life without an adequate return. Indigence, therefore, will rarely be found in company with good education.” My own experience strongly confirms the truth of these sentiments, and I invariably find that those parents (of whom there are many) who do not avail themselves of the school, are not those who have the lowest wages, or earn the least money, but they are the most ignorant, and their habits of life are of so low and degraded a nature, that they are not only indifferent to the welfare and moral conduct of their own children, but are perfectly regardless of the good opinion of those around them: many of them, such as are living in crowded cottages, and from the force of habit and bad management can make no effort to keep their children decently clean; and, in fact, their standard of moral feeling is so low, whether arising out of their physical condition I do not know, as to make them appear to have little beyond the animal instinct of feeding their young, so as to keep the body alive, and have not the slightest notion of anything which is not of a gross and sensual nature. I would have it inculcated by every father in his family, by every schoolmaster in his school, by every clergyman in his parish, that the man who needlessly throws himself for support on the industry of others, lowers himself in the scale of human beings, and in some respect partakes of the character of a dishonest man; that he does not act up to the precepts of Christianity which he professes; and that the strong feeling of the labouring class, which prevails more particularly in the south of England, of " why spare the parish?" and which is encouraged by the strangely mistaken principles on which the farmers act, not only has a tendency in every possible way to lower their condition by interfering with the price of labour, and thus lowering their standard of social comforts, by totally destroying every feeling of self-respect and of manly independence; but also that in past times it has almost destroyed the whole social system to which they belong, and may do so again if not guarded against by a system of education of the lower classes, which shall teach them more of forethought in what concerns their own domestic affairs, and give them a greater insight as to how all this bears upon the well-being, not only of their own class, but of the country to which they belong. In saying this of the labouring class I do not throw the blame upon them as regards the past-far from it; I think much greater blame attaches itself to the classes above them, who, without having the excuse of want of education, have not paid that attention to their condition, physical and moral, which it was their duty to do. Nor would I less press upon the attention of the rising generation, those of them likely to be the future employers of labour, that "the labourer is worthy of his hire;" that the wages of the industrious labourer, in a healthy state of society, ought to be equal to all the decent wants and respectabilities of his station in life; and although political economy may say the state of the labour-market is not regulated by considerations of this kind, yet youth, trained up in these ideas, and with kindly feelings arising out of them, impressed in early life, will not afterwards be able to shake them off at the suggestions of avarice; but will be content to think that such a portion of the value of a commodity as is equal to all his proper wants belongs to the producer, who has the first claim, and that the merchant, the landlord, or the farmer, ought to be content with what remains after the producer is provided for. Should any of these classes thus trained up at school transgress these wholesome maxims instilled into them in youth, conscience will be continually telling them they are wrong and they will have that sort of uncomfortable feeling about them, which every man has when he knows he is doing an act which he dare not talk of to his neighbours, and which both his early education an! his own conscience unite in telling him is morally wrong.-DAWES' 'Hints, &c., on National Education.' IT is a satisfaction to know that the same thing, or motion, or whatever it is, which causes the sensation of heat, causes also fluidity, and expands bodies in all directions; that electricity, the light which is seen on the back of a cat when slightly rubbed on a frosty evening, is the very same matter with the lightning of the clouds; that plants breathe like ourselves, but differently by day and by night; that the air which burns in our lamps enables a balloon to mount, and causes the globules of the dust of plants to rise, float through the air, and continue their race ;— in a word, is the immediate cause of vegetation. Nothing can at first view appear less like, or less likely to be caused by the same thing, than the processes of burning and of breathing,-the rust of metals and burning, and acid and rust,-the influence of a plant on the air it grows in by night, and of an animal on the same air at any time, nay, and of a body burning in that air; and yet all these are the same operation. It is an undeniable fact, that the very same thing which makes the fire burn, makes metals rust, forms acids, and enables plants and animals to breathe; that these operations, so unlike to common eyes when examined by the light of science, are the same, the rusting of metals, the formation of acids, the burning of inflammable bodies, the breathing of animals, and the growth of plants by night. To know this is a positive gratification. Is it not pleasing to find the same substance in various situations extremely unlike each other; to meet with fixed air as the produce of burning, of breathing, and of vegetation; to find that it is the choke-damp of mines, the bad air in the grotto at Naples, the cause of death in neglected brewers' vats, and of the brisk and acid flavour of Seltzer and other mineral springs? Can Nothing can be less like than the working of a vast steamengine, of the old construction, and the crawling of a fly upon the window. Yet we find that these two operations are performed by the same means, the weight of the atmosphere, and that a sea-horse climbs the ice-hills by no other power. anything be more strange to contemplate? Is there in all the fairy tales that ever were fancied anything more calculated to arrest the attention and to occupy and to gratify the mind, than this most unexpected resemblance between things so unlike to the eyes of ordinary beholders? What more pleasing occupation than to see uncovered and bared before our eyes the very instrument and the process by which Nature works? Then we raise our views to the structure of the heavens, and are again gratified with tracing accurate but most unexpected resemblances. Is it not in the highest degree interesting to find, that the power which keeps this earth in its shape, and in its path, wheeling upon its axis and round the sun, extends over all the other worlds that compose the universe, and gives to each its proper place and motion; that this same power keeps the moon in her path round our earth, and our earth in its path round the sun, and each planet in its path; that the same power causes the tides upon our globe, and the peculiar form of the globe itself; and that, after all, it is the same power which makes a stone fall to the ground? To learn these things, and to reflect upon them, occupies the faculties, fills the mind, and produces certain as well as pure gratification.-BROUGHAM'S Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science.' 1. Electricity comes from a Greek word signifying amber, it having been observed by Thales, B.C. 600, that this substance when rubbed had the power of attracting feathers and other light bodies. Glass and various other substances are now known to have the same power. 2. In the earliest steam-engines, steam was employed to force up the piston, and it was allowed to fall by its own weight; that is, by the pressure of the atmo sphere." Or all the amusements which can possibly be imagined for a hard-working man, after his daily toil, or in its intervals, there is nothing like reading an entertaining book, supposing him to have a taste for it, and supposing him to have the book to read. It calls for no bodily exertion, of which he has had enough, or too much. It relieves his home of its dulness and sameness, which, in nine cases out of ten, is what drives him out to the alehouse, to his own ruin and his family's. It transports him into a livelier, and gayer, and more diversified and interesting scene, and while he enjoys himself there, he may forget the evils of the present moment, fully as much as if he were ever so drunk, with the great advantage of finding himself the next day with his money in his pocket, or at least laid out in real necessaries and comforts for himself and his family,-and without a headache. Nay, it accompanies him to his next day's work, and if the book he has been reading be anything above the very idlest and lightest, gives him something to think of besides the mere mechanical drudgery of his every-day occupation,—something he can enjoy while absent, and look forward with pleasure to return to. But supposing him to have been fortunate in the choice of his book, and to have alighted upon one really good, and of a good class, what a source of domestic enjoyment is laid open! What a bond of family union! He may read it aloud, or make his wife read it, or his eldest boy or girl, or pass it round from hand to hand. All have the benefit of it; all contribute to the gratification of the rest, and a feeling of common interest and pleasure is excited. Nothing unites people like companionship in intellectual enjoyment. It does more, it gives them mutual respect, and to each among them self respectthat corner-stone of all virtue. It furnishes to each the masterkey by which he may avail himself of his privilege as an intellectual being to "Enter the sacred temple of his breast, And gaze and wander there a ravished guest; And while thus leading him to look within his own bosom for the ultimate sources of his happiness, warns him, at the same time, to be cautious how he defiles and desecrates that inward and most glorious of temples.' If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading. I speak of it of course only as a worldly advantage, and not in the slightest degree as superseding or derogating from the higher office and surer and stronger panoply of religious principles, but as a taste, an instrument and a mode of pleasurable gratification. Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history, with the wisest, the wittiest, with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him. It is hardly possible but the character should take a higher and better tone from the constant habit of associating, in thought, with a class of thinkers, to say the least of it, above the average of humanity. It is morally impossible but that the manners should take a tinge of good breeding and civilization from having constantly before one's eyes the way in which the best-bred and the best-informed men have talked and conducted themselves in their intercourse with each other. There is a gentle but perfectly-irresistible coercion in the habit of reading, well directed, over the whole tenor of a man's character and conduct, which is not the less effectual because it works insensibly, and because it is really the last thing he dreams of. It civilizes the conduct of men, and suffers them not to remain barbarous. The reason why I have dwelt so strongly upon the point of amusement, is this, that it is really the only handle, at least the only innocent one, by which we can gain a fair grasp of the attention of those who have grown up in a want of instruction, and in a carelessness of their own improvement. Those who cater for the passions, especially the base or malignant ones, find an easy access to the ignorant and idle of every rank and station; but it is not so with sound knowledge and rational instruction. The very act of sitting down to read a book is an effort,-it is a kind of venture; at all events it involves a certain expenditure of time which, we think, might be otherwise pleasantly employed; and if this is not instantly, and in the |