ure in these
several processes may be successfully imitated, while they endeavour to
communicate the elements of knowledge to the young.

Ideas being the only proper food of the mind, Nature has created in the
young an extraordinary appetite and desire for their possession. There
is a striking analogy in this respect, between the strengthening of the
body by food, and the invigorating of the mind by knowledge; and before
proceeding to detail the methods by which the parent or the teacher may
successfully break down and prepare the bread of knowledge for their
pupils in imitation of Nature, it will be of advantage here to consider
more particularly some of the circumstances connected with this
instructive analogy. By tracing the likeness so conspicuously held out
to us in this analogy by Nature herself, we shall be greatly assisted in
evading the bewildering and mystifying influence of prejudice, and the
reader will be much better prepared to judge of the value of those means
recommended for nourishing and strengthening the mind by knowledge, when
he finds them to correspond so exactly with similar principles employed
by Nature for the nourishing and strengthening of the body by food. We
shall by this means, we hope, be able to detect some of those fallacies
which have long tended to trammel the exertions, and to prevent the
success of the teacher in his interesting labours.

The first point of analogy to which we would advert, is the vigour and
activity of the mental appetite in the young, which corresponds so
strikingly with the frequent and urgent craving of their bodily appetite
for food.--The desire of food for the body, and the desire of knowledge
for the mind, are alike restless and insatiable in childhood; and a
similar amount of satisfaction and pleasure is the consequence, whenever
these desires are prudently gratified. That the desire for knowledge in
the young is often weakened, and sometimes destroyed, is but too true;
but this is the work of man, not of Nature. It will accordingly be found
on investigation, with but few exceptions, that wherever the general
appetite of the child, either for mental or bodily food, becomes languid
or weak, it is either the effect for disease or of some grievous abuse.

Another point of analogy consists, in the necessity of the personal
active co-operation of the child himself in receiving and digesting his
food.--There is no such thing in Nature as a child being fed and
nou