of their own immediate circle. Hugging perpetually their own firesides, they come at last to confound what is accidental with what is essential; to fancy that their own notions, tastes, and feelings, are inseparable from the nature of man. Rabelais has felicitously hit off this whole class of persons by describing them as persons who seem as if they had lived all their lives in a barrel, and only looked out at the bung-hole. Going abroad and ventilating their ideas among strangers, they find that dogmas which they have always looked upon as unquestionable, because they have never heard them questioned, are rejected by great and enlightened communities; that feelings which they had thought instinctive to the race are unknown to whole nations; that notions and opinions which have excited. their contempt or horror are regarded as ennobling and sublime by millions. They thus lose that Chinese cast of mind, that stupid contempt for everything beyond the wall of their celestial empire, which once made them ridiculous. They doubt where they once dogmatized; they tolerate where they once execrated. New associations take place among their ideas; they overhaul the old rubbish of their opinions; bigotry and prejudice are exploded; and the whole man, perhaps, undergoes a revolution of sentiments. and sympathies as complete as the mutation of form in certain insects.

For these reasons we rejoice in the increasing passion for travel, and cry "Io Triumphe!" to every locomotive that trails its murky banner along the air. Foreigners may smile at what they term our national mania for locomotion, the Bedouin habits of our people; but we regard this circulation, this vagabondizing instinct, this ebb and flow of the masses of our population-north, south, east

and west-as the very life-tide of our system. Let the sharp-witted, speculative Yankee, and the impetuous native of the South, the frank, open-hearted son of the West, and the calm-minded, dignified inhabitant of the Middle States, jostle freely together, giving and taking the peculiar tastes, feelings and opinions of their respective communities, and we shall have no fears of disunion or sectional broils. It is ignorance and isolation only which create a want of sympathy; and no American, therefore, should consider his education as complete until he has studied geography practically, not merely by scaling the dizzy heights of Mont Blanc, or exploring the vales of Cashmere, but by traveling over the length and breadth of that mighty country stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which he boasts as his own, his native land."

66

HOT-HOUSE EDUCATION.

THE

HE tendency to over-stimulate the mental faculties of the young in this country has been often rebuked by the press, but was never, we think, more alarming than now. When Mr. Parton visited Chicago some time since, to write his article on that city for the "Atlantic Monthly," he was struck with the general excellence of our public schools, but was painfully impressed with the conviction that they were intellectual hot-houses, where the minds of the young were rapidly developed, but developed at the expense of physical vigor, and at the risk of ultimate weakness, and even insanity. But Chicago is not the only city where the young are educated by steam. The idea that the intellectual growth of children should be forced like lettuces in hot-houses, is prevalent all over the country. East and West, North and South, there is a rage for cleverness; and though, like the pearl in the oyster, it be the result of disease, it is yet encouraged and applauded even when it involves the ruin of both the physical and moral health. The "smart" boy is incited to display his abilities before admiring visitors, and the "smart" girl is perched upon a music-stool at ten or twelve years of age to play a sonata of Beethoven. In a New York paper we read of a little girl whose parents boast that she is so absorbed in her school lessons that she says them over nightly in her sleep. The town of Essex, Massachusetts, boasts of another

infant phenomenon, which, though only three years old, plays over three hundred pieces on the piano. At a Sunday school celebration on Long Island, where prizes were given to those children who recited from memory the greatest number of verses from the Bible, a little pale-faced prodigy, a girl of only four years old,- distanced all her rivals by repeating one hundred and eleven verses of Mark's Gospel! Englishmen, it is said, are surprised at the precocity of American children, and the variety of their attainments at an early age; but even John Bull is beginning to copy our absurdities, and to be dissatisfied unless the young travel in "lightning express" trains along the railways of knowledge. An English editor met a little girl going to school the other day, who had work enough cut out for a full-grown Euclid. Besides lessons in orthography, etymology, and syntax, she had others to learn in astronomy, belles-lettres, music, drawing, and political economy, with side issues, consisting of cardboard, needle-work, and Berlin wool, pictures of lemon-colored sheep kept from indigo lions by a saffron-colored shepherd, and the whole to be done up and finished in three hours!

A writer in Macmillan's Magazine, a few years ago, spoke of four cases that had come to his knowledge of girls seriously injured by excessive educational cramming. In one, the brain was utterly unable to bear the burden put upon it, and the pupil was removed from school in a highly excitable state; in another, epileptic fits had followed the host of subjects pressed upon the scholar; in the third, the symptoms of brain fog had become so obvious that the amount of schooling had been greatly reduced; and in a fourth fits had been induced, followed by complete prostration of brain. The same writer quotes from a work by

Brudenell Carter on "The Influence of Education and Training in Preventing Diseases of the Nervous System," a statement that there is a large public school in London where boys from ten to twelve years old carry home tasks which will occupy them till near midnight, and where the rules and laws of study are so arranged as to preclude the possibility of sufficient recreation. Some years ago the British public was startled by the suicides of young men who had been preparing for examination at the University of London. As if the cubic capacity of the British skull were annually increasing, new studies are continually added to the academic curriculum, which exacts an amount of labor suited only to a matured brain. Facts like these are alarming, and show that in education, as in everything else, the "haste that makes waste" is the great curse of modern life. Instead of following the course which nature dictates, and leaving the child to feel its own powers, and to revel in infantile wonder at the objects which solicit its gaze, we begin at once to worry it with school-books, and labor with might and main to make it "a useful member of society." Before the age of four we begin the work of oppressing its little brain with an incubus of technical terms and pedantic phrases, and compel it to acquire, by painful and irksome attention, things which would tax severely the intellect of an adult. At seven or eight it is deep in the mysteries of arithmetic, grammar, "geography and the use of globes"; at nine or ten we cram it with Greek and Latin; at twelve to fourteen it vaults into College and coat-tails; and at seventeen or eighteen has been. dragged through a four-years' course, having acquired a smattering of everything, with a thorough knowledge of