readily and certainly chemical science can now be acquired,
since the adoption of the present mode of symbolizing its doctrines by
combinations of letters and figures. Arguments, conjectures, theories,
respecting qualities addressed alike to every sense, respecting functions
indeed not cognizable by any sense, are now presented on the board in
visible symbolic formulas, which have the same advantage over the former
mode of presenting the subject, that the sight of a chess-board during
the progress of a game has over a mere verbal description of the
movements.

The truth of this doctrine is strikingly illustrated in the present
mode of teaching geography, as compared with that once in use, when a
child, instead of looking at the map of a country, with its boundaries
and other physical characters painted to the eye, had to grope through a
trackless wilderness of description. The study will be still more
improved, when children shall be universally required to make as well as
to look at maps,--when, to the definiteness of knowledge coming through
the sight, there shall be added that inerasible impression upon the
memory, which comes from fixedness and continuity of attention. It is
impossible for a child to draw a map, without looking intently, and with
continued attention, upon every part of that which is to be delineated.
The two conditions to perfect recollection are combined, and the
knowledge, which is the result, is the very last to fade from the
memory.

Every teacher of small children knows how much more certainly they learn
to spell by seeing than by hearing. You may repeat to a child five times
over the sounds which make up a word, and he will not recollect it with
half the certainty that he would on seeing it once. The same principle
which leads to this result, and which indicates the propriety, not only
of looking at maps but of making them, in order to the more perfect
knowledge of geography, will suggest to the thoughtful teacher the
expediency of children's not only looking at words, but of writing them,
in order to become perfect spellers.

Mental arithmetic has its fascinations. It has, too, I am ready to
admit, solid advantages. Its advantages, however, I apprehend are not
precisely those which are sometimes attributed to it. There can be no
doubt, I think, that it helps to cultivate the reflective powers; that
it requires, and by requiring gives, the ability to confine the
attention to continued menta