The views of the author in regard to the education of the child are clearly given. In this country children are sent to school far too young. The mind is overtaxed before the body has had time to develop, and a debilitated constitution is too often the result. It is of little consequence whether a child reads at six years or not until it is ten. First develop the physical, then at the proper time the vigorous intellect will climb the hill of knowledge, leaving far behind the student whose constitution was destroyed by overcrowding the brain during the tender age of childhood. “The main design of nature in early youth, is _not_ the speedy development of the mind,—for she has designedly, as it were, withheld this agent,—but the development and growth of the body, by means of the nutritive functions so carefully provided for the purpose. All the energies of the constitution are then required for the promotion of this object; and if the brain be then cultivated too assiduously, these energies are abstracted from their legitimate purpose, and physical debility, ending most probably in disease and decay is produced. Does it not thus clearly and manifestly appear, that premature and too exclusive mental cultivation is to thwart nature by interfering with her operations in the careful development of the physical constitution of youth?” It was the opinion of Rosseau “that the chief art of education in childhood is _to lose time_; that every delay should be considered an advantage, care being taken not to give that instruction to-day which may be deferred, without danger, till to-morrow.” The same writer says: “The most critical interval of human life is that between the hour of birth and twelve years of age. This is the time wherein vice and error take root, without our being possessed of any instrument to destroy them; and when the implement is found they are so deeply grounded that they are no longer to be eradicated. “If children took a leap from their mother’s breast and at once arrived at the age of reason, the methods of education now usually taken with them would be very proper; but, according to the progress of nature, they require those which are very different. We should not tamper with the mind till it has acquired all its faculties; for it is impossible it should perceive the light we hold out to it while it is blind, or that it should pursue, over an immense plain of ideas, that route which reason hath so slightly traced as to be perceptible only to the sharpest sight. “The first part of education, therefore, ought to be purely negative. It consists neither in teaching virtue nor truth, but in guarding the heart from vice and the mind from error.”