has not been the only evil that has attended a misapplication of the gallery; for the teachers, for want of knowing the system properly, have been at a loss how to occupy the time of the children, and scores of teachers have ruined their own constitutions, and also the constitutions of some of the children, by the perpetual talking and singing, which, I am sorry to say, too many consider to be the sum total of the system:  and I may state here, that the children should never be more than one hour at a time, or, at most two hours, during the day, in the gallery.  All beyond this is injurious to the teacher, and doubly so to the little pupils.  The forenoon is always the best time for gallery lessons; the teacher’s mind is more clear, and the minds of the children are more receptive.  After the children have taken their dinner they should be entertained with the object lessons, a small portion of spelling and reading, and the rest of the afternoon should be devoted to moral and physical teaching in the play-ground, if the weather will at all permit it.  The more you rob your children of their physical education to shew off their intellectual acquirements, the more injury you do their health and your own; and in the effort to do too much, you violate the laws of nature, defeat your own object, and make the school a hot-bed of precocity, instead of a rational infants’ school for the training and educating infants.  I have been blamed, by writers on the infant system, for that which I never did, and never recommended; I have been made answerable for the errors and mis-conceptions of others, who have not troubled themselves to read my writings; and, in their anxiety to produce something new and original, have strayed from the very essential parts of the plan, and on this account I am charged by several writers with being unacquainted with the philosophy of my own system.  I thought three-and-thirty years ago that if I could arrest public attention to the subject, it was as much as could be expected.  I knew very well at that time that a dry philosophical detail would neither be received or read.  My object was to appeal to the senses of the public by doing the thing in every town where practicable.  By this method I succeeded, where the other would have failed, but it by no means followed that I was unacquainted with the philosophy of my own plans, merely because I preferred the doing of the thing to the writing about it.  Believing, however, that the time has now arrived, and that the public mind is better prepared than it was then, I have thought I might venture to go a little more into detail, in order to remove some well founded objections, which, but for this reason, would not have existed.  The infant mind, like a tender plant, requires to be handled and dealt with carefully, for if it be forced and injudiciously treated during the first seven years of its existence, it will affect its whole constitution as long as it lives afterwards.  There are hundreds