Deducting the time from the 13th of December to the 27th of January during which I was confined to my room, I have been pretty industrious; through the winter I behaved as well as one could expect. German has been my chief study; to give it a relief I have attended one hour a day to a lecture in Italian on the Modern Arts, and, to feel satisfied that I had some sober inquiry in hand, I have devoted another to Professor Saalfeld’s course of European Statistics, so that I have generally been able to count at night twelve hours of private study and private instruction. This has only sharpened not satisfied my appetite. I have laid out for myself a course of more diligent labors the next semester. I shall then be at least eight hours in the lecture rooms, beginning at six in the morning. I must contrive, besides, to devote eight other hours to private study. I am not in the least Germanized, and yet it appalls me when I think of the difference between an education here and in America. The great evil with us is, in our primary schools, the best years for learning are trifled and whiled away; boys learn nothing because they have no instructors, because we demand of one the full [work?] of ten, and because laziness is the first lesson which one gets in all our great schools. I know very well that we want but few closet scholars, few learned philologists, and few verbal commentators; that all our systems of government and customs and life suppose a preparation for making practical men,—men who move, and are felt in the world; but all this could be better done without wasting every year from infancy to manhood. The system of education here is the very reverse of our own: in America boys are let loose upon the work when they are children, and fettered when they are sent to our college; here they are cloistered, too much so I acknowledge, till they can guide themselves, and then put at their own disposal at the universities. Luther’s Reformation threw all the monkish establishments in the Protestant countries into the hands of the Princes, and they very wisely appropriated them to the purposes of education, but unluckily they have retained more of the monastic seclusion than they ought. The three great schools in Saxony, Pforte, Meissen, and ⸺ are kept in convents, and the boys enjoy little more than the liberty of a cloister. They are all very famous, the first more particularly; out of it have come half of the great scholars of the country. Still they are essentially defective in the point above named. Just in the neighborhood of Gotha is the admirable institution of Salzmann, in a delightfully pleasant and healthy valley; his number is limited to thirty-eight, and he has twelve instructors,—admits no boy who does not bring with him the fairest character: when