on the subject might be practicable, a competent decision
should be given as to the future occupation and destiny of a child.

But this is a question attended with no common degree of difficulty.
To the resolving such a question with sufficient evidence, a very
considerable series of observations would become necessary. The child
should be introduced into a variety of scenes, and a magazine, so to
speak, of those things about which human industry and skill may be
employed, should be successively set before him. The censor who is to
decide on the result of the whole, should be a person of great sagacity,
and capable of pronouncing upon a given amount of the most imperfect
and incidental indications. He should be clear-sighted, and vigilant
to observe the involuntary turns of an eye, expressions of a lip, and
demonstrations of a limb.

The declarations of the child himself are often of very small use in the
case. He may be directed by an impulse, which occurs in the morning, and
vanishes in the evening. His preferences change as rapidly as the shapes
we sometimes observe in the evening clouds, and are governed by whim
or fantasy, and not by any of those indications which are parcel of his
individual constitution. He desires in many instances to be devoted to
a particular occupation, because his playfellow has been assigned to it
before him.

The parent is not qualified to judge in this fundamental question,
because he is under the dominion of partiality, and wishes that his
child may become a lord chancellor, an archbishop, or any thing else,
the possessor of which condition shall be enabled to make a splendid
figure in the world. He is not qualified, because he is an interested
party, and, either from an exaggerated estimate of his child's merits,
or from a selfish shrinking from the cost it might require to mature
them, is anxious to arrive at a conclusion not founded upon the
intrinsic claims of the case to be considered.

Even supposing it to be sufficiently ascertained in what calling it is
that the child will be most beneficially engaged, a thousand extrinsical
circumstances will often prevent that from being the calling chosen.
Nature distributes her gifts without any reference to the distinctions
of artificial society. The genius that demanded the most careful and
assiduous cultivation, that it might hereafter form the boast and
ornament of the world, will be reared amidst the chill blasts of
poverty; while h