The benefits accruing to education, from successfully imitating Nature in this department of her process, will be incalculable; not only in adding to the amount of knowledge communicated, but in the ease and delight which the young will experience in acquiring it. All must admit that the pleasure, as well as the rapidity, of the educational process in the young, continues only during the time that Nature is their teacher;--and that her operations are generally checked, or neutralized by the mismanagement of those who supersede her work, and begin to theorize for themselves. The proof of this is to be found in the fact, that although a child is much less capable of acquiring knowledge between one and three years of age, than he is between eight and ten; yet, generally, the amount of his intellectual attainments by his school exercises, during the two latter years, bears no proportion to those of the former, when Nature _alone_ was his teacher. In the one case, too, his knowledge was acquired without effort or fatigue, and in the exercise of the most delightful feelings;--in the other, quite the reverse. That we shall ever be able to equal Nature in this part of her educational process, is not to be expected; but that, by following up the principles which she has developed, and imitating the methods by which she accomplishes her ends, we shall become more and more successful, there can be no doubt. The method, therefore, to be adopted by us is, to examine carefully the principles which she employs with the young, through the several stages of her process, and then, by adopting exercises which embody these principles, to proceed in a course similar to that which she has pointed out. In prosecuting this plan, then, our object must be, first, to examine generally the various means employed by Nature, in the acquisition of knowledge by the young,--and then to attend more in detail to the mode by which she applies the principles involved in each. These general means appear to consist of four distinct principles, which, for want of better definitions, we shall denominate "Reiteration," "Individuation, or Abstraction," "Grouping, or Association," and "Classification, or Analysing."[2]