resulted in a fibre fit for good and continuous labor at maturity is interfered with; the child as an intellectual instrument is to that extent spoiled by an error in the process by which that instrument was sought to be improved.

The same effect on the muscular system is exemplified in the racers that are now trained to run at two and one-half or three years old for the grand prizes at Doncaster or Epsom. The winner of the Derby never becomes an "Eclipse" or "Flying Childers" because the muscular system has been overwrought two or three years before it could have arrived at its full development, which development is stopped by the premature over-exertion.

If the brain be not stimulated to work, but is allowed to rest, and if, at the same time, the muscles be forbidden to act, then there arises, if this restraint be too prolonged, an overcharged state of the nervous system. It is such a state as we see exemplified in the caged quadrupeds of active habits, where it seeks to relieve it by converting the nervous into the muscular force to the extent permitted by its prison, either executing a succession of bounds against the prison-bars like the agile leopard, or stalking like the lion sullenly to and fro.

If the active child be too long prevented from gratifying its instinctive impulse to put in motion its limbs or body the nervous system becomes overcharged, and the relief may at last be got by violent emotions or acts called passion or "naughtiness," ending in the fit of crying and flood of tears.

But all the impediments to a healthy development of the nerv ous system might be obviated by regulations based on the system which you rightly advocate, providing for more frequent alternations of labor and rest, of study and play, of mental exertion and muscular exercise; in other words, by briefer and more frequent periods allotted to its phases of educational procedure and modified to suit two or three divisions of the scholars, according to age.

The powers and workings of the human frame concerned in the complex acts and influences which you have asked me to explain physiologically, are amongst the most recondite and difficult in our science; you will therefore comprehend and excuse my shortcomings in trying to fulfil your wish. But on the main point, I

have no doubt that your aim is in close accordance with the nature of the delicate, and for good or evil, easily impressible organization of the child.

Believe me ever truly yours,

RICHARD OWEN.

To the above interesting letter from Mr. Chadwick's article in the Transactions of the British Association, we subjoin a few short passages from his equally interesting volume entitled "A Letter to N. W. Senior, Esq., &c.," printed by the Education Commission, regretting that want of space prevents us from drawing more largely from its pages, and from the striking body of evidence that accompanies it.

"The experience of the short-school-time district industrial schools" he says (p. 19) "as displayed in such evidence as that which I have collected and transmitted (referring to an octavo volume of 200 pages) is demonstrative of a general conclusion that by the administrative division of educational labor, the elements of popular education, reading well with some skill in parsing, writing a fair hand, spelling well, arithmetic up to decimal fractions, the naval and the military drill, and vocal music may be taught well, together with the elements of religious instruction, in about one-half the time now commonly occupied in teaching indifferently the three elementary branches, as they are considered, of a popular education. It is found that beginning with the infant school, these courses of mental and bodily accomplishments may generally be completed soon after the tenth year."

"The gain in time from six or five to three hours of daily school attendance and from six to three years — half the time now commonly occupied-is not the sole or the most important gain achieved in the large schools by the division of educational labor and the application of the half-time principle. A boy who has acquired the same amount of knowledge in one-half the time of another boy must have obtained a proportionately superior habit of mental activity. This is the experience stated by employers of labor in good half-time school districts who have ceased to employ " long-timers" when they can get "short-timers." . . . . The mental

habits of listless attention prolonged beyond periods in which it is psychologically possible to obtain voluntary and profitable attention from children, the mental habits of "dawdling," of useless waiting, which the common school-teaching during long hours communicates, are highly pernicious and economically wasteful, more especially for those who have to gain their own livelihood." . . . . "No such proportion of the boy pupils who have gone through the course of instruction in a half-time district pauper school could be plucked for bad spelling and bad ciphering as have been plucked of young gentlemen candidates for direct commissions in the army. I have had the pauper children in these schools tried with the questions proposed to candidates for clerkships in the War Office, and as large a proportion of clever answers was got from these boys under thirteen as would probably be obtained from the older actual candidates for clerkships. The younger Eton scholars

could not stand an examination in the lower elements of instruction with the pauper children who have gone through this course."

"I quite agree with Mr. Paget (p. 78) when he states that the half-time principle is one which admits of very wide application, and that our middle classes might give their sons up to the age of twenty an alternation of a day of college and gymnastic exercises, with a day in the counting-house, and thus, with God's blessing, confer upon them that inestimable boon, a sound mind embodied in a healthy frame.'"

The conclusions which Mr. Chadwick draws from the results of his investigations are stated by him at very considerable length. We will quote some of those which seem of the most immediate practical importance. He concludes that "as relates to the general population, the usual courses of school teaching which require five or six hours of mental effort from very young children of the aveerage ages taught, from the seventh to the tenth year and above, in the common elementary schools is largely in excess of their capacity of attention at those years, and in violation of the laws of psychology:"" that the present excessive duration of sedentary application required from little children beyond their proved capacity of voluntary and profitable attention is mentally injurious by inducing associations of weariness and disgust with the matters

taught, by creating comparatively diffused, slow, and dilatory habits of mind, often provoking corporal chastisement:' "that whilst the practice in good half-time schools, of three hours' mental effort daily, is proved to be adapted to the natural capacity of young children of from seven to eleven or twelve years of age, as a provision obligatory on those engaged in productive labor it is proved to act beneficially as a security against bodily overwork; all bodily as well as mental labor for young and growing children, if continued during the same length of hours as grown adults, being a source of deterioration to the laboring population of the country: "That by teaching on a large scale and on the half-time system the period for imparting superior clementary knowledge and bodily as well as mental aptitudes may be reduced from an average period of six years to an average of three, and (including the cost of bodily training) at an expense for educational power of less than one half the present expense of the common education:" "That the same educational power and the same schools may be extensively applied to the training of double sets of children, either on the same days or on alternate days, as may be most convenient for the demands of domestic service or productive industry, or of thinly populated rural districts, and popular education be conciliated with the demands for the industrial service of children."

The experiments and conclusions of Mr. Chadwick, though drawn from a state of things in many respects very different from that existing in our own country, may, we think, well induce us to consider whether we also may not derive valuable hints from them. The question arises whether we take a sufficiently wide and liberal view of the true objects of popular education,whether that should be made to consist solely in book-learning or whether the training of the senses of children and the development of their bodily organs are not equally necessary parts of a sound education, whether, as an instrument in training the bodily senses, instruction might not be given that should be a valuable preparation for the arts and trades which so many of the pupils will make the occupations of their lives, or for the girls, instruction in those domestic duties in respect to which the girls of this

generation are growing up so lamentably deficient, - or if it is impossible, under our system to accomplish all this in school, whether the mere book-learning cannot be compressed by a better teaching and better arrangements into a much shorter time,― (the possibility of which Mr. Chadwick we think has abundantly proved) leaving time for those other essentials of a really good training to be acquired even from a very early age in other ways, -whether, in short, the long school hours and the incessant devotion of children to books is not after all based on mere unreasoning custom. It is a noticeable fact that a very large proportion of the foremost men of this country may be said to have been educated on the half-time system; for they were farmers' sons whose whole book education consisted in attendance on a winter country school. [ED.

Since writing the above article we have received the following interesting communication in corroboration of our views, from a gentleman who we are sure will pardon us for mentioning his name, in consideration of the added weight it will give his testimony, the Rev. C. F. Foster, Chaplain of the State Almshouse, at Tewksbury. We are glad to find ourselves in error in the statement that no experiments of the kind we have been detailing have ever been tried on this side of the ocean. Mr. Foster says:

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"The views presented in the article upon the half-time system are so exactly in accordance with what I have seen of its practical working, that I venture to offer a few thoughts which were suggested while listening to the reading of the paper referred to, at the meeting of the Association. In one point, the author has made a mistake. He is, doubtless, not aware that the experiment is now being tried on a small scale, in Massachusetts, and that the view is not therefore, as he states, still a mere theory in this country. In one of the public charitable institutions of this State, comprising a school of nearly two hundred pupils, this plan in its general outline has been pursued during the past two years. The circumstances which gave rise to the experiment, were the opposite of those which he there urges as a reason for making such a system universal. It was found in the present instance that children were constantly leaving the school with a three months' certificate,