lity, from the absence of which rules and penalties become necessary: it is thus enabled, to dispense with these formal and mechanical aids, and, rising to a higher class of mental motives, exerts a more propitious influence. It fastens on the individual mind by methods resembling those of judicious maternal management, which are always addressed to the affections or to reason, and operate not as laws but as principles.

An infant school, when rightly conducted, is made to resemble a family; the teacher taking, for a time, the place of the parent. In a word, the mind and character of the teacher are brought into direct contact with those of the children; and the management of the school depends not on a preestablished system of rules or routine of exercises, but on the immediate action of a presiding mind. No dependence is placed on formalities of any sort. The teacher endeavours rather to avoid these, and trusts to his influence over reason and affection. Instead of repressing the mind by a rule, or restraining it by

penalty, he endeavours to lift it up to intelligent views of order and duty, and to inspire it with the conscious pleasure of rectitude and self-control. To this end, he reasons and persuades; he appeals to sympathy; he calls in the aid of imagination. If the quickness of infantile emotion has, for a moment, overthrown reason, he calmly and gently endeavours to raise it again. If waywardness arises, the little offender is never made to feel the discipline of systematic resentment: he is directed to a new train of thought, by means of new objects; he is placed amidst a cheerful group of his associates, and is allowed to take part in their employments; he is presented with a picture calculated to raise an agreeable or tranquil state of feeling; or is told an appropriate and interesting story, which wins him back from his temporary mood of pain, and restores to him that balance of his infant powers, which circumstances had disturbed.

The teacher of an infant school does not come to his employment with an apparatus of regulations, prohibitions, and penalties, contrived beforehand, and happily calculated to ope

rate as a general prescription and infallible remedy for all moral disorders: he comes to watch the infant mind in its action and tendencies, to aid and befriend it; he 'occasionally ventures to guide and direct it, but never thwarts it, and seldom checks it. His methods spring up at the moment; they arise out of particular occurrences, and vary with every aspect of the mind. He cherishes infantile virtue by giving it free scope and generous encouragement, rather than by soliciting or exciting it by any particular expedient: vice he anticipates and prevents, by taking away the occasions of it.*

The intellectual instruction attempted in infant schools, is not so successful, perhaps, as the moral management. It is sometimes carried much farther than the infant capacities admit, and so becomes nominal and apparent, in some particulars, more than real or beneficial. I allude, here, to the inculcation of dogmatic theology, to lessons in the nomenclature of geometry and astronomy, and to the exercise of chanting tables in arithmetic. Much, I admit, is apparently done in this way: the memory is called into use, and the children are made to seem very intelligent. But the memory thus cultivated is verbal merely; and the knowledge is that of words rather than things. This is but the exploded system of teaching by rote, revived and applied to science, instead of the columns of the spelling-book. There is no intellectual gain in such instruction; or, rather, there is no instruction given in such

cases.

Leave the infant being to nature's tuition; and what a contrast is exhibited to the common, unmeaning, and mechanical process of elementary education! As soon as the infant can walk, he manifests that he has learned to discriminate forms and colors, odors and sounds, without teaching. If left to himself, he walks about in the field, picking the most beauti

* The humorous and eccentric moralist, John Newton, has left a great legacy for teachers in that shrewd saying of his, 'Let me first fill the bushel with wheat, and then I defy any man to fill it with chaff.'

ful and fragrant plants around him. He prefers one shape of a leaf to another: he selects the most brilliant blossoms. He stops to listen to the natural melody of the birds. He watches, with sympathetic delight, the varied forms, and the free and graceful movements of the different animals he sees. In all these employments he is undergoing a discipline of attention, judgment, memory, imagination, and feeling, which the superficial observer may not trace, but which is not the less real, useful, and practical.

Appropriate instruction for infancy would be such as should follow out and regulate these tendencies of nature,—not preclude them, by an arbitrary and formal routine, as is commonly done, in what is called regular education. The infant school system is not, as yet, what it may be expected to become, after a few years more of experiment and observation shall have shed their light on this new department of instruction. It needs a still greater freedom from the shackles of previous custom. But it is deserving of all praise, in its tendency to afford a natural and generous scope to the young mind,—in its compliance with the obvious predilections of juvenile taste, in its liberal supply of those objects on which the affections of infancy and childhood naturally fasten, and by means of which they are invigorated and expanded. Pictures, and such playthings as are calculated to have a salutary effect on mind and body, are freely used in the infant schools. But it is much to be desired that the branches of knowledge, and the practical exercises, which are introduced in these and similar schools, should be such as even the infant mind could appreciate, that natural history, in all those branches of it which are accessible to childhood, should be still more extensively introduced, and taught by means of specimens or pictures, and other representations. The capacities and propensities of the infant mind would, in this way, be equally consulted; and a vast deal of useful mental discipline on the forms and colors of objects might thus be imparted. The elements of number and combination might be drawn from the same source. Attention

and discrimination would, by such means, be successfully cultivated; memory would be usefully employed; the affections would be interested and refined; imagination would be exercised; and the whole mind would receive an intellectual impulse, favorable to elevation and purity of character.

Instruction in this department of science, however, would need to be divested of system and of nomenclature, and to be modified, in all respects, by the condition of childhood. The teacher's aim should be to elicit thought and reflection, rather than to furnish the appearance of scientific acquirements; early cultivation being regarded by him merely as a preparative for intellectual habits, and not requiring, therefore, the terms and the apparatus which belong to later stages in the pursuit of knowledge.

The rudiments of several useful accomplishments, may, no doubt, be successfully taught in early childhood. Among these would certainly be reading, writing, and arithmetic; --but the last two as comparatively unimportant at the early stage of infancy, and the first, rather as a happy means of promoting general habits of intelligence and of pure morality, than as a thing urgent or indispensable. A child may be well informed, comparatively, may be accustomed to excellent moral habits, may have been, in fact, well taught, without being able, as yet, to write or read or spell; and the success of a teacher who is engaged in the instruction of young children, should never be measured by the letter of attainment, even in these practical branches, but by the extent to which he has imparted the power of attention, and by his endeavours to create an inquisitive and discriminating turn of mind, or a delight in mental occupation.

The true idea of an infant or elementary school would be most fully realised by that of an infant lyceum,' (so to term it,) in which the main object is not to peruse any one volume, or exhaust any one science, but rather to select the instructive and the entertaining from all, to excite a general interest in

the rudiments of knowledge, and to produce a relish for intellectual pursuits.

There are but few books which could be mentioned, as suited to the wants of the infant mind, or successfully adapted to the business of elementary instruction. The current volumes of natural history are too extensive in their plan, or are so largely devoted to rare and foreign animals, as to be unsuitable for very young children. A book of domestic animals, with correct and neat engravings, would be very useful in this department. Worcester's Primer will be found serviceable to children old enough to use it. But a simpler book still would be better. Fowle's Child's Arithmetic is, on the whole, well adapted to its objects; so also is Emerson's North merican Arithmetic. A slate and slate pencil, put into the hands of children who are capable of using them, with permission to draw and print, are an excellent means of employment and of improvement. The Child's Song Book will be found useful in any attempt to teach simple tunes to little children, and a volume of suitable drawings or engravings, selected as already mentioned, would afford much useful instruction, as well as entertainment. Such, however, is the scantiness of supply in all these departments of publication, that no book can be mentioned with exclusive or unqualified approbation. The teacher must expect to find all such aids in need of modification and improvement. He must look to the minds of his little charge themselves, to ascertain what he and they need; and he must, after all, draw largely from his own resources for methods and materials.

The great means, indeed, of improving elementary education we must look for in the character and qualifications of teachers themselves. One prevalent and fatal error must first be corrected, the impression that little is required of an elementary teacher, and that any person is competent to such an office. No mistake could be more prejudicial to education