and a great excitement made at land about it,