NOTICE.

This report is forwarded to the several County Clerks in the State of Michigan, for distribution as follows:

To each County Clerk, one copy;

To each County Treasurer, one copy;
To each Township Clerk, one copy;
To each Township Library, one copy;

To each District Library, one copy;

To the Director for the use of the District Board, in each District having no Library, one copy;

To the Clerk of each City having a City Library, for the use of such Library, ten copies.

The attention of School Officers is respectfully solicited to the Superintendent's Report. Matters of great interest to the Schools are there discussed, and School Officers are requested to give the views presented an earnest and candid consideration.

School Officers who receive the Report, will do a public ser. vice by calling the attention of Teachers and others to its various suggestions.

OFFICE OF SUPERrintendent of PUBLIC INSTRUCTION,

Lansing, December 15, 1861.

TO HIS EXCELLENCY, AUSTIN BLAIR,

Governor of the State of Michigan:

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I have the honor to submit, herewith, the Annual Report required by law from the Department of Public Instruction, for the year 1861.

Very respectfully, your, &c.,

J. M. GREGORY,

Superintendent of Public Instruction.

STATE OF MICHIGAN.

1861.

DOCUMENT NO. 5.

ANNUAL REPORT of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

When the tempest shakes our dwelling and threatens its destruction, we point with more than wouted pride and joy to the firm foundations, and to the massive beams that brace the walls and bear aloft the roof. So when a great political convulsion, like the monstrous and wicked rebellion which now rages in our country, arises and threatens to hurl us down from the high places of national freedom and power, of Christian civilization and peaceful prosperity, and to everwhelm us in the rent fragments of the benign government which has so long sheltered us, we may turn with a new and deeper veneration to that great system of public education which our fathers so wisely instituted, and in whose issues of common learning and virtue our political fabric finds its strongest safeguards and surest supports.

Flung, in one rude hour, from the peaceful repose of nearly eighty years, out into the midst of a strife whose wide proportions and intense bitterness are scarcely paralleled in the history of our world,-pushed suddenly to the utmost strain of our national energies, to suppress a rebellion as cruel as it is