Let the school commissioners of each State look to this matter at once. Let them insist that each teacher shall forthwith obtain the knowledge requisite to properly instruct and bring forward every pupil in his or her class. A knowledge should be had of the exact kind and amount of work requisite for a class of a certain age. Let some suitable person or persons be appointed in the cities to supervise this branch of education, and see that the teachers are thoroughly qualified. Let the scholar understand that his body can be trained exactly as well as his mind, and that the sound health of both is intimately connected with having it so trained. Let the school-hours be so arranged that ten minutes in the middle of the morning session, and again in the afternoon, shall be allotted to this branch. See what Maclaren[F] did for the Radley and Magdalen boys in _one hour a week!_ see what Sargent[G] did in our country for two hundred youth in two hours a week, and with wooden dumb-bells, very light clubs, and a few pulley-weights at that! Let people at once and forever get rid of the notion that this exercise is a mere play-spell, or that it is only good to make athletes or acrobats. It is as much a branch of education as any taught in our schools to-day; and who will question that, if such uniform and splendid progress was made in each school as was made in the cases just cited, and in different instances, with at first such unpromising pupils, the brief twenty minutes daily so spent would be as well spent and as valuable to each pupil as any other twenty or thirty minutes of his day? It should no more be allowed to interfere with their usual play than any other branch is. It is a matter of progress and development, in a way highly important to every scholar, and should be so treated, and the child's play-hours should be in no way curtailed to accomplish it.