the truly useful-the development of the youthful mind. And if Connecticut and Massachusetts have held an honourable place in the history of our country, if they always had the sagacity to perceive their true interests, and the manliness to maintain them, it is due mainly to the efforts of their conscientious labourers in the field of instruction, who had a living faith in the utility of those departments of knowledge which our modern philosophers would discard as inconsistent with the spirit of the age.

We have not at present the means of knowing what amount of classical studies was pursued in the early existence of these colleges. We have reason to believe that it was considerably more than at present. This is certainly true of Latin. This was the conventional language of Europe, and all college theses were maintained in that language. In the life time of President Stiles, of Yale College, who died in 1796, all official intercourse between the officers and students of the college was in Latin; it is now, we believe, used only on State occasions. A glance at the curricolum now pursued, will make it obvious that no student can be expected to converse in Latin. Besides a very moderate amount of Latin required for admission, a few books of Livy, of Tacitus, and Horace, constitute the whole course. Bad as this is, the deficiency in Greek is perhaps greater. For admission, it is sufficient to be able to translate from Dalzell's Græca Minora, or some such elementary work; and notwithstanding that Yale perhaps excels all others in the Greek department, even here the student is supposed to have completed his course at the end of the junior year. It is not wonderful, then, that so many graduates are unable to read Greek; that they sometimes forget even the characters; nor is it strange that many of them are foremost in denouncing, as time lost, that which is spent in learning what is so speedily forgotten.

The multiplicity of professors, and the impossibility of finding work for them, has, in some colleges, given rise to what is called the elective system. In Harvard, after the Sophomore year, students may select for themselves the departments which they desire to prosecute. This is done, indeed, with the approbation and consent of parents and guardians; and the statutes of the college ordain, that when no such election is made for the student, the Facul

ty shall make it for him. The elective studies are Greek, Latin, German, Spanish, and the higher branches of pure mathematics. Those of obligation are ethics, rhetoric, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and astronomy. It does not appear from their annual catalogue what course they assign to those students whose course of study is referred to the discretion of the Faculty.

To this system of elective studies many objections may be urged. The students no longer stand on an equal footing with regard to each other, and consequently much of that wholesome emulation which should exist in a college is lost. The attempt to introduce a partial course in the Charleston College, under Dr. Adams, had this result, and was abandoned.

But perhaps a more serious objection to the system may be found in the virtual abandonment by the Faculty of the high prerogative of absolutely guiding the education of youth. A College Faculty should be a unit. Each member should regard every other as a collaborator in the great work which he has undertaken to perform; and this can be done, only by assigning to each a reasonable portion of their common time. As soon as preferences are shown to one over another, the sense of unity is destroyed, and the esprit du corps in danger of being annihilated.

It is urged with great plausibility, that by the introduction of the elective system, a spirit of emulation is excited in the Faculty, and each member is interested to exert himself to secure scholars for himself. Something is unquestionably due to this consideration; but the Faculty which gives way to it, abandons high ground, and exposes itself to the danger of catering, not merely to the public prejudice, but what is far worse, to the tastes and judices of the very persons the training of whose minds is committed to its discretion.

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A college must pay some respect to the spirit of the age. The Faculty which should adhere obstinately to ancient usages, is in danger of being supplanted by one which is more pliable. But there is one ground which no college can abandon without incurring the guilt of suicide. It must maintain the right of deciding absolutely what it shall teach. Interference in this respect is not to be tolerated. Dictation from without should be re

garded as an unwarrantable interference. Every student committed to its care, should be referred absolutely to its discretion; and the parent or guardian who should undertake to direct the course of instruction for his son, should be respectfully invited to remove him. A college which occupies this elevated position will wield a moral power far higher than that which, referring the course of education to the discretion of others, reduces itself to the condition of a mere usher, paid to impart instruction in certain specific branches of popular education.

The great evil under which American colleges labour, is the tender age at which youths are admitted. They are frequently required to pursue studies which their minds are incapable of grasping. The only remedy for this is to increase the difficulties of admission. The tendency of the grammar schools is always to overtake the college. Require more of the candidate for admission, and at the same time you elevate the character of the grammar school. The curriculum of American colleges occupies four years. The tendency of the schools is to reduce it to three. Whenever this becomes general, the college should instantly take a step forward, and by requiring more of the candidate, enable itself to impart a more extended course of instruction. Thus, if the candidates generally enter the Sophomore class, the college should at once advance the terms ef admission to the Freshman class to that point. It would be sufficient, perhaps, to extend this rule merely to classical studies. It is important that boys should read more classics. All our text-books contain references to them, which the student is supposed to have read, but which, under existing circumstances he has no time to read.

For admission to the Freshman class of Harvard College, candidates are examined in Virgil, Cæsar, Cicero, and Fellow's Greek Reader. After admission they read select portions of Livy and Schmitz's History of Rome. Now how much more profitably employed would the time be in reading Schmitz's Manual, if the student had been made to read Livy first. As it is, he acquires his first knowledge from a work, which however valuable, is necessarily brief; in the other case he would have enjoyed all the advantages of a review of his previous studies.

The classical department, likewise, would be improved.

Being longer trained at school, the boy would be more familiar with the languages, and the recitations would assume more the character of critical and philological examinations, and the study of the classics would become really what in other countries it is proudly called,—the study of the humanities—and the schools thus urged onward, would continue the struggle again to overtake the college, and thus a perpetual stimulant would be at work to improve both the school and the college. A determination on the part of the college to admit none into any class higher than the Freshman, would be met with an equal determination on the part of the teacher to force their boys into the upper classes; and thus the two institutions which can never be rivals, would reciprocally act upon each other, to their mutual improvement, the benefit of their pupils, and the welfare of society at large.

ART. VIII.-LAWS OF LIFE.

Laws of Life. By ELIZABETH BLACKWELL, M.D. With special reference to the physical education of girls.

THE above title of a work recently published in the city of New York, where the authoress resides as a practising physician, is truly calculated to excite attention and inquiry. She has the fullest right to style herself, M.D., being a regular graduate, of good standing from the Medical College of Geneva, in the Empire State; and is the first lady who has received, on this side of the Atlantic, the ordinary diploma of the Doctorate in Medicine. That she was abundantly worthy thus to be crowned is proved, as well and vastly better by the contents of this little book, than by the signatures of the learned and very respectable Professors, before whom she appeared, after due attendance upon their lectures, to undergo the usual ordeal and pass the requisite examinations.

It is now "a fixed fact" that the practice of physicwe suppose Surgery must be also included-is no longer to be the exclusive province of the masculine sex. There is a Female College in Boston which was favorably no

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ticed in the Massachusetts Legislature, during its last session, and is likely to receive a donation from that body. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, for June 1852, tells us that "several female physicians are in practice" in that enlightened city-the American Athenswith an increasing business." The class of the Female Medical College, of Philadelphia, consisting exclusively of females, as the name imports, amounted last winter to fifty-two students; eight ladies graduated in the spring of the present year, and the circular for the next session is already issued. Although, thus far, the chairs are filled by gentlemen, we are informed that they are only considered temporary incumbents; female Professors are to supplant them as soon as the proper number shall be prepared for the onerous duties of instruction.

We are by no means among those who look upon this movement with horror and dismay as one of unqualified evil. Like all other innovations, it contains doubtless elements of annoyance and disturbance, and experience only can show whether its tendencies are on the whole, for the better or for the worse. Like the enterprise of Tennyson's Princess, it will be apt to meet with some uncalculated and perhaps uncontrollable contingencies to interfere with and possibly overthrow it. But we shall see; time only brings revelations and conclusions. Still less are we willing to take position with those unmanly critics who make a jest of the earnest efforts of the gentler and better half of our race to acquire varied forms of knowledge, or still more disgracefully, give utterance to rude and clownish taunts, such as we have read, with a feeling of shame, in two of the London Journals, referring to the amiable authoress of the work under notice. Mrs. Browning, better known as the poetess, Miss Barrett, somewhere calls madame George Sand the

Large headed woman, and large hearted man!"

Both these eulogistic epithets are as fairly the property of our American graduate, who has with her own firm and determined will met and encountered difficulties and surmounted obstacles that would have forever stopped and annihilated an army of the small fry of her calumniators. She is as much their superior intellectually, by the laborious cultivation of her fine mind, as nature has elevated her above their highest capacity of appreciation, in crea