educational journals, public lectures, and the columns of the newspaper, might be cited as authority. These expectations are naturally founded upon the improvements which are supposed to have taken place in education. But they are extravagant and unreasonable, because the real improvements in the apparatus and modes of instruction, have been greatly exaggerated as respects their practical effect on intellectual culture; while many supposed reforms have proved to be of no value at all. It is true, that by the help of machinery, one man may now perform the labor of ten; but I have heard of no invention by which the quickness or the capacity of the mind can be increased in any such ratio. What Euclid said of Geometry more than two thousand years ago, may be said with equal truth of all branches of knowledge to-day: There is no royal road to learning. Education does not consist in pouring knowledge into the mind. True education is the cultivation of the intellect, the discipline of the mental powers, and from the nature of the mind itself, that discipline must be the result of individual application, with but comparatively little assistance from other minds or from extraneous objects. "In all circumstances," said Daniel Webster, "a man is, under God, the maker of his own mind. The Creator has so constituted the human intellect that it can grow only by its own action, and by its own action it must certainly and necessarily grow. Every man must, therefore, in an important sense, educate himself. His books and teachers are but helps, the work is his. A man

is not educated until he has the ability to summon, in an act of emergency, all his mental powers in vigorous exercise, to effect his proposed object. It is not the man who has seen most, or has read most, who can do this; such an one is in danger of being borne down, like a beast of burden, by an overloaded mass of other men's thoughts. Nor is it the man who can boast merely of native vigor and capacity. The greatest of all the warriors that went to the siege of Troy, carried the largest bow, not because he had most strength, but because self-discipline had taught him how to bend it." Such was the opinion of one of the greatest and best disciplined minds of this, or of any age; its correctness will be acknowledged by all.

Large, commodious, and well furnished rooms are highly desirable, are attractive to the child, and promote the physical comfort and well being of all: yet it does not follow that a pupil can commit or understand a lesson in Arithmetic or Grammar, any better in such a room, than in one of less pretensions. Apparatus, also, to illustrate principles and facts in Natural Philosophy and Astronomy is now considered indispensable in every well ordered school; and yet the child, who by the help of diagrams alone, gets a clear idea of the movements of the solar system, of the cause of eclipses, the changes of the seasons, and the difference in the length of days and nights, is better disciplined and therefore better educated, than one who obtains the same knowledge by the help of an orrery or tellurion.

Many changes, also, which have been made in text-books and methods of teaching, have turned out to be no great improvements after all. Grammar is generally regarded by children as having been specially designed for their torment; and they deem it anything but sinful to call down curses on the head of him who first invented it. But the millenium began with these children several years ago. The philosopher's stone was one day discovered and honored with the name of Analysis. A 'royal road' was opened to one branch of knowledge at least. The dull, mechanical routine of parsing was to be discarded at once and forever, as a relic of the barbarous age. Instead of the simple noun and verb, we were favored with the dignified subject and predicate; and the homely adverb and adjective gave way to the classic adjunct and modifier. It is now several years since children were first put over that course, and if we may rely upon oral testimony, as well as their slow progress, and limping, awkward gait, it may be safely affirmed that that road has been found as hard to travel as any other. Let me not be misunderstood; I approve of analysis in the study of language, as in that of everything else; and more or less of it should enter into the recitation of every lesson in that department. But I believe the common form, or any form, may be made just as dull, mechanical, and lifeless, as the veriest routine of parsing that was ever adopted. Nay more; so far as analysis itself is concerned, I believe that the problems in Colburn's Intellectual Arithmetic may be, and often

are, taught in as mechanical a manner as any branch whatever. My position, then, is this; that the revolution effected in teaching Grammar, was bloodless, harmless, and comparatively worthless.

Within a few years, also, a great change has been wrought in the method of teaching Geography. It is now settled beyond all dispute, that our fathers knew nothing of the science or the proper method of teaching it. That part of the subject technically called physical Geography, is the only one now regarded as having any claims upon our attention. On the extreme western border of the State which bounds my own on the west, is to be found the grandest cataract in the world. If a child impressed with the idea, that towards the south must necessarily be down on a map, should tumble the waters of the Niagara up that awful precipice into Lake Erie, he would bring everlasting disgrace upon himself, his teacher, and his school. If the mistake were made at an examination or on any public occasion, it would very likely find its way into the next "report" or the nearest newspaper, accompanied with appropriate comments on the method of instruction adopted in that school. But for the same pupil to be ignorant of the capital of that State, or of its chief city, would be rather commendable than otherwise; because forsooth, an earthquake may sink the one, and the next legislature may remove the other; and it is now held to be a shameful waste of time to learn any facts in Geography that are liable to change. It is readily admitted that many principles in this de

partment, are important, are easily understood, and serve to make the study more interesting and more intelligible to the child. Physical Geography, therefore, should have a place with mathematical and political, but it should be in connection with them and not to their exclusion.

If, however, any comparison is to be instituted as to the relative importance of these divisions, I would ask why a knowledge of the manners and customs, the form of government, the religious belief and the mode of worship, of any country, is not as interesting, as useful, and in every respect as important, as a knowledge of its highlands and its lowlands, its declivities and its basins, the course of its rivers, and the direction of its mountainchains? As has just been stated, many facts in physical Geography are simple, and perfectly within the comprehension of the pupil; but others depend on principles in Natural Philosophy and Chemistry, that are not understood or studied even for years. The child who does not comprehend some of the most common phenomena of nature, the formation of dew, for example, the gathering of drops on a tumbler filled with iced water, or the sprinkling of a floor on a hot day, to lower the temperature by evaporation,-is expected to understand the whole theory of winds and currents, to know and to be able to explain why one country is subject to constant or periodic rains, and why another is a rainless waste. In reference to this department, then, I say," A place for everything, and everything in its place."