than formerly; although, even now, not
seldom met with. She is more common who
expresses any slight mental agitation by
energetic bodily movement, by scream, start,
and gesture; and the greater frequency of
such actions among girls than among boys
does not need to be described. It is well
known to arise from one of the characteristics
of the female organism; and this, when
unduly developed, amounts to the excitability
which renders girls liable to hysteric
fits from fright or other sudden emotions;
preparing them for various injurious
influences. The way to combat it, and to
keep it within proper and healthful bounds,
is by means of exercise: exercise of a kind
which strengthens the habitual authority of
the will over the limbs, which employs body
and mind together and in unison, and cannot
be performed without their co-operation.
Such is afforded by all active games of skill.
Boys have fencing, cricket, and a score of
other pursuits, with this tendency. Schoolgirls
commonly do nothing but walk languidly
in a row, along the same familiar and tiresome
road; often reading or learning tasks by
the way, as if to shut out the possibility of
any observation of nature. Sometimes they
practise dreary exercises, a caricature of
drilling, invented by a famous school-
mistress, who, upon the decline of an aristocratic
connection, secured an evangelical one;
and became suddenly convinced of the sinfulness
of dancing, for which these exercises
were her substitute. They involve only
attitudinising and imitation; while girls
want games in which their judgments shall
teach them what they ought to do, and in
which practice shall teach their hands to
execute what their heads have planned.
Battledore and shuttlecock, jeu de grâce,
and archery, would fulfil these requirements;
and are in all respects well adapted for girls.
But then, Prospect Villa must have a suitable
playground, and the mistress must understand
its uses, and the way in which it will
conduce to the proper training of her pupils.

Turning, now, to mental education, is there
here no room for improvement? We well
remember an evening visit to a schoolmistress,
during which a gentle tap at the door
was answered by "come in;" and a child
with a book made her appearance. She was
hastily retreating at sight of a stranger; but
was ordered to remain, and was asked, with
terrible emphasis upon the adverb, whether
she now knew her lesson? Timidly replying
in the affirmative, she handed a thickish
octavo volume to the mistress, who apologised
for the interruption, and then gave her
attention to the task. The pupil was a pretty
little girl of ten years old; with bright,
intelligent, loving, black eyes, and great black
curls bobbing upon her neck. The book
seemed to be a chaotic assemblage of
questions about nothing particular; and two of
these, upon subjects diverse as the poles, the
child answered correctly. Then came a
momentous inquiry: "In what county of England
are cranberries most abundant?" A puzzled
and anxious look crept over the little face,
the wistful eyes turned up to those of the
teacher, but found no clue in their calm
repose; and, after a pause, "Africa," was the
reply. In another instant the door closed
upon the retreating damsel, once more
dismissed in disgrace; and our hostess, with a
jest at the poor child's stupidity, returned to
the subject which her entrance had broken
off. We could not help thinking of the way
in which the geographical mistress at that
school must have discharged her duties; and
of the total non-apprehension of all her
teaching displayed in that one answer. The
mistress who heard the lesson was not aware,
we are sure, that there are two kinds of
knowledge of a thing that is taught, the
sensation, as distinguished from the meaning,
the sound, as distinguished from the idea.
She did not know that, in the case of many
children, lessons only produce the first;
unless explained diligently, carefully,
unceasingly, until the crust of mere sense
perceptions is broken through, the almost
dormant intellect awakened, and mind brought
into communion with mind. Without such a
process (which some children receive at home
from earliest infancy), tasks may be perfectly
learned and repeated as sounds alone. The
Muchir Achmet Menickley Pasha,
commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army, was
once, in presence of the writer, wickedly
entrapped into a talk upon European politics.
By-and-by, Italy was mentioned; and the
Pasha, after assenting to much that was said
about it, took advantage of a pause to
inquire: "What is Italy?" Not where is it;
but what? Is it a person or thing, animal
or vegetable, fish or fowl? Many young
ladies at school, who could repeat, with
perfect glibness, a list of the kingdoms of
Europe, are not, we suspect, very much wiser
than the Egyptian general; and have learned
little more than a certain order and succession
of sounds, which might as well be in
Sanscrit. If dodged or perplexed, they are as
likely as not to remember the wrong one;
and to say Africa in place of——shire (the
blank modestly expressing our own ignorance
of the berry-bearing district). An admirable
illustration of this sort of learning is
furnished by the Rev. W. H. Brookfield, Her
Majesty's Inspector of Schools, in his last
published report to the Committee of Council
on Education. He copies verbatim the
following answers in the Church Catechism,
from the slates of two children of eleven years
old, and of fair intelligence, who had received
instruction at school for five years.

The first answer is:

My duty toads God is to bleed in him to fering
and to loaf withold your arts withold my mine withold
my sold and with my sernth to whirchp and to give
thinks to put my old trast in him to call upon him to