best place that God has ordained for man. To form a hu man soul to virtue and to enrich it with knowledge, is an office inferior only to creating power. Toil on! fellow teacher, faithfully, earnestly and perseveringly. Your work is vast and your responsibility great, but you shall not lose your reward.

0.

TEACH THE CHILDREN TO SING.

The wisest of all the heathen nations, the ancient Greeks, made a point of teaching their children music; because, they said, it taught them, not to be self-willed and fanciful, but to see the beauty of order, the usefulness of rules, the divineness of laws.

The importance of teaching music, especially vocal mu sic, to children, can scarcely be over estimated. Its val ue as a means of government in the nursery, its soothing power over the wayward and fretful child, every mother well knows; and every teacher should know, practically and experimentally, its power to allay excitement and subdue evil passions in school. Under its influence anger subsides, ill-will vanishes, and the spirit of revenge softens to forbearance and then to pity, and love takes the place of malice and hatred. Introduce vocal music into a turbulent school, and it will prove like oil on troubled. waters. Let it be introduced and persevered in, and very soon elements of harmony will appear where discord and ill-nature previously prevailed.

Teach a child to sing "I'll away, I'll away," etc., and he will need no rod to drive him, or commands to force him, to school. If a child does not at once discern "the beauty of order, the usefulness of rules, the divineness of laws," the sure and certain outwork of the influence of music upon the mind is tune and time-promptness and efficiency-life and energy.

Then, by all means, teach the children to sing. At the

fireside, in the schools and every where,

Let the young voice
Strike a sweet note of praise,
Or blend with music's charm
Thoughts fresh and warm
As childhood's days.
Sing with the early bird
At morn its sweetest lay,
And carol through the day
Its thoughts unheard.
O let the children sing-
And hasten thus the hour
When music's Heavenly power

Eden shall bring,

And Heaven again, with angel's voice,
In peace on earth, with man rejoice.

M.

ELEMENTARY STUDIES.

Whatever care and thought may have been spent upon the selection of the studies pursued in our schools, it is still an open question whether we have, in every instance, the results of the wisest possible choice, and whether certain advantageous changes are not readily practicable. Without presuming to dogmatize or to bestow censure, it may not be wholly idle to seize a few floating thoughts bearing upon this subject, and to endeavor to reduce them to an intelligible form. At least it may afford an oppor tunity for the removal of groundless fears and for the correction of false impressions.

The opinion- or at least the impression-seems to be an increasing one, that the course of study pursued in our schools, especially in the lower grades, is not, in every respect, the best that can be devised, and that improvements are not only possible but immediately and eminently desirable. It seems difficult, for those who observe and reflect, to shun this conviction. There are what appear to be manifest indications of existing defects-of mistakes in the choice of subjects, or of methods, or both. The permanent acquisitions of pupils, in either intellectual power or the knowledge of facts, do not seem to correspond to

the amount of time spent in study. No one pretends to deny that the branches pursued are valuable and impor tant. Nor will any one contend that they are made at all too familiar to the mind of the pupil. The fault is rather of a different kind. We too frequently find the attainments of the pupil, after years of study in some particular branch, below what we have reason to expect. For instance, it is no uncommon thing to find pupils at the age of fifteen and upwards unable to answer very common questions in geography. And yet these same pupils may have had daily recitations on the subject during, perhaps, five out of the ten years of their school attendance. In the intermediate school and in the junior classes of the grammar school, they probably recited with great fluency the lessons from the text-book, drew maps with neatness and facility, and won golden opinions at the quarterly examinations. The appa rent fact that so large a portion of their attainments has evaporated, in the space of a couple of years, so as to be of but little practical value, suggests either a wrong mode of pursuing the study, or a premature pursuit of it by the pupil. The question arises-Are the minds of our pupils sufficiently mature for the intelligible pursuit of this study at the age when they are usually required to engage in it? Are not the ideas which they gain of the earth, the natter-of-fact world in which we have our abiding place, to a very great extent inadequate and erroneous? Have they not been learning the names of crooked lines on pa per, as likely, in their misconception, to run up hill as down, instead of rivers which carry the water of the moun tain shower and the protracted rain storm through the lowest level of the valleys into the ocean? And have they not been mistaking irregular triangles and squares and trapezoids of red, green, blue and yellow, for continents, and small circles of varying size for cities, towns and vil lages? And may not these misconceptions prove an embarrassment, at a later period, in the acquirement of cor. rect conceptions? May it not, in many cases, cost as

much to unlearn what is false as it would to acquire what is true, de novo? If these things receive an affirmative answer, the inference follows that there has been a mistake, and that such portions of the subject as lie behind the comprehension of the pupil should be deferred until his mind becomes more mature. Were the facts which he has once learned, to remain permanently stored in his memory so as to be easily recalled, it might somewhat weaken the force of this inference, notwithstanding the difficulty he would find in separating them from his own misconceptions. But in numerous instances the recollection of three-fourths of the facts themselves will have been lost before they become fixed in the mind by rational reflection, while numerous misconceptions continue to hover like shadows over the general subject, or to shine like ignes fatui-now here, now there-only to bewilder and mislead. A portion of the facts of geography can be both learned and understood by young pupils. Should not these be carefully selected and arranged for their acquisition, and the remainder of the subject be reserved for a period of increased intelligence and ability?

The subject of arithmetic, as at present pursued in our schools, has not now for the first time fallen uuder suspicion. Nor can we wonder,-while the majority of our pupils from the age of six or seven, or even younger, to that of twelve or fifteen, are engaged in its pursuit as constantly as the schools are in session,-that the question arises whether this long period of application to a single branch of study is judiciously employed. No other branch of study, if we except reading and spelling, is allowed to absorb so large an amount of time as this. This can be warranted only upon the assumption of its greater relative importance, or of the inherent difficulties in the way of its mastery. But waiving the consideration of its comparative practical value, either as a means of mental discipline or as a preparation for the duties of active life, and granting that its importance is as great as its most zeal

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ous advocates claim for it, the question still remains-Is so large an amount of time required for its mastery? We confess that, when we have seen two pupils of nearly equal capacity-one of whom at the age of ten was barely acquainted with the processes of adding, substracting, multiplying and dividing simple numbers, and the other at the same age equipped with the results of five years previous study-evincing at the age of twelve about equal ability in comprehending the conditions of a problem and about equal facility in its solution, we have found it difficult to divest ourselves of impressions of time not wisely employed. And when we have seen pupils at the age of seven or eight exhibit remarkable power in the rapid combination of numbers, and go through the demonstration of such questions as-Four sixths of.fifteen is what part of five eighths of sixty four?—one of the easy ques tions-with the precision of clock work, and yet, at the age of twelve, sadly puzzled in finding the amount of a note the back of which was burdened by a few indorsements, the question has protruded itself with some pertinacity, whether what on the former occasion seemed so much like the work of a machine, was utterly a delusion after all. If an intelligent pupil can obtain as efficient a mathematical discipline between the ages of ten and thirteen as most of our pupils gain between five and the latter age-and we incline to the belief that this is approximately true-we need no further evidence that much time is spent upon this subject that could with much greater advantage be bestowed upon others.

It is not necessary here to extend our consideration to other branches of study. If the course pursued in our primary and intermediate schools involves the mistakes at which we have hinted, there arise two important questions which demand an answer. First, in what consist the existing defects? and second, how can they be obviated? To the first of these an answer is suggested by what has been said above. It is that the studies pursued are not