we recognize the fact that they forget that at that age, the first
or intuitional stage is past; and when publishers endeavor to recommend
their books to teachers, by sending them specimens of the pictures in
the books, instead of specimens of the explanations and statements, the
teachers know that they are supposed to be equally admirers of fine
wood-cuts.

In the first, or intuitional stage, when the child is chiefly employed
with perceptions, there is little to be done but to train the eye, the
ear, the hand and the voice, and to teach the correct use of distinctly
spoken language.

It is clearly impossible to investigate the subject of mental education
in detail in the present essay; I must content myself with a few
suggestions and statements.

First, is it not evident that it is all-important what kind of training
the little girl receives in the first years of her school life, while
she is yet in the intuitional or perceptive stage? A failure to properly
train her attention here, and the whole of her after-work is
invalidated. Her school work becomes, in its progress, tiresome, and
hence disagreeable, from the constant necessity of repetition, a
necessity arising from the want of a trained power of attention. She is
found fault with for restlessness and want of interest, as if that were
her fault, and not her misfortune; and, at the end, her knowledge is at
best but "a thing of shreds and patches," till, when all is done and the
result exhibited, we ask, with a sigh, "whether it be really worth while
to go through so much to gain so little." And yet, what care do
guardians take to secure the best advantages for their daughters at
fifteen and seventeen, and of how little importance do they consider
it, under what kind of teaching they place them between eight and
fifteen! The error is all the same in the intellectual as in the
physical education of our girls. We are continually carefully locking
the stable-door after the horse is stolen; we are continually allowing
things to go wrong, and then making superhuman efforts to right them,
not remembering that it is far easier to keep out of trouble than to get
out of it. If a girl must be trusted to incompetent, or, at the best,
doubtful, teachers during half her school life, let that half be the
last, and not the first, and incompetency will be shorn of half its
power to injure. Not only directly in the interest of the girls, but in
the interest of my own profession-