ANNUAL REPORT.

The Board of Directors submit the following Report: Another completed year calls for our Annual Report. Several meetings of the Board have been held during the year; the customary Committee of Arrangements, for the annual meeting, appointed; and such other business of the Institute transacted, as the Directors deemed most important.

The meeting at Springfield last year was remarkable for a rain storm, which lasted during the three days of the session. Yet so great was the energy and perseverance of the members of the Institute, that the attendance increased from the beginning to the end; and we have reason to believe that the result of the meeting was one of great and permanent influence. The Lectures and Discussions were of a high character, and must have left a salutary impression on every mind. These Lectures and Discussions have been published, in the usual style, by Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, and can be obtained at the price of fifty cents a volume.

The Curators in their Report present no new facts. The Library still remains at the bookstore of Messrs. Ticknor & Fields, and requires some further action by the Directors to make it as useful as it should be.

By the Treasurer's Report, it appears that the balance on hand at the last annual meeting, was$294.03; the receipts for the year have been $325; the expenditures, $268.73; making the balance now on hand $350.30. Respectfully submitted for the Board.

JOHN KINGSBURY.

In the big sum of earthly life, our duties to one another are the decimals which swallow up the units of all other relations. And of these the most

sacred are our duties towards children; thus primarily sacred, because the present warmth, generated in the doing of them, projects far over the future a canopy of nourishing light. Thence, as a subject for thought and effort, culture of the young remains ever as fresh and attractive as are our garden-beds in spring, re-awakened by their annual germinations. Men will tire of rose-buds and peachblossoms ere to their hearts will grow stale the budding and blossoming of human souls. Precious mysterious shoots! In what fruit they shall issue lies much with us. To our tending is entrusted this beautiful teeming growth. On our co-operation with the deepest forces wherewith God has en

dowed Nature, depends whether these tremendous forces shall be destructive or creative. On earth can there be a higher trust?

This trust we in part fulfil whenever we meet, as now, to consider the ever-recurring, the everpresent subject of education. By sympathy and interchange of opinion we fortify this momentous interest.

My discourse this evening will be chiefly directed to moral education, and especially to what I venture to call the higher side thereof, viz: the duty which, in the development of the young, the constitution of the human mind imposes of making the higher emotive faculties the sources of discipline.

The most sublime and beautiful of created things, cognizable by man, is his own mind. In the structure of this deep, dazzling wonder, there are high and low, low, not in a bad sense, for the whole and every part is normally good, but high and low as to range of function. The intellect has instruments for grasping individualities, one for each class thereof; others, of wider grasp, for seizing limited relations among them; and wider still, — wide to the degree of all-comprehensiveness, — others which bind all individualities and relations into classes, and through proximate or remote affinities, all classes into unity, and, with countless threads of causation, weave into one vast web all the multifarious phenomena of the Universe. Wanting the first two classes, -which relate to individualities and their simplest relations, the intellect would starve for lack of food: wanting the third, it would perish from indigestion. To its healthy action all three are

essential; but towards the former two the lat ter stands as chief to subordinates, as captain to privates. Without the broad classifying gift, the vast unifying force of the reasoning powers, all the materials collected by the others would lie forever in shapeless heaps, in chaotic helplessness, waiting to have breathed into them the life of constructive thought, whereby alone can they spring into graduated symmetrical forms, and assume the dignity of organic power.

As with the intellectual so with the affective province of the mind, the province of the feelings. Here, too, there are high and low, the lower limited in range to the individual self, or to its shortest ties of relationship; the higher swinging the individual up into a plane so broad and soaring, that self becomes merged in humanity, and petty interests subordinated to grand principles.

In turning to account, through early culture, the richest of human treasures, the innate faculties of man, never should we lose sight of this deep impregnable law of subordination,—a law which exacts, that in intellectual education the chief lever be the REASON and not the memory, and in moral, the unselfish general feelings, not the selfish individual ones. To all, but especially to that high class of public functionaries, the professional teachers of the young, most important is it to have lively regard to this law.

To you, then, ladies and gentlemen teachers, would I first address my remarks.

To teach is a universal office. In her grand

and beautiful and simple and multiform movements, processes, appearances, from the largest to the smallest, Nature reads us silent but ceaseless lessons. From the social, industrial, religious, political fabrics of man's building, flow never-ceasing streams of instruction. From the cradle to the grave we are learners; and wo to the man who stops learning. Through the myriad ties that marry our minds to the powers of Nature, God provides an indestructible, ever-moving chain of tuition, for our daily, yearly, everlasting profit. Each one of us, as a unit in Nature, is in turn indirectly a teacher. But you take on yourselves to be direct teachers, and teachers of humanity in the warm impressible season of youth. On the steps of the very throne of the Divine Teacher you present yourselves, and sue to be his aids, his confidential assistants. That you perform well this chosen, this holy part, the first and fundamental need is, that you be aware, cordially aware, that each one of your pupils is made in the image of his Maker; and thence, that in your methods and whole bearing you keep ever present to your minds this their sublime birth and consequent sublime destiny. Reverence for the child, faith in humanity, conviction of the moral capabilities, and of the final moral purification of man, these are the teacher's best credentials. Whatever may be his aspect or conduct, however blasted he may seem by inherited perversities, by parental neglect, by malignant influences, in every pupil the teacher should behold, not the mere son or daughter of this or that father and mother, but a child of God, and,