Take the first and most obvious form of parental solicitude, the form literally connected with the question just cited--we mean the physical maintenance of children. It would be wasting words in this or any respectable assembly, to try to prove that parents should provide food and clothing for their offspring. Yet here, and every where, in our mode of making this provision, many very grave questions may arise. Kind feeling is not enough. Without knowledge and forethought, we may hurt where we wish to help--we may kill where we wish to cure. At every step we need better counsel than any instinctive fondness, or childish caprice, or worldly fashion. The Creator has a lesson for us in the use of all his gifts, and if we do not heed it, what we give as bread may turn out a stone, and what seems to us a fish may sting like a serpent. In providing food, clothing, air, exercise, for our children, we are to study those solemn and inexorable laws which God has enacted for the rule of the body. In this lower court of creation there is no pardoning power, and the wrong done to the constitution in childhood is a wrong for a lifetime. We apprehend that in no one point is our American society more in error and more at variance, not only with natural laws, but even with the best European standard, than in the physical education of children. They are fed often on the trash of the confectioner, instead of the simple aliments nearest the hints of nature, and by improper dress and hours they are forced into a precocious maturity of mind and body, equally hurtful to both.