It should also be a leading motive with every teacher, to avoid the dangers peculiar to his calling. Incident to every occupation and profession among men, there are peculiar dangers. Painters are afflicted with the "Painter's colic." The burnishers of steel die of consumption. Tailors and shoe-makers, are in danger of being hump-backed and round-shouldered; and if put to work very young, they have bandy-legs to match. Watch repairers become squint-eyed, and mere technical lawyers become squint-minded. Rich men are prone to be too conservative, and mere politicians too radical. Surgeons treat human nerves, as though they were pack-thread, and clergymen often lose all relish for innocent enjoyments, become austere and sanctimonious, and are in danger of skipping the duties of this life, in the intentness with which they look after another. Now the teacher's vocation is by no means exempt from this common lot. It has its peculiar exposures, and against them, therefore, the teacher should exercise constant vigilance. In the school-room, the teacher is, and must be, the ultimate court of appeal. All questionable points, whether in lessons or in conduct, come before him for adjudication. He holds courts both of civil and criminal jurisdiction. He determines all questions of law, as well as all matters of fact. His "terms " last through the year, and probably he decides as many questions each day, as the highest court, in any state or nation in Christendom does in a twelvemonth. Now all this tends to make him dogmatical and opinionated. I do not say, it necessarily produces dogmatism, or stubbornness in the defense of opinions; but I do say that it tends to these odious qualities, and unless this tendency be counteracted, it will produce them. His decisions, too, he makes extemporaneously. He can not, like a court of Chancery, keep a case before him, until the original par ties are dead, and their executors or administrators come in to pray for judgment. This state of things necessitates promptness, if not precipitaney, in formation of opinions; and hence an incautious teacher, in his intercourse with men, is prone to decide all social, national, or international questions,questions involving commerce, diplomacy, or war,-in as summary a manner, as when he presided in the school house forum, and decided contested points about accent or number, apples or nuts. Now against all circumscription and narrowness in the range of thought and speculation, teachers should stand guard continually. They should practice counteracting mental exercises to prevent their minds from becoming microscopic and pedantically nice; in the same way that a sensible tailor or shoemaker practices counteracting physical exercises against being bow-backed. The teacher should constantly aim at that enlargement of mind, that amplitude of view, which will assimilate the operations of the school-room to the grandest affairs of life, instead of contracting the grand affairs of life to the narrow dimensions of the school-room. By intercourse with business men, he should rectify his generalizations, and by conversation with the progress of the great and busy world, he should give his mind a centrifugal impetus, which will enlarge the diameter, without increasing the eccentricity of its orbit. There is still another point which I hope no one will deem too trivial to be noticed in this connection. Some teachers suffer under those nervous phenomena, commonly called Fidgets. Twirling a pencil-case or a watch-key; stroking down a watch-guard; fumbling with a button; making the fingers ride pick-a-pack; rocking the foot; swinging the arms; shrugging the shoulders; see-sawing the body; drumming with the fingers; snapping or cracking the joints; soloing on a whistle or a key; thrusting the hands into the pockets, or-contemptible sight-hanging up the arms, like herrings to be dried, at the armholes of the vest ;-in fine, all sorts of ungainly movements, fibrous twitchings and small spasms generally, constitute the odious tricks I refer to. Whether these unseemly exhibitions are electric in their nature; whether they operate as an escapement to carry off superabundant nervous fluid, I pretend not to decide; but I would respectfully suggest to all school-examiners, whether such manners do not disqualify for teaching. For their own sakes, and especially for the sakes of the children, let all teachers call in the surgeon, if necessary, to eradicate these nictitating membranes, or to cut off the nerves that lead to them. The motives which have thus far been specially enjoined, though in a degree personal to the teacher, are in no respect discreditable to him. I am happy however to rise out of this region into one of purer ether, to motives untainted by any personal considerations whatever. I address myself then to those high and enduring motives that grow out of the very nature of the teacher's calling. And here it is obvious, on the threshold, that the teacher presides, not over insentient and inanimate things, but over sentient and animated creatures; not over the stationary and impenetra ble, but over the progressive, and over the most impressible of all the works of the Creator; in fine, he presides, not over the ephemeral or temporal, but over the immortal. No other workman works on such materials. The natures on which he operates shall expand without bound or limit; for, when once created, they are coeternal with their Creator. Hence the smallest influence of a teacher, upon the receptive mind of a pupil, must eventuate in great results. There are no such things, in education, as trifles or insignificances. The subject fails of being appreciated merely because it is so vast; as the earth can not be clasped, like an orange, because of its size. To make it understood, it must be analyzed, and presented in fragments and by piece-meal. And I think it can be easily proved to any teacher, that each day's labor, well or illdone, will have an important, it may be a decisive effect upon the fortunes of his pupils. And what may perhaps surprise some who have never pondered on the subject, this remark holds true, even in regard to the commonest studies. Here is a boy learning to write. As he opens his manuscript-book, writes during his hour, and then lays it aside, the progress which he has made or failed to make, in regard to the cut or smoothness of a few letters or lines, seems of little consequence; and yet who that is acquainted in our cities, does not know of many instances, where a man has obtained or lost a clerkship,— and thus secured or missed a competency for life,-by his skill and dispatch, or his want of them, in the single matter of chirography? ▲ child is learning to spell, but no special pains are taken to make him respell, and respell, until spelled aright, every misspelled word. Hence his danger of error increases with the number of words he begins to use. The best age for mastering the orthography of our language passes by, and the pupil goes out into the world, exposed to the odium of illiteracy, and perhaps incurring still graver consequences. I knew a late case, where a young gentleman of sterling talents, and of great promise, lost the appointment of teacher, in one of our Public Schools, where the salary was fifteen hundred dollars a year, because in the written application which he made for the place, the word grammar was spelled grammer. He had been taught, too, in the schools of a city, whose masters received $1,500 a year. Now if orthography had been taught to that young man, in a proper manner; if he had ever written exercises in orthography, or had ever seen the misspelled word, grammer, gibbeted on the black-board, he would have saved two important things,—his mortification, and fifteen hundred dollars a year. What sort of a song will such a man sing about his old teacher? A school-boy is untaught or mistaught in reading. He makes ridiculous mistakes in the pronunciation of common words, gives such intonation and inflections as pervert an author's meaning; or worse than all, he is trained to a theatrical and overwrought style of elocution. He leaves school. By and by, in the presence of a smaller or larger company, he chances to be called upon to read. He exposes his ignorance or his affectation, gets laughed at, and is never put forward more. Clergymen have lost settlements; or what is quite as humiliating, have preached to empty seats, because of their miserable reading; and in long and complicated trials at law, where most of the evidence is documentary, lawyers have been supposed to win verdicts from a jury, because of their clear enunciation, the intelligibility, and the impressiveness, with which they have read the testimony. Another pupil has never been indoctrinated into arithmetical principles; his whole instructions in this branch, having been by arbitrary rule and formula. A place is bought for him in a city counting-room, but, owing to his frequent mistakes, he is dismissed; or in the country, he is appointed to audit the accounts of town or parish officers, makes blunders, is exposed, forfeits his reputation, and so loses all chance of promotion or advancement among his fellow-citizens. Who, too, does not know that men fail in business, losing not only property but perhaps character and integrity also, because they did not know how to keep accounts, and hence were ignorant of their real pecuniary condition? Ask any lawyer, any man of business, or politician, what is the class of remarks usually made, when a man's fitness for any particular service or office becomes a subject of discussion. If three men are to be selected as arbitrators, perhaps a dozen will be named before a complement is agreed on. One man is acknowledged to be conscientious, but he knows nothing beyond the Multiplication Table. Another is well skilled in business, but a suspicion hangs on his integrity. A third, for want of proper guidance, has spent all school-going days, and all the leisure of his subsequent life, in the abstractions of Mathematics; he knows all the puzzling sums on record: "Can tell how far a careless fly Would chance to turn the globe awry, while in all matters pertaining to practical life, he is a ninny and is not competent to superintend the affairs of an ant-heap; I do not mean one those imperial ant-heaps, reared by the termites of Africa, but one of those Lilliputian mounds we see in a garden after a shower. Another is allowed to possess talent and attainment; but he has been educated to believe that every one who does not attend the church he attends, and employ the physician he employs, must be a wicked man, while anybody who does so must be a good one. And thus, through some defect in disposition, in attainments, or in character, which education might and should have remedied, they are set aside. So in those anti-preliminary meetings, as we may call them,—those private interviews or conversations which iniate initiation,-what are the points which indicate this or that individual as an eligible candidate for office? In four cases out of five,-in nine cases out of ten,-are they not some attributes that have been developed or made prominent in school,- -or in college, which is only a higher school? And the case is the same, when the question first arises, whether a man is qualified to be an accountant in a trading house or bank; an overseer in a factory; a superintendent in a mechanic's shop, or an engineer on a railroad. In regard to these first chances, which a man has to show what he is, and to better his condition, education has far more influence than talent. After one has secured his opportunity; after he has reached. a position where his capacities can speak for themselves; then I acknowledge that less will depend upon his previous training and more upon his native endowments. But the greatest want of a mass of men is an opportunity to exhibit what is in them. Give them this opportunity, and if they have any vigor, they will display it and insure their fortune. Take this away and their talent rusts in a napkin. The most perfect seed in the world can never evolve its powers, until it finds a soil in which to germinate. causes. Now all these, and ten thousand more facts like unto them, will never be de nied or gainsaid by any person acquainted with the evolution of effects from And what is the motive which the teacher should derive from them? Surely no less than this. His every day's teaching and government will elevate or depress the condition, in all after life, of every pupil in his school. There is no one of all the children around him, on whom his daily instruction and treatment will produce no effect. The physical, intellectual, and moral condition of each is to be, at least partially, what he foredooms. A child has a feeble constitution, or his native stamina have been broken down or enfeebled, in early life, by injudicious exposure or foolish parental indulgence. Perhaps it is now too late ever to make a healthy, athletic man of him. That once attainable blessing may have been forfeited beyond redeeming. What then? Is he not still in a condition to be made either better or worse? By a knowledge and application of the laws of Physiology, may you not so far restore him, as to save him from two or three fits of sickness, or from a painful, costly period of chronic ailment and debility? If you can not prolong his years to seventy, you may to sixty, or, at least to fifty, instead of his dying at thirty-five. If you can not prevent his liability to colds and weak lungs, you may at least save him from consumption and premature death. You may so increase his health that he will be able to fill positions and perform duties of which he would otherwise be incapable. Perhaps you may give him just that additional degree of strength, by which, when encompassed by the perils of the flood, he can put forth the one stroke more which will save him from drowning. Extensively true as this is in regard to boys, how much more so is it of girls.. It is no imagination or extravagance to say, that your judicious or injudicious treatment of a delicate girl, during a single winter's school term, may save or lose the mother of a young family. Here you have a whole class of boys, not one of whom gives token of that talent or address which will secure him a seat in the Congress of the United States. What then? Can |