If there be good grounds for this, how important the distinction! It is but little we can know at the utmost. It becomes, therefore, even in the highest and widest education, a question of selection and discrimination. How important, then, the choice in respect to the shorter period of common school instruction. If this precious season is so very brief, if so little can be learned, surely that small _quantity_ should be of the choicest _quality_, and the highest considerations connected with the soul, intellectual and moral health, should be taken into the estimate of its nature and its value. In making such estimate more regard should be had to what enters into the future _thinking_, than to what will enter into the future _action_, to the knowledge that assimilates itself to the very being of the soul rather than to that which belongs to particular and ever-changing circumstances. In other words, the preference should be given to that instruction which forms the law of the thoughts, which refines the taste, which elevates the affections, which gives a stock of ideas, precious though small, and ever in demand as the spirit's daily food amid the drudgery and worldliness of the coming life, rather than to those outward facts of science which must be to a great extent empirical for the brief primary school, and, in their best form for the college or the university, have but little hold upon the inner life. To make the practical application of this, let us suppose that two or three years are all that can be given, in some places, to common-school education. A part of this time is necessarily occupied with the very elements of knowledge, reading, writing, and numbers. How shall we best employ the residue? One plan is to give it up wholly to practical knowledge, as it is called, or what is supposed to have an immediate connection with the active business of life, although greatly overrated even in this respect. Another would devote it to as good an acquaintance as can be formed with the best things in the best English classics--and this by a course of well-directed reading, or, as the Greek boys were required to do in respect to their poets, by committing largely to memory. It would be well if time could be given to both. But this, we will suppose, can not be done, and we are to decide between the rival claims. Can there be a doubt as to who is likely to be the useful man, the healthy-souled man, the _sound_ man, in the best sense of the terms? Can we doubt as to who will have the richest store laid up for that future thinking and future feeling which is the true life of the soul--the boy whose precious time has been given to a little physiology, a little natural history, a little of that trash which sometimes goes under the name of meteorology, all forgotten as soon as learned, because never learned either philosophically or scientifically--or he whose mind has been brought in as close communion