decided to be best for its normal growth.

To begin with, then, we must educate the child from the first into a
habit of controlling and directing her naturally drifting and capricious
attention by the will. The power of the child is very limited in this
respect. Her eyes, the index of her attention, wander easily from one
external object to another, and consequently our work must be very
gradual, for, if we attempt to hold the attention one moment longer than
the mind has strength for, the tense bow snaps, and the overstrained
activity lapses into inanity. We must ask her attention for very short
intervals at first, and during many years; for every time that we
attempt to convey information for so long that the attention gives way,
we have weakened, and not strengthened the power. Exercise, to be
judicious, we must remember, must, in mind as well as body, be regular,
and increase steadily in its demand. The object of the first teaching
should, therefore, be the steady and methodical cultivation of the
faculty of attention, and not the acquisition of knowledge. Our first
work must be to give such judicious exercise that the mind shall acquire
a habit of exercise and an appetite for it, and not to spoil at the
outset the mental digestion. A healthy appetite being once created, we
have then only to spread the table and place the courses one after
another, at proper intervals, and within convenient reach, in regular
order, and the work is done.

But the child, as she grows from child to woman, must pass through three
stages, showing three different directions which are successively taken
by the intelligent activity. First, she is occupied in perceiving
objects. She then passes into the years dominated by the imagination,
and she should emerge from this into the dominion of rational, logical
thought, but, through the fault of a defective education, she often
never passes beyond the second stage. Thus dwarfed and crippled she
remains during her whole life, physically a woman, mentally a child.
Better days are, however, dawning, though the sun be but one hour high.

Again, serious errors are made in education, from the want of a proper
appreciation of the time at which the girl passes inevitably from one to
the other of these stages. When, for example, authors of text-books on
Natural Science, History and Reading, designed for pupils of fifteen
and sixteen years of age, cover more space with illustrations than with
text,