frequently put and re-put, that they amount on average to fifty per cent, at least, of the total number that may be set to-morrow, to addle the brains of the Smiths, Browns, and Robinsons who may be ambitious of serving their country in a red-tape capacity.

It has often struck me that the general principles of our national system of education are open to considerable improvement.

We go to work on a wrong foundation.

Any plan of instruction, meant to be permanent in its effects, should be homogeneous: we, on the contrary, so break up and divide the different branches of ordinary knowledge, that they resemble more a number of disconnected particles, loosely strung together without order or uniformity, than the kindred units of a harmonious whole—as should properly be the case.

We mark out and specify, geography, history, science, and Belles Lettres, as distinct subjects for study—whereas, in reality, they dovetail into one another in the closest bonds of relationship; and, were they only thus judiciously intermingled, in one, thorough, cosmical course of learning, they would, most likely, be better understood in their separate parts, and, undoubtedly, be better remembered.

For instance, in grounding the young idea in the geography of any particular country, the main points of its history should follow as a natural sequence. Its seas and rivers would lead to the consideration of commerce and the polity of nations:—the mention of its towns, suggest the names of its great men in literature and art. Its scenery would call to mind the poets who might have made it famous, the artists who may have portrayed its beauties with their pencil; while, to pursue the theme, its valleys and mountains would remind the student of the value of agriculture and mineral wealth—besides attracting his notice to atmospherical and other scientific phenomena, that can be far more readily comprehended by young learners, when thus seen, as it were, in action, than if taught merely in separate dry treatises that seem to have little in common with the busy, bustling, moving world, whose laws they affect to expound.

My plan, indeed, would be a further development of the Kindergarten scheme, and the Pestalozzian system, generally.

As soon as children had passed through the rudimentary stages of instruction, being able to spell and read correctly, their advanced studies should be entirely shorn of their present routine characteristics. They might be made so full of life, and even 

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