criminal out of their number. You must look through generations in the annals of crime to find one Eugene Aram, the student, once the teacher.

Go on then, teachers, in your noble work; then noblest when best fulfilling its great and grandest part, the forming of the characters of our youths; go on, having the eyes and hearts of all the good and the worthy, the wise, the patriotic, and the Christian with you; for you have our all, our every treasure and interest in your keeping; for with another, we may well exclaim, "What do we entrust to the teacher!" At least some part of the religion of our people; very much surely of their moral habits, their providence, their economy, their cheerfulness and content; their conscientious industry, their enjoyments, their amusements, their mental energies, in some degree, their health; their attachment to the laws and institutions of their country; their independence of thought as Americans; their respect for social relations; their acquiescence in the difference of position and circumstances; their deference for legitimate authority; their dread of anarchy; their love of good order; their regard for government; their aversion to lawlessness and licentiousness; their peace, their happiness.

What do we entrust to the teacher? We are persuaded that we do not exaggerate when we say, the destinies of America; the permanence of our Constitution; the safety of our institutions, secular and sacred; the perpetuity of our liberties; the secu

rity of all our wealth, strength, and grandeur; our future welfare, glory, national existence.

Yes, it is America itself we entrust to the teacher; its name, its history, its influence; - this well loved land, home of republicanism, of freedom, of learning, of religion, as we have proudly, nor yet unjustly called it; - this land which has ever made the teacher its pride, and what other worthier than the teacher's pride?-this land even now becoming, through sacrifice and trial, through tears and blood, a land worthier laboring and living for, a more inviting field for sowing that precious seed scattered by the teacher's hand; when to the teacher we commit our youth we commit our all.

LECTURE III.

SUPERVISION OF SCHOOLS.*

BY BIRDSEY G. NORTHROP, AGENT MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION.

THE schools in our towns and cities differ in nothing more than in the skill, thoroughness, and efficency of their supervision. This one agency is the most common cause of other differences. The schools themselves tell the practised observer the style of this supervision, as readily as a house does that of an architect. My observations in visiting thousands of schools throughout Massachusetts, and many in twelve other States, have clearly proved to my mind the wisdom of maintaining a Superintendent in all our cities and large towns, who shall devote his whole time to the care and improvement of the schools.

The magnitude of the interests involved, pecuniary, physical, intellectual and moral, the great advance recently made in the science and art of teaching, the glaring defects still existing even in our cities, the improvements needed and the happy results already accomplished by this agency where it has had a fair

* Delivered also before the Hampden County Teachers' Association in Springfield, in October, 1863, and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., in February, 1864.

trial, all prove the importance of establishing this office.

Its duties are difficult as well as important. A failure will surely come from clumsy hands. Especially in the initiation of this system, great care should be taken in the selection of the incumbent. A mistake here has more than once spoiled the experiment, if not marred the schools. Comparatively few men are qualified to meet the varied and delicate demands of this most responsible post.

In addition to liberal culture and practical familiarity with all the school studies high and low, he must have sound judgment, or in stronger Saxon phrase, common sense, a knowledge of human nature and of the laws of mind, and most of all, of the juvenile mind, with the conditions and processes of mental growth, love of children, and tact and facility in addressing and controlling them. He should be able to bring to this service the skill and ample resources drawn from a successful experience in the schoolroom. The science and art of teaching, the true succession of studies, the order in which the juvenile faculties are to be addressed and developed, the philosophy of motive, in a word the broad subject of Education, physical, mental, and spiritual, is to be carefully investigated. He must be so accurate an observer of the various methods and their several results that he can infer the one from the other, and thus not only discover existing errors and defects, but at once suggest the means of removing them.

In the best schools, where others observe only excellences, his practised eye must discover the less obvious deficiencies still remaining and the appropriate remedies. He should make himself familiar with the most successful schools in the land and keep pace with the general progress of Education. The object-schools at Oswego, the training system of Toronto, the Normal schools of different States, and the model schools in some instances connected with them; the ingenious and yet philosophic methods for waking the dormant minds of imbeciles, adopted in the Institutions at Syracuse, Barre, or Boston; the conversations by Pantomime and the new system of spelling and talking solely by the emotions, as expressed in the countenance of mutes; the processes for training the senses just initiated in New York city; the practice of simultaneous delineation and description, both linear and verbal, as at Westfield; the map drawing from memory in the Phillips; the gymnics of the Eliot; the geography of the Hancock, in Boston, with her Model School Palaces; the unrivalled spelling of Providence; the exhaustive scrutiny of a sentence from Virgil or Homer by Dr. Taylor at Andover; the admirable infantry tactics of the seventy boys, "the Brookline Rifles," and the unequalled drills of the Cadets at West Point, not more as cavalry, infantry, flying artillery, or in heavy ordnance and mortar practice, than in the higher and harder field of pure mathematics, rapid sketching, and the mechanics of engi