craves for its sustenance and development; that the spirit has not so lost its magnetic sensitiveness by long contact with dull or dead natures as not to be attracted by kindness, trust, and confidence, and repelled by harshness, sneers, and ridicule; that, in short, the child is fresh, active, ardent, restless, and impulsive, in the midst of a world to him as new, as curious, as attractive, as unknown as himself, where he must conquer or fail for himself.

This human child in its complexity and its delicacy, in its weakness and its possibilities, is the real, unsolved problem of our schools, and the man or woman fitted by nature, education, thought, and experience to discern the true conditions and rightly apply the means for its solution, their greatest need.

Before the days of Franklin the lightning was known only as the dangerous attendant of the thunder-storm, coming to frighten the ignorant, and fill the heart of the wise man with awe. But when he found it to be no supernatural imp, but the familar of his laboratory, he stripped it of its direst terrors, showing how it might be turned aside and its wrath averted. Then came the lightning-rod man, to most persons an object of dread only less than that of the original lightning. A wiser generation has learned that by proper guidance electricity may become one of our most efficient and tractable agents in diffusing and transmitting light and intelligence.

So the inextinguishable boyishness of the boy, the terror of the schoolma'am and the wonder of the pedagogue, which in the olden time was seen but as an element of turbulence and confusion, to be shunned by the order-loving and the peaceful, a later day learned to avoid by turning it from the school-room to the street, possibly relieving the school but increasing the real evil.

A praiseworthy motive, no doubt, dictated this course, to avoid the mental and moral pyæmia sure to result if the evil should be taken up and spread through the system; but a too long and continuous drain of even "laudable pus" weakens and ruins at the last.

It but remains for those who control our schools, it remains for us, as teachers, to turn this old-time bane into a blessing. We have to learn, not how to check those restless feet, but how to direct them gracefully into the right paths; not how to stifle the craving of those eager hearts, but to supply the nutriment, which they with joy can receive and assimilate; we must labor not to hush and still those babbling tongues, but to find the words of truth and wisdom, which they may understandingly pronounce; not to dull the sharp sense, that so often leads away from our wishes and regulations, but to impart a zest to our teachings, so sweetly to mingle toil and play, that each shall be in its turn a delight; not to deaden or destroy the instinctive tendencies of his expanding being, but kindly and wisely to bring them into a willing subjection to a higher reason, guided by a more enlightened understanding; to remove the tedium of heartless toil, by a more thorough study of the child nature; by noting, with as keen an eye as the bee-hunter's, what course his instincts would take, and placing before him in each stage of his course the subjects and problems of nature, life, and art, with which his outreaching spirit may successfully and lovingly grapple.

Can the ambitious student of nature find enough to satisfy the longings of his soul in bending over a butterfly or a beetle, and the philologist seek his immortality of fame in devotion to the dative case, and are we degraded by our endeavors to understand this crowning expression of creative power?

There is an essential truth in the spirit of the remark attributed to Mr. Garfield, when a member of Congress. When some alumni and friends of Williams College were discussing its needs in the way of books and apparatus, and turned to him for his opinion, he is said to have replied, "Give me a log-cabin in the center of the State, having but one room, containing a rough bench, with Dr. Hopkins on one end and me on the other, and there is a college for me." And well might it be. A large-minded, a great-hearted, a fully-equipped, and well-trained man, in wise and intimate converse with an intelligent and revering pupil, guiding yet following his earnest but often halting efforts to clear up the manifold mysteries of mind and matter around him, and the greatest of all, the extent and the powers of his own mental and moral being, the teacher too great, too earnest to be dwarfed or hindered—himself, perhaps, the greater learner of the two.

A narrow basis of character or purpose must he have who fears to stoop to the comprehension of his little learners, who rather dare not rise toward the height of his profession.

He whose growth ceases with his graduation from school or college, whose certificate to teach crowns the last effort of an exhausted spirit, may suffer by suffering the little children to come too near, or to draw too closely about him, for the wisest man will often find himself at fault in answering their legitimate inquiries, and often feels a momentary impulse to meet the difficulty by the time-honored method of putting that child to bed.

There can be no more dangerous heresy for our schools than the sentiment which would depreciate the scholarly attainments and character of our teachers.

Scholarship alone does not of necessity imply the ability to teach, but this ability is quite as likely to be

the companion of learning as of ignorance, and experience shows that if accurate scholarship and correct speech be wanting, the aptness is quite as apt to teach error as truth.

The days of the A-B-C-darians, and the three R'sah ah and alas !-have happily gone by, and hard after them are following those to whom the ability to trace with index-finger, word by word, and line by line, the pupil's progress down the page of the text-book, was enough.

The eager applicant for a position advancing through the room with the exclamation: "Have you did it yet? I want it awful," probably had that qualification; and the candidate for a place as principal of one of our great schools, with its score of teachers, and its ten or twelve hundred pupils, would hardly have hazarded "Cardinal Wolsey and John of Gaunt" as "leading statesmen of George III's reign," with the text-book before his eyes.

We fear such teachers, even when bringing their apt

gifts.

That the teacher should be familiar with the meager contents of the text-book goes without the saying, but this is but a small and comparatively insignificant part of his accomplishments, and the memorizing of the brief pages but one of the several results to be aimed at for the pupil's benefit. The clear conception, the power of thought, of comparison and judgment, and the easy, concise, correct expression, are distinct objects, each fully as important as the facts themselves.

No grade so small but some definite and ready knowledge of the vegetable and animal life about us is an essential part of the teacher's outfit.

Plain and simple illustration of the cause of day and night, the summer's heat, the winter's cold, the dew, the rain, the frosts and snows, will find a welcome place in

the school-room, without infringing upon the high-school course, and sometimes without leaving the skill of the high-school graduate in physics and astronomy untasked.

That grasp of mathematics which, outside the province of the lightning calculator, comprehends something of the logic of numbers and their application, to see what we have, and what we want, and the direct road to our destination, needs to be nerved by a stronger diet of algebra and geometry than the averages of our examinations would often indicate.

To what useful purpose do our pupils learn from the book the names of the ten important towns of Massachusetts, without knowing so much as whether they are something to be laid away in safes, or strung up to dry like the old wives' apples; or to learn that Minnesota produces wheat, Kentucky tobacco, and Louisiana sugar, still ignorant whether they are picked like apples from trees, or dug from the ground like potatoes; or why spend much time or thought at all on the what or the where of the Angora cat?

And should not he who directs the education of the child have some acquaintance with the laws of mental growth and development? I mean, not the deep ponderings and abstruse reasonings of the metaphysician, and the recluse, but those accepted principles of mental action which may guide to the right mode and order of presenting the different subjects—something of the material upon which he works, and the tools to be employed.

There are more fruitful themes for our primary pupils than nice classifications and technical definitions. What not to teach is often as important a problem as how to teach. Why confuse our children with the nature and kinds of sentences before they have them at command ?