re of the eye
and the ear, but so it is, that while I have been reading the writings
of the Hebrew Prophets, and of those other gifted bards who communed so
intently with nature and with nature's God, it has seemed to me
impossible that any one could enter fully into all the tenderness,
beauty, and sublimity of their language, or receive into his heart all
its peculiarity of meaning, unless his own eye had been used to trace
the skill of that hand which framed and fashioned every thing that is,
and to descry the delicacy of that pencil which has painted all the
flowers of the field, nor unless his own ear has learned to perceive the
melody and harmony of sounds."

We can discipline the sight directly, and to a very great extent; and we
can have the satisfaction of perceiving the progressive improvement of
the faculty. For this purpose, every school should be furnished with
appropriate apparatus. A set of measures is indispensable. I will
illustrate by an example. For the benefit of the primary department
connected with a seminary of learning that was formerly for several
years under my supervision, I constructed a set of rules for linear
measurement. Their breadth and thickness were uniform, each being an
inch wide and half an inch thick. The set consisted of nine rules, whose
lengths were as follows: four were each one foot long; one, a foot and a
half long; two, two feet; one, two and a half feet; and one, three feet.
Every rule had a small hole bored through each end. I had also a number
of small pins turned just the right size to fit these holes. I have
since submitted to several hundred teachers, in institutes and
elsewhere, my mode of combining and using these measures; and from the
deep interest which a large number of intelligent parents and teachers
in different localities have manifested in the subject, I venture to
refer to it in this connection. I first tried the experiment ten years
ago, with a class of about twenty children from four to seven years of
age. Several of these could not read, and some of them had not learned
the alphabet. The children were first led to observe carefully the
length of these several rules, until they could determine at sight the
length of each. For several of the first lessons some of them would
misjudge. They would, for instance, call a two foot rule one and a half
or two and a half feet long. In such cases their judgments were
immediately corrected by the application of two on