THE farmer has his crib wherein he stores his grain; the merchant has his store-house wherein he lays up his merchandise; and every lad has a shelf in his brain whereon he puts all his knowledge. How curious it is that a boy, like a merchant, can take account of stock and ascertain how much he has gained in the knowledge of things. But if he should undertake to make an inventory of all, it would take years to complete it, if indeed his lifetime would be sufficient for the purpose. Those who have most carefully considered the immense number of facts that a small boy has learned, are of the opinion that a lad at the age of five years has then acquired more than he can by any possibility add to during the remaining years of his life. He retains in his memory every separate fact. He has mastered the ordinary, every-day laws of his being. He has become familiar with the ordinary laws of nature. He has learned language, an achievement which has not been attained by anyone over five years of age. Of some twenty-eight well attested cases of infants having been carried away by wild animals and recovered, not one could be taught to talk. And further, a child learns several languages at the same time with the same ease with which he masters one. If the father, mother, and nurse be of different nationalities, and each speaks to the child in his veracular, he learns the three languages without apparent effort, and never fails of addressing each in the proper tongue. It is otherwise with adults. It is said of a certain missionary, who devoted much time to the acquisition of a foreign language, that with all his effort he was outstripped by his children, who were allowed to come in contact with the children of the natives, and that he was obliged frequently to call his little ones to supply a word. It was a child who corrected his parent's prayer that "God would eat the Indians," the words eat and save being similar. The mind and memory of a child has no affinity for principles. It deals only in facts. Rules are to them a hindrance. Age has recourse to association to assist memory; but children have no such occasion. For this reason a child can learn to spell much more easily than a man. It is seldom that a man can wholly correct his lack of early education in this regard. There was a colored school in the city of Providence some years ago, in which the younger scholars were restless, on account of the restraint to which they were not accustomed. The teacher deputized one of the older pupils to hear them spell, as a means of quiet. In a short time they became famous in this particular, and the High School would hardly have dared to meet them in a spelling-match. The writer, together with the late Dr. Arnold, selected one hundred of the hardest words in the dictionary with which to examine these little girls and boys—such words as daguerreotype, belleslettres, diarrhœa, and the like—and no failure was made till the ninety-eighth word. Had rules been given them for doubling the consonants, or in any other regard, they would not only have been of no advantage, but a hindrance. If a child is compelled to learn rules instead of facts, it is an occasion for the interference of the society to prevent cruelty to children. Was there ever a child who so overcame the laws of its being as to be interested in grammar, which is nothing but rules? If so, it was phenomenal.—Examiner.