The application of the lessons ought to be the principal concern of the teacher. On this much of their utility depends, and of which the following will afford a sufficient example. In the 5th line of the "Progressive Exercises," above referred to, the announcement is simply that "Rebekah was obliging,"--from which the child will readily enough draw the lesson, that "we also should be obliging." But to _apply_ this lesson, the teacher is to suppose a corresponding case, and to ask the child how it ought to behave on that occasion. For example, he may ask, "If a companion wanted a sight of your book, what should you do?" "Lend it to him."--"From what do you get that lesson?" "From Rebekah being obliging."--"If you saw your companion drop his ball, or his marble, without perceiving it, what should you do?" "Pick it up and give it to him."--"How do you know that you ought to do that?" "From God giving Rebekah as our example, who was obliging." The field which here opens up for the ingenuity of the teacher for the moral improvement of the young is almost boundless. Note T, p. 318.--The method which both Nature and experience have pointed out, as the best for giving a practical knowledge of the principles of Natural Philosophy to children, is to state and explain some general principle, such as, that "Soft and porous bodies are bad conductors (of heat;") and then set them to think, by asking what special lessons that general truth teaches them. This leads the pupil to a train of thought, which will at all events prepare him for the proper lessons when suggested by the teacher, and which will enable him at once to perceive why his mother has to make use of a cloth when using the smoothing iron; why a metal tea-pot must have a wooden handle;--why soft clothing preserves the heat of his body, and keeps him warm;--and why the poker by the fire gets heated throughout, while a piece of wood, the same length and in the same spot, remains comparatively cool. To teach the phenomena of Nature, out of their mutual relations to the general principle, would be both laborious and evanescent, because of the want of the great connecting link, afforded by the analytical method here supposed. It was by the above means that the children, in the experiment in Aberdeen, and more especially those in that at Newry, appeared to the examinators to be inexhaustible; they having, during a space of time unprecedentedly short, got hold of principles which enabled them, without any great stretch of memory, and by the association of ideas, to account for hundreds of familiar objects and circumstances, the nature and working of which they had never perhaps thought of before.