ever amount to anything when our educational mill has turned them out are those made of refractory clay,--the incomplete ones, the broken ones, the twisted ones, those that would not or could not be moulded into the established pattern. This is why I am so opposed to our present methods. Let us have fewer lessons from books, and more knowledge gained by personal observation; less reading and cramming, and more reflective thinking; fewer pages of books read, and more results and deductions gained from personal experiences with things high and low, animate and inanimate, that catch the eye and mind _out of doors_; and above all the total cessation of all mental labor when the body is not at its best. The crowding of sick and ailing children is more cruel and brutal than Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and so utterly needless and useless that fools couldn’t do worse. What is the use of education to a sick person, and especially when the sickness is the result of the educational process. God save us from any more such education! Doubtless I shall be told that my ideas are impracticable. I know they are and ever will be to those who value “the system” more than the child. Granted that in cold and wet weather students can’t get out of doors much. Then open all the doors and all the windows and give up the time to marching, to physical exercises, to deep breathing, to anything,--romping even,--rather than to cramming and studying a set number of pages, while the air breathed is impure, unwholesome, actively poisonous. When our educational methods thus interfere with the health of the child, I am forever and unalterably opposed to them. We had far rather have a nation of healthy and happy children, growing up into healthy and happy manhood and womanhood, even though devoid of much book knowledge, than a bloodless, anæmic, unhappy nation though filled with all the lore of the ages. Give me, for me and mine, every time, physical and mental health and happiness, even though we have never parsed a single sentence, determined the family and Latin name of a single flower, or found out the solution of one solitary problem of algebra. 4. My fourth proposition is, that as the result of this indoor book-teaching our children are not taught to think for themselves, but are expected and required to accept the ideas of the authors,--often, indeed, they must memorize the exact words of the books. This is, in itself, enough to condemn the whole system. We could better afford to have absolutely no schools, no colleges, no books even, than a nation professedly educated, yet the members of which have not learned to do their own thinking.