Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, and Kentucky. They are well supported, and conducted with marked ability.

I might mention many other indications of the progress of our cause since the organization of our association, but these must suffice. In what degree this progress has been accelerated by our labors does not become us to say. It is something to be conscious that we have done what we could. It is enough for us to know that our object has commanded the respect, and our efforts have been cheered by the good wishes, of the wise and the patriotic in every part of our country. The seed which we with thousands of others have sown is already producing an abundant harvest. It is now the national sentiment that it is the duty of the State to provide the means of education for every one of its citizens, and to carry forward that education to the highest practical point of perfection. The work is rapidly going forward. States which only a few years since were admitted to the Union, now number their pupils by hundreds of thousands. Our last census informs us that in 1850 there were 4,089,507 pupils in our various schools and colleges, at an expense of $16,162,000; and I am credibly informed, that, at the present time, I might add fifty per cent. to these numbers and still be within the truth. In our various public libraries, most of them intended for popular use, there were 4,636,411 volumes and this number has since been greatly increased. A single fact, better than any statistics, illustrates the amount of reading matter required to

meet the wants of this country. The demand for paper is greatly in advance of the supply. We cannot make and import rags enough to meet our regular consumption. This country, a few centuries since, an untrodden wilderness, is now draining of its rags the shores of the Mediterranean, once the chosen home of European and Asiatic civilization. With such prospects before us, the American teacher may surely be encouraged to pursue with confident hope and renewed diligence his useful and selfdenying labor.

Here I might very properly close, for I have already occupied as large a portion of your time as I had intended. I am, however, tempted to detain you a few moments longer. We have seen what has been already accomplished. This whole country must soon be educated. Some of us may live tổ see the time when there will not be found a nativeborn American who has not enjoyed the advantages of common school education. Should we not endeavor to render this universal education productive of the most valuable results? In the work of benevolence we can never say that we have attained. Every step of our upward progress serves only to open to us a still wider horizon; new fields are spread before us demanding the labor of cultivation, and broader harvests wave inviting the sickle of the reaper.

How may we render education more perfect? We are charged with the cultivation of mind. How may we best develope the intellectual faculties, so as to render our spiritual nature in the highest

degree capable of accomplishing the purposes for which it was created? Should we attempt an answer to this question in all its bearings, volumes might be written, and our work yet remain unfinished. I will, therefore, confine myself to a single aspect of this subject, which, I fear, we are at present somewhat prone to overlook.

If we would educate mind, we should certainly inquire into the nature of mind, and the order in which its faculties are developed. Without attempting any formal analysis of our spiritual nature, it will be sufficient for my purpose to remark, that our faculties may generally be denominated either Objective or Subjective. By the first of these we acquire a knowledge of the qualities and relations of the world without us, and by the second, of the energies and relations of the world within us. The one find their field of operation in the objects of the material, the other, in the objects of the spiritual world. The knowledge of the one presents itself to the mind in the form of an image which we create for ourselves, when we think of it; the other forms no such representation. By the one, we receive impressions from without; by the other, having formed abstract conceptions, we use them for the purpose of arriving at other and more extended knowledge.

The object of all education is, to develope and improve both of these classes of faculties; in a word, every power of the soul. But it is evident that these powers can be improved and strengthened only by use. All study, therefore, so far as it

accomplishes its purpose, should both enlarge our knowledge and improve our mental energies. We do not study one thing to strengthen the mind, and another to increase our knowledge; but we study always with this twofold object. If we study correctly, comprehending not only the fact but the reason of it, and the principles on which it depends, both of these results will, no doubt, be accomplished. Hence, it would also seem that no faculty can properly be developed by study, until it has arrived at such maturity as to be capable of free and spontaneous exercise.

The question then here arises, do these faculties all come to maturity at the same time. Are our perceptive faculties as active and as vigilant in age as in youth? Is the memory as trustworthy at sixty as at sixteen? Is the reasoning power as vigorous in childhood as in middle age? We all know the only answer that can be given to these questions. We must all have observed that there is a marked succession in the development of our various faculties. A perfect human mind is endowed with them all, but at different periods of its existence it possesses them in very different degrees. This successive development occurs especially during that portion of our lives which is occupied in the process of education. The most important changes in the biases of the intellect, generally take place, if I mistake not, between the ages of ten and twenty. I presume that if we recall the period of our education, we can remember the time when we were conscious of a great transformation in our

intellectual nature. Without knowing why, we found that our taste for reading was created anew. We discovered what was meant by beauty of style and delicacy of sentiment; we could delight ourselves in the generalizations of science, and were fascinated with all that revealed to us the nature and relations of our spiritual being. A little while before, and all discussion of this kind seemed to us stale, dry, and unprofitable, and we wondered how any one could find any interest in such abstract, and, to us, incomprehensible disquisitions. Now we derived our highest pleasure from these very studies which, only a year or two since, were, to us, as a book that was sealed. I can remember as though it was yesterday, the, time when I became conscious of a change like this in my own mind, and I presume that many of you can bear witness to a similar experience.

If these be the facts, should we not be guided by them in constructing our systems of education? We neither created mind nor established the laws of its development. If we would treat it successfully, we must act in obedience to the laws to which the Creator has subjected it. If there is an established succession in the development of the faculties, and if no faculty can be improved but by use, and if we can never use any faculty successfully until it has arrived at some degree of maturity, it will surely follow that the order of our studies must be arranged in conformity to the successive development of our faculties.

As to the order of the development of our intel