timely done, many a life has been, and may be saved,and many other matters which require what is called presence of mind.

racter:

While we have demanded, for the educator, superior accomplishments in all the branches of intellectual study which we have enumerated, we should wish him to keep in his view the extent of knowledge in these branches which it will, under the most improved system, be practicable to impart generally to his pupils, in elementary education. He must possess the power of fixing elementary principles in the student's mind, more than details; these principles just so far illustrated and realized by details as to render them of future practical utility, either to the extent they have been acquired, or as the basis of yet farther attainments. Every sane human being should possess knowledge of something of the following chaGoing out first to the vast, he should know that creation exists in space which is boundless; and that necessarily, for we cannot conceive a limit, without conceiving space beyond it. In space he will be aware exist numberless suns, which appear to us as little stars, each sun, it is almost demonstrated, having attending planets; that these suns, though millions in our firmament are only a group; and that at distances, which mock imagination, there are other groups forming other firmaments, perhaps greater than ours in the number and vastness of their suns; so that our own sun is a mere point in creation, and our earth relatively a grain of sand. He should know that the fixed stars, or suns, are at great distances from the earth, the nearest twenty billions of miles, every billion a million of millions. The principles of gravitation will follow, and a fair and competent knowledge of the leading phenomena of astronomy.

Descending to our own planet, he will be led to observe that it is composed of matter, having relations, when

taken in masses, of attraction, density, &c. producing known results, in obedience to certain laws, the knowledge of which is called Mechanical Philosophy.

But matter has internal qualities, and we find its elements reduced to about fifty- and capable, probably, of greater simplification-solid, fluid, and gaseous, combining under certain ascertained rules, and forming the whole of the vast variety of things, living and inanimate, which surround us. With the adequate details for illustration the pupil will obtain, in this department, a competent knowledge of Chemistry; will be made familiar with what is known of these natural agents of incomprehensible power,-Heat, Light, Magnetism, and Electricity. The pupil should not leave school ignorant of the deeply interesting but comparatively recent discovery-from the examination of the strata of the earth, to as great a depth as has yet been reached, and that is relatively but a film, -that the earth has undergone well ascertained changes during the lapse of countless ages, and been inhabited by successive races of animals, whose remains are found petrified, as a part of, but quite distinguishable from, the rocks which inclose them. The composition and uses of these rocks themselves will follow, and the pupil will have attained some notion of Geology and Mineralogy.

With a competent knowledge of the earth's surface, its land and water, &c. called Physical Geography, and of its atmosphere, winds, tides, weather, &c. termed Meteorology, the pupil will have gone through the knowledge of the inorganic world.

Organic nature comprises plants and animals, all that live by food, increase and grow, reproduce their like, and decay and die; none of these characteristics marking inorganic nature.

Botany is the science of the vegetable organic world. Zoology of the animal; in its most comprehensive and le

gitimate sense comprising man himself, though generally applied to the study of the inferior animals only.

Man, hitherto the least pursued, is nevertheless the most important study for man. No one should be, as multitudes are, ignorant of his bodily structure and functions, or Anatomy and Physiology; if his various systems of bones, muscles, blood, viscera, nerves, and above all brain; the last formerly so little understood, but now advanced, from mere anatomical nomenclature, to a wellascertained physiology.

The nature of Pathology, or disease, and its relief in Medicine should at least be comprehended, as a part of science, though to an extent greatly short of professional attainment.

Men as divided into races and located in different parts of the earth present the science of Human Geography, or the Natural History of Man. Divided into communities and governments, we have Political Geography. It ought to be as discreditable to be ignorant of these, as now it is to be unable to read.

History naturally follows, as a chronicle of the events which have occurred for ages in these communities, and in their intercourse, pacific as well as hostile, with each other. This point requires a slight amplification. In nothing is there more time lost, nay worse than lost, than in teaching history to the young, much injury is done by it to society. The annals of man have hitherto been little else than a chronicle of the animal propensities. In more modern times, the moral sentiments have begun to improve human affairs, but to so small a degree, as to serve only as a light to make more visible the general darkness. The antient world was enslaved by selfishness almost unmitigated. Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Asiatics, were at one and the same time degraded and oppressed by pride, rapacity, and cruelty. Their history

is a catalogue of vain glory, jealousy, injustice, fraud, violence, slaughter, and robbery, all in their most criminal degree. But by the Creator's fiat, justice and mercy alone" endure for ever." The punishment is sometimes slow, but it is sure. The criminals were made the instruments of each other's destruction. They successively triumphed and fell; and the antient nations tore each other to pieces. As a part of his educational course, it is right that the student of history should know that such things were; but this may be done without his reading volumes of the horrible details. As hitherto written and taught, history has done much to occasion that prominence of the passion for arms, that delight in war, which has descended even to our times, and which has rendered martial deeds so popular, and loaded them with the highest honours and richest rewards.

The

The internal polity of the nations of antiquity presents us with no higher pattern for the guidance of more moral modern times, or for the instruction of the young. Brute despotism and abject submission sum up the relations of the governors and the governed. In this there is the most uninteresting and uninstructive monotony. The sensualities, caprices, and cruelties, of tyrants, in all countries of the antient world, were so much alike in complexion, that when we have seen one we have seen all. Greeks and Romans themselves do not afford models for the study of liberal principles. Their practical morality was low. Their rulers were tyrants when circumstances gave them power, and the people were not less tyrannical, ungrateful, and unjust, when it was their turn to exercise it. Benevolence and justice are the only lasting foundations of free institutions. These desire equal rights, privileges, and enjoyments, for the whole human race; they are inconsistent with a tendency in the governors to exclude, oppress, or engross, and in the governed to over

leap the self imposed bounds of social relations. There is no durability in any government where the rulers do more than guard the community from excesses which may arise from the selfish feelings; or where the governed combine to exercise anything else than mutual good-will, fairness, and respect, for each other's rights. These were limits unknown in communities impelled by animalism like Greece and Rome.

Before history can be perfectly well taught it must be properly written. It must be written under the direction of an enlightened philosophy of mind and human nature, and the sound ethics of the supremacy of the moral sentiments and intellect. It ought to be viewed as a record of the manifestations of the faculties of man, and its events classed according to their relation to the higher or lower feelings of humanity; exalting the former as worthy of approval and imitation, and reprobating the latter according to their place in the scale of vice or crime, to which, in abuse, they essentially belong. The historian thus guided would not worship the false splendour of the Greeks and Romans; -a worship too unequivocally indicative of a sympathy in ourselves with the lower feelings, out of which that false splendour arose; - but tracing through all their ramifications and tortuosities, to their ultimate inevitable retribution, acts fundamentally immoral or criminal, would sternly refuse to them the slightest shelter from universal execration, in the most dazzling feats of heroism, the most munificent dispensation of plunder, the finest taste, or most gorgeous magnificence. The same guiding principles would impart to history a philosophical character which would give it the highest practical value; and, instead of an unedifying monotony of vice and crime, would render it a continued illustration of principle and an instructive guide in national practice.