over the whole frame of society. The caucus, also the town meeting, the district-school meeting, the court-room and the justice's office, store the mind with political knowledge, and with the great principles of right and wrong. The united force of Public OPINION, aided in some cases by the exercises of the Sabbath, moulds the moral nature. No, no. Place one of our district schools in a wild spot in Ireland, or in Russia, and let every child there receive all the instruction that it generally confers here, and you would quickly see the inefficiency of such training. The difference between that spot and the neighboring districts would be scarcely perceptible. The kind of reading taught at school, which confers little or no command over our literature,-this, with the trifling modicum of arithmetic, grammar and geography, if deprived of all the other aids derived from the peculiar state of our society, would do little or nothing towards the development of their great powers, would fail to produce a community like that of New England in ten generations.

If, then, the school, which now effects so little, might so easily be made to produce such great results, might lay open the whole cyclopædia of science and literature to our youth, might not only so train their reasoning powers as to fit them for the important station they hold as a beacon light for a world enveloped in darkness and misery, and in addition might cultivate amongst them the virtues of conscientiousness, truthfulness, obedience, self-denial, veneration and love,ếought we not to take hold in good earnest, to bring about a solid reform, by determining what really are the essentials of a sound education, and uniting all our energies to fix them firmly in our system? If my feeble efforts shall in any way assist in this important work, my labors in the cause will have met with an abundant reward.

LECTURE V.

THE CLAIMS OF NATURAL HISTORY AS A BRANCH OF

COMMON SCHOOL EDUCATION.

BY WILLIAM O. AYERS,

PRINCIPAL OF THE ELIOT GRAMMAR SCHOOL, BOSTON.

God has placed us in a material world, and has made our relations to it so varied and so intimate as to end but with our lives. From the first dawn of our existence till we moulder back to dust, these objects of nature minister to our luxury, our comfort, and even our life. Our breath, our food, our motion and our rest, our clothing, our amusements, our houses, our vehicles and our travelling, our commerce and our sources of wealth, all depend upon them. Does it not, therefore, appear strange and unreasonable that even now, when the diffusion of knowledge is so general, and in a land which boasts, and with reason too, its unrivalled schools and school systems, it should be necessary to plead that our children may be allowed to learn their connection with this world, this glorious world around us; that instead of being confined to the rules and definitions of grammar,

arithmetic, &c., they may be allowed to open their eyes and see, to open their hearts and feel the beauties in the midst of which they live? But that such a necessity exists, is to many minds apparent. Go into any of our schools, and ascertain what branches are studied and the amount of time devoted to each, examine the rules and instructions of school committees, and find what books are ordered or allowed ; go into the bookstores, and inquire for works on Natural History suited to the capacities of your children, and then for grammars or geographies, and discover that while of these latter you will be shown the productions of ten to twenty different authors, all of them good, though differing in excellence; of the former the stock in trade consists of one or at most two works, abounding in errors. Take up a book, issued within the last few weeks, purporting to be a Class Book of Zoology for schools, and see the crabs and lobsters classed as insects, and then consider if it is not time that an attempt were made to introduce into our schools the study of Natural History in a form at once accurate and attractive. Let me not be understood to say that arithmetic, geography, grammar are unworthy of the attention which they so generally receive. Far from it; they must continue to be, as they ever have been, the basis of all sound education, and without them our labors in other branches must be vain. All that I ask is, that Natural History shall receive at the hands of teachers, and all interested in education, that proportion of study and care which its intrinsic merits demand. We seek not that any preëminence shall be granted, that this study shall be

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pursued to the exclusion of any of those which have so long held sway. That were unjust; but is it unjust to claim for an important branch of knowledge, that it should not remain in total neglect? But a few years since, the study of Natural History in schools was almost impracticable. Burthened with the load of errors which had descended from the times of Aristotle and Pliny, and which actual observation has scarcely attempted to remove, it would have been extreme folly to require a child to fill his memory with a mass of that which the slightest watchfulness must show him was totally incorrect. But this excuse can no longer exist. Instead of subjecting its votaries to the charge of insanity or of dealing with evil spirits; instead of bringing on their heads the thunders of the church and the ridicule of men of learning, Natural History stands now in closer proximity to that proud elevation on which the dignity of its subjects and its objects must eventually place it. Men whose intellect and acquirements make them the glory of their age, who stand in the foremost ranks of those well known to fame, are not ashamed to devote the undivided energies of life to its pursuits. They climb the snows of the Upper Alps, to watch how

“ The glacier's cold and ressless mass

Moves onward day by day ;'

they brave the burning sands and deadly blasts of Africa, to learn with what unsparing hand nature has poured the stores of animal and vegetable life along the banks of the Joliba or Gaboon; with the

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