To these statements the individual who has collected them, adds his own testimony in the following language: "I have been for three years and a half a member of a manual labor school. The whole number of my fellow students during that period was about two hundred. I was personally acquainted with every individual, and merely 'speak what I know,' and 'testify what I have seen,' when I state that every _student_ who acquired a reputation for sound scholarship during this time, was a _fast friend_ of the manual labor system. The most intelligent, without a single exception, were not only thoroughly convinced of the importance of the system, but _they loved it with all their hearts_. They counted it a privilege and a delight to give their testimony in its favor, and they _did it_ in good earnest. Their approval of the system rose into an intelligent and abiding passion; and it is no marvel that it was so; for they had within them a permanent, living consciousness of its benefits and blessings. They felt it in their _bodies_, knitting their muscles into firmness, compacting their limbs, consolidating their frame work, and thrilling with fresh life the very marrow of their bones. They felt it in their _minds_, giving tenacity to memory, stability to judgment, acuteness to discrimination, multiform analogy to the suggestive faculty, and daylight to perception. They felt it in their _hearts_, renovating every susceptibility, and swelling the tide of emotion. It is true, with a few, a very few of the students, the system was unpopular, and so were languages and mathematics, philosophy and rhetoric, and every thing else in the daily routine, _save the bed and the dinner table_. Such students were snails in the field, drones in the workshop, dumb in debate, pigmies in the recitation room, and cyphers at the black board. "In every manual labor school which I visited in my tour," he continues, "it was the invariable testimony of trustees and teachers, that the talent, the scholarship, the manliness, the high promise of all such institutions, were found among the pupils who gave the manual labor system their hearty approval; whereas if there were among the students brainless coxcombs, sighing sentimentalists, languishing effeminates, and other nameless things of equivocal gender; to prostitute _their_ delicate persons to the vile outrage of manual labor, was indeed a _sore affliction!_" We shall close these selections by adding to them the testimony of an individual[4] of distinguished literary attainments, whose advantages for obtaining correct information on this topic, as well as many others, have been of the most favorable kind. [Footnote 4: Professor Stuart.]