This extract, from the pen of one who has devoted so much talent and patient investigation to the subject of education, entitles it to the serious consideration of all those who are in any way connected with the same subject in this country, where the old A B C cramming all but universally prevails.—­But to return to Upper Canada and its schools.  Some estimate of the value of its scholastic establishments may be formed from the fact, that while its sphere of usefulness is rapidly extending, it has already reached the following honourable position:  The population of Upper Canada is close upon 1,000,000; the number of children between the ages of 5 and 16 is 263,000; the number of children on the rolls of the common school establishments is 179,587; and the grand total of money available for these glorious purposes, is 170,000l.  I feel conscious that I have by no means done full justice to this important subject; but the limits of a work like this render it impossible so to do.  Let it suffice to say, that Upper Canada is inferior to none of its neighbouring rivals, as regards the quality of instruction given; and that it is rapidly treading on the heels of the most liberal of them, as regards the amount raised for its support.  The normal school, I conceive to be a model as nearly perfect as human agency has yet achieved; and the chemical and agricultural lectures there given, and practically illustrated on the small farm adjoining the building, cannot fail to produce most useful and important results in a young uncultivated country possessing the richest soil imaginable.  The Governor-General and the Government deserve every credit for the support and encouragement they have given to education; but, if I may draw a comparison without being invidious, I would repeat, that it is to the unusual zeal and energy of Dr. Ryerson, to his great powers of discriminating and selecting what he found most valuable in the countless methods he examined, and to his combination and adaptation of them, that the colony is mainly indebted for its present admirable system.  Well may Upper Canada be proud of her educational achievements, and in her past exertions read a hopeful earnest of a yet more noble future.[AT]

But it is not in education alone that Canada has been shadowing forth a noble career.  Emancipated from maternal apron-strings by a constitutional self-government, and aided by the superior administrative powers of the Earl of Elgin, she has exhibited an innate vitality which had so long been smothered by Imperial misrule as to cause a doubt of its existence; and if she has not shown it by the birth of populous cities, she has proved it by a more general and diffusive prosperity.  A revenue quadrupled in four years needs no Chicagos or Buffalos to endorse the colony’s claims to energy and progress.  Internal improvements have also been undertaken on a large scale:  railways are threading their iron bands through waste and forest, and connecting in one link all the North American