healthy development of ideas. All educators acknowledge this, just as men in general acknowledge the moral law; but how many of them live up to it? How many of them are willing to leave in their pupils' minds liberal tracts of ignorance, acknowledged as such tracts which might be cultivated, but which are left fallow simply in order that the mental powers may not be overtaxed nor imagination unduly restrained? We venture to say that the cases are rare in which an effort is not being made to cultivate, as it were, every square inch of mental territory, and call all the strength of the intellect into exercise. Each school or academy must teach so many "branches"; it would never do for one to omit what another has in its curriculum; and every pupil, if not compelled, is urged to take up just as many subjects as he or she can possibly grapple with. The general, at least the frequent, consequence is—congestion, confusion, enfeebled memory, impaired judgment, lowered intellectual vitality. Better far, in many cases, would it have been if the child, with no education beyond reading and writing, had lived in a concrete world and picked up, gradually, verifiable notions about real things. There is nothing fortuitous in the fact that so many men, eminent in various departments of life, have had but the most meager "educational advantages" in their youth. It would seem as if the one great "educational advantage" they had was in getting free from so-called education at a very early period and betaking themselves to the school of active life—a school that leads up to abstract truths only through multiplied concrete examples; that leaves ample space in the mind for useful ignorance, and consequently makes all the better provision for useful knowledge.
There is much sound philosophy in regard to education abroad in the world to-day. What is needed is, that educators should be as wise in practice as they are in theory. The labor of the gardener, every one knows, consists, to a large extent, in "thinning out" his crops. If a similar process could be practiced on the minds of the young, and if it were practiced, the evils of too copious sowing would not be so great; but, as the method is hardly applicable to intellectual growths, teachers should educate themselves up to the point of sowing sparingly in order that they may reap abundantly. The evil of too thick sowing attains, we believe, greater proportions in academies for young ladies than anywhere else. There, nearly everything that is taught to boys enters into the course of instruction, while music and other "accomplishments," together with an extra language or two, are generally superadded. As if this were not enough, a special acquaintance with the literature, history, and institutions of the ancient Jews, untinged, however, by any touch of "modern criticism," is frequently also insisted on. The effect of all this may be easily imagined—a spindly growth of rootless ideas, habits of intellectual indifference, a medley of incongruous notions in regard to ill-apprehended facts; in a word, a seriously injured, if not a fatally ruined, intelligence.
The intellectual signs of the times, it should be remembered, are not all favorable. We have such an educational apparatus, for extent and scope at least, as the world never saw before; but the results—it is not easy to be enthusiastic over the results. Where is the quickened sense for evidence that we might have expected to see? Where the seriousness of intellectual aim? Where the refinement of popular taste? Cant seems to stalk abroad through the world as potent an enslaver as ever of the minds of men. Credulity is wide-spread. Superstition still occupies its strongholds and rules over vast multitudes. Faction controls our politics and legislation is made a plaything. We have, perhaps, expected too much of education in the past; but at least, if we un-
