nto the secrets of the Professorial chair, that they may in
turn become Professors of those branches to classes of their own. Nor
would such a plan, if it were possible, be altogether without its value.
It surely needs no demonstration to prove, that in the highest
departments, no less than in the lowest, something more than knowledge
is needed in order to teach. An understanding of how to communicate
one's knowledge, and practical skill in doing it, are as necessary in
teaching theology, metaphysics, languages, infinitesimal analysis, or
chemistry, as they are in teaching the alphabet. If there are bunglers,
who know not how to go to work to teach a child its letters, or to open
its young mind and heart to the reception of truth, whose school-rooms
are places where the young mind and heart are in a state, either of
perpetual torpor, or of perpetual nightmare, have these bunglers no
analogues in the men of ponderous erudition that sometimes fill the
Professor's chair? Have we no examples, in our highest seminaries of
learning, of men very eminent in scientific attainments, who have not in
themselves the first elements of a teacher? who impart to their students
no quickening impulse? whose vast and towering knowledge may make them
perhaps a grand feature in their College, attracting to it all eyes, but
whose intellectual treasures, for all the practical wants of the
students, are of no more use, than are the swathed and buried mummies in
the pyramid of Cheops!

A Teachers' Seminary, if it were complete, would include in its
curriculum of study the entire cycle of human knowledge, so far as it is
taught by schools. Our teachers of mathematics and of logic, of law and
of medicine, need indeed a knowledge of the branches which they are to
teach, and for this knowledge they do not need a Teachers' Seminary. But
they need something more than this knowledge. Besides being men of
erudition, they need to be teachers, no less than the humbler members of
the profession, who have only to teach the alphabet and the
multiplication table; and there is in all teaching, high or low,
something that is common to them all--an art and a skill which is
different from the mere knowledge of the subjects; which is not
necessarily learned in learning the subjects; which requires special,
superadded gifts, and distinct study and training. There is, according
to my observation, as great a lack of this special skill in the higher
seminaries of lear