One day some visitors requested I would call out a class of the children to be examined.  Having done so, I asked the visitors in what they would wish the children to be examined; at the same time stating that they might hear the children examined in natural history, Scriptural history, arithmetic, spelling, geography, or geometry.  They choose the latter, and I proceded to examine the children accordingly; beginning with straight lines.  Having continued this examination for about half an hour, we proceeded to enter into particulars respecting triangles; and having discoursed on the difference between isosceles triangles and scalene triangles, I observed that an acute isosceles triangle had all its angles acute, and proceeded to observe that a right-angled scalene triangle had all its angles acute.  The children immediately began to laugh, for which I was at a loss to account, and told them of the impropriety of laughing at me.  One of the children immediately replied, “Please, sir, do you know what we were laughing at?” I replied in the negative.  “Then, sir,” says the boy, “I will tell you.  Please, sir, you have made a blunder.”  I, thinking I had not, proceeded to defend myself, when the children replied, “Please, sir, you convict yourself.”  I replied, “How so?” “Why,” says the children, “you said a right-angled triangle had one right angle, and that all its angles are acute.  If it has one right angle, how can all its angles be acute?” I soon perceived the children were right, and that I was wrong.  Here, then, the reader may perceive the fruits of teaching the children to think, inasmuch as it is shewn that children of six years of age and under were able to refute their tutor.  If children had been taught to think many years ago, error would have been much more easily detected, and its baneful influence would not have had that effect upon society which at this day unfortunately we are obliged to witness.

At another time I was lecturing the children in the gallery on the subject of cruelty to animals; when one of the little children observed, “Please, sir, my big brother catches the poor flies, and then sticks a pin through them, and makes them draw the pin along the table.”  This afforded me an excellent opportunity of appealing to their feelings on the enormity of this offence, and, among other things, I observed, that if the poor fly had been gifted with the powers of speech like their own, it probably would have exclaimed, while dead, as follows:—­“You naughty child, how can you think of torturing me so?  Is there not room in the world for you and me?  Did I ever do you any harm?  Does it do you any good to put me in such pain?  Why do you do it, you are big enough to know better?  How would you like a man to run a piece of wire through your body, and make you draw things about?  Would you not cry at the pain?  Go, then, you wicked boy, and learn to leave off such cruel actions.”  Having finished, one of the children replied, “How can any thing speak if it is dead?” “Why,” said I, “supposing it could speak.”  “You meant to say, sir,” was the rejoinder, “dying instead of dead.”