jumped overboard, and, just as they were beginning to be seririously alarmed at his long disappearance, he rose with his mistress from the water. This story is not deficient in that which all such stories should have to be perfectly delightful, nate conclusion. The party remained at the Fijis till the oppressor died, and then returned to Vavaoo, where they enjoyed a long and happy life. This is related as an authentic tradition.

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LXXXII. - THOUGHTS ON EDUCATION.

1. AIR AND EXERCISE.- London Quarterly Review.

SPECIAL attention should be given, both by parents and teachers, to the physical development of the child. Pure air and free exercise are indispensable, and wherever either of these is withheld the consequences will be certain to extend themselves over the whole future life. The seeds of protracted and hopeless suffering have, in innumerable instances, been sown in the constitution 40 of the child simply through ignorance of this great fundamental physical law; and the time has come when the united voices of these innocent victims should ascend, trumpettongued," to the ears of every parent and every teacher in the land. "Give us free air and wholesome exercise; give us leave to develop our expanding energies 92 in accordance with the laws of our being; give us full scope for the elastic and bounding impulses of our youthful blood!"

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2. EDUCATION EI IN THE UNITED STATES. Webster.

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That which is elsewhere left to chance, or to charity, we secure by law. For the purpose of public instruction, we hold every man subject to taxation in proportion to his property,1 and we look not to the question whether he himself have or have not children to be benefited by the education for which he pays. We regard it as a wise and liberal system of police, by which property and life and the peace of society are secured. We seek to prevent, in some measure, the extension of the penal *I code, by inspiring a salutary and conservative principle of virtue and of knowledge at an early age.

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We hope to excite a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of character, by enlarging the capacity and increasing the sphere of intellectual enjoyment. By general instruction, we seek, as far as possible, to purify the whole moral atmosphere; * to keep good

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THOUGHTS ON EDUCATION.

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sentiments uppermost, and to turn the strong current of feeling and opinion, as well as the censures of the law and the denunciation of religion, against immorality and crime. We hope for a security, beyond the law, and above the law, in the prevalence of enlightened and well-principled moral sentiment. Education, to accomplish the ends of good government," should be universally diffused. Open the doors of the schoolhouse to all the children of the land. Let no man have the excuse of poverty 22 for not educating his own offspring. Place the means of education within his reach, and if they remain in ignorance be it his own reproach. If one object of the expenditure of your revenue be protection against crime, you could not devise a better or cheaper means of obtaining it. Other nations spend their money in providing means for its detection and punishment, but it is for the principles of our government to provide for its never occurring. The one acts by coercion, the other by prevention. On the diffusion of education among the people rest the preservation and perpetuation of our free institutions.

They give the keys of knowledge to the mass of the people. I think it may with truth be said, that the branches of knowledge taught in our common schools, when taught in a finished, masterly manner,—reading in which I include the spelling of our language-a firm, sightly, legible handwriting, and the elemental rules of arithmetic, are of greater value than all the

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rest which is taught at school. I am far from saying that nothing else can be taught at our district schools; but the young person who brings these from school, can himself, in his winter evenings, range over the entire field of useful knowledge.

Our common schools are important in the same way as the common air, the common sunshine, the common rain,-invaluable for their commonness. They are the corner-stōne of that municipal organization which is the characteristic feature of our social system; they are the fountain of that wide-spread intelligence, which, like a moral life, pervades the country. From the humblest village school there may go forth a teacher who, like Newton," shall bind his temples with the stars of Ori'on's belt, — with Herschel, light up his cell with the beams of before undiscovered planets, with Franklin, grasp the lightning.

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4. ON PAMPERING THE BODY AT THE SOUL'S EXPENSE.- Everett. What, sir! feed a child's body, and let his soul hunger! pamper his limbs, and starve his faculties! What! plant the earth,

cover a thousand hills with your droves of cattle, pursue the fish to their hiding-places in the sea, and spread out your wheatfields across the plain, in order to supply the wants of that body which will soon be as cold and senseless as their poorest clod, and let the pure spiritual essence within you, with all its glorious capacities for improvement, languish and pine! What! build factories, turn in rivers upon the water-wheels, unchain the imprisoned spirits of steam, to weave a garment for the body, and let the soul remain unadorned and naked!

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What considerate man can enter a school, and not reflect, with awe, that it is a seminary where immortal minds are training for eternity? What parent but is, at times, weighed down with the thought that there must be laid the foundations of a building which will stand when not merely temple and palace, but the perpetual hills, and the adaman'tine rocks on which they rest, have melted away! that a light may there be kindled, which will shine, not merely when every artificial beam is extinguished, but when the affrighted sun has fled away from the heavens!

5. TRUE ESTIMATE OF THE TEACHER'S CALLING.

Channing.

One of the surest signs of the regeneration of society will be the elevation of the art of teaching to the highest rank in the community. When a people shall learn that its greatest benefactors and most important members are men devoted to the liberal instruction of all its classes, to the work of raising to life its buried intellect, — it will have opened to itself the path of true glory.

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There is no office higher than that of a teacher of youth; for there is nothing on earth so precious as the mind, soul, character, of the child. No office should be regarded with greater respect. The first minds in the community should be encouraged to assume it. Parents should do all but impoverish themselves, to induce such to become the guardians and guides of their children. To this good all their show and luxury should be sacrificed. Here they should be lavish, whilst they straiten themselves in every thing else. They should wear the cheapest clothes, live on the plainest food, if they can in no other way secure to their families the best instruction. They should have no anxiety to accumulate property for their children, provided they can place them under influences which will awaken their faculties, inspire them with pure and high principles, and fit them to bear a manly, useful, and honorable part in the world. No language can express the cruelty or folly of that economy, which, to leave a fortune to a child, starves his intellect, impoverishes his heart.

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COLUMBUS AND HIS DISCOVERY.

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LXXXIII. COLUMBUS AND HIS DISCOVERY.

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1. In the latest quarter of the fifteenth century, an Italian mariner, a citizen of the little republic of Gen'o-a, who had hitherto gained a livelihood as a pilot in the commercial service of different countries, made his appearance successively at various courts in the south and west of Europe, soliciting patronage and aid for a bold and novel" project in navigation. The idea of reaching the East by a voyage around the African continent had begun to assume consistency; but the vastly more significant idea, that the earth is a globe, and capable of being circumnavigated, had by no means become incorporated into the general intelligence of the age.

2. And thus to reach the East by sailing in a western direction—this was a conception which no human being is known to have formed before Columbus, and which he proposed to the governments of Italy, of Spain, of Portugal, and of England, and for a long time without success. The state of science was not such as to enable men to discriminate between the improbable and the absurd. They looked upon Columbus as we did thirty years ago upon Captain Symmes.E But the illustrious adventurer persevered. Sorrow and disappointment clouded his spirits, but did not shake his faith nor subdue his will. His well-instructed imagination had taken firm hold of the idea that the earth is a sphere.60

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3. What seemed to the multitude even 30 of the educated of that day a doubtful and somewhat mystical theory, what appeared to the uninformed mass a monstrous paradox, contradicted by every step we take upon the broad, flat earth which we daily tread beneath 66 our feet, that great and fruitful truth revealed itself to the serene intelligence of Columbus as a practical fact, on which he was willing to stake all he had, ― character and life. And it deserves ever to be bōrne in mind, as the most illustrious_example of the connection of scientific theory with great practical results, that the discovery of America, with all its momentous consequences to mankind, is owing to his distinct conception of the single scientific proposition, ter-ra'que-ous earth is a sphere.60

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4. After years of fruitless and heart-sick solicitation, after offering in effect to this monarch and to that monarch the gift of a hemisphere, the great discoverer touches upon a partial success. He succeeds, not in enlisting the sympathy of his countrymen at Gen'o-a and Venice I for a brave brother sailor; not in giving a new direction to the spirit of măritime adventure which had so

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long prevailed in Portugal; not in stimulating the commercial thrift of Henry the Seventh, or the pious ambition of the Catholic King. His sorrowful perseverance touched the heart of a noble princess, worthy the throne which she adorned. The New World, which was just escaping the subtle kingcraft of Ferdinand, was saved to Spain by the womanly compassion of Isabella. 5. It is truly melancholy, however, to contemplate the wretched equipment for which the most powerful princess in Christendom was ready to pledge her jewels. Three small vessels one of which was without a deck, and no one of them probably exceeded the capacity of a pilot boat, and even these impressed into the public service composed the expedition fitted out under royal patronage, to realize that magnificent conception in which the creätive mind of Columbus had planted the germs of a New World. No chapter of romance equals the interest of this expedition.

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6. The departure from Palos, where, a few years before, he had begged a morsel of bread and a cup of water for his wayworn child; his final farewell to the Old World at the Cana'ries; EI his entrance upon the trade-winds, which then for the first time filled a European sail; the portentous variation of the needle,EI never before observed; the fearful course westward and westward, day after day and night after night, over the unknown ocean; the mutinous and ill-appeased crew; at length the tokens of land; the cloud-banks on the western horizon; the logs of drift-wood; the fresh shrub floating with its leaves and berries;

the flocks of land-birds; the shoals of fish that inhabit shallow water; the indescribable smell of the shore; the mysterious presentiment that ever goes before a great event; and, finally, on that ever-memorable night of the 12th of October, 1492, the moving light seen by the sleepless eye of the great discoverer himself from the deck of the Santa Maria, and in the morning the reäl, undoubted land, swelling up from the bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange new races of men, - these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our continent excels the spe'cious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines the flickering taper.

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LXXXIV. THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.

1. As they proceeded, the indications of approaching land seemed to be more certain, and excited hope in proportion. The birds began to appear in flocks, making towards the south-west.