8 ON ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. 



die before two years of age. This was not intended by Nature ; 

 it does not happen in the inferior tribes, and must arise from some 

 grievous error or ignorance in man. Food, air, exercise, tempera- 

 ture, sleep, ablutions, skilfully managed, ought to produce better 

 results. Many a child, moreover, is ruined in temper and disposi- 

 tion in an ignorant nurse's arms. If it be naturally irascible, it 

 is injudiciously fretted and provoked ; if petulant and revengeful, it 

 is told to beat the floor on which it falls, the table it has run 

 against, or any person or thing that comes in its way. It is care- 

 fully taught to scold, and stamp, and rage, and it is pacified by hav- 

 ing its wide-open mouth stuffed with sugar. By this last act 

 another lesson of evil, and one which is a deep source of human 

 woe, is inculcated ; it is made a selfish politician before it can utter 

 an intelligible word : it grows up violent, revengeful, and artful, 

 turning upon and rending most cruelly the repentant parent, who, 

 changing her plan, in vain endeavours to whip out what she her- 

 self put in, and which, far beyond her management, will vent 

 itself upon a really injured society. 



Nurses must, therefore, be educated to train all the human feel- 

 ings, and their earliest manifestations ; to remove the causes which 

 excite the inferior, to divert from their paroxysms when these 

 chance to occur ; never exhibiting their activity in their own man- 

 ner or expression of countenance, which ought always to be mild 

 and cheerful ; to direct the earliest dawn of observation to its most 

 attractive objects ; and last, not least, to regulate the child's habits 

 in food, air, exercise, and sleep, so as to nourish both body and 

 mind. At two years of age, or as soon as the child can walk alone, 

 he, or she, should be entered at an infant school. This should con- 

 sist of not fewer than forty or fifty pupils, in order to obtain the 

 advantage of a variety of dispositions for mutual exercise in the 

 little community. The school-roora should be large, lofty, and 

 well-ventilated and warmed, and the value of all these advantages 

 early and constantly impressed upon the pupils. There they should 

 find a teacher and his wife — for no kind of colleagues are better 

 fitted for co-operation — quick, intelligent, fond, children-loving, 

 cheerful, and amusing ; with whom it is impossible to connect fear, 

 or anything but love and attachment ; for on these two last the 

 whole system is based. In a roomy play-ground should be arranged 

 all the means of exercise, by safe and judicious gymnastics, such as 

 the circular swing, &c. Refinement and taste will be cultivated by 

 accustoming the pupils to flower borders, fruit trees, and even orna- 

 ments, which they will respect, and not, as is now done by chil- 



