Correspondents are specially requested to place at the head of each letter the name of their Post Office, and the County and State in which it is located. THE AMERICAN MISSIONARY. * * * * * VOL. XXXII. JANUARY, 1878. No. 1. * * * * * _American Missionary Association._ * * * * * 1877-1878. Year after year the work of the American Missionary Association goes on with steady increase. We glide from one year to another noiselessly, and take up on the New Year’s Day the same tools we dropped when the signal came that the working hours of the old year were ended. One seems very much like the other, and yet, as we look back, we find that each year has, to some extent, a character and a work of its own. Changes come unheralded, proportions vary; each phase is now conspicuous and now in almost eclipse, while the whole work goes on. A few years ago it was the large number of our common school teachers sent from the North to the just-opened Southern field; then came the era of Normal instruction, as the States opened schools for the colored children, but could not furnish schoolmasters fit to teach them. The facilities for higher education, and, especially, for training for the ministry, came in then for our care—1877 saw what seemed to be the beginning of the end in this direction, in the sending of three men, trained in our schools, for missionary work to Africa. What shall be the peculiar work of 1878? There is no portion of the whole which those who work through us are willing to have dropped. Among the Indians, what little we have done we must continue to do, until some Providence as plain as that which gave it to our hands shall discharge us from the duty. We cannot withdraw our help from the churches on the Pacific Coast, in their endeavors to lead the Chinaman through the knowledge of the English language to the God of the English-speaking people. We cannot close the Normal school, for the intelligent Christian teacher is yet the greatest want of the Southern Freedmen. To the young men who desire to preach Christ Jesus and Him crucified to their own people, we cannot deny the instruction in the word of God and in the truths of religion which they ask of us. All these, which are distinctively departments of Christian effort, must be kept up, and, especially, this work among the negro youth of the great South.