iority in productive power of the old Northern and Middle States over the Northwest; and still more, by the inferiority of industrial power of the plantation States, compared with the region lying north of them, will have a constant tendency to approximate, but can never become identical. The constant tendency of the center of industrial power will be northward, as well as westward. This will be determined by the superiority of natural resources of the Northwest over the Southwestern section, by the use of a far greater proportion of machine labor, in substitution for muscular labor, in the northern region, and also by the superior muscular and mental power of the inhabitants of the colder climate. To these might be added the immense advantage of a vastly greater accumulated industrial power, in every branch of industry, and the tendency of the superabundant capital of the Old world to flow into the free States, and the country north of them.

In the view of the subject which has been taken here, it will be seen that the trade of the British provinces north of us has been considered a portion of our domestic trade, and that Mexico and California have been left out of our calculation. These may be allowed to balance each other. But, together or apart, they will not be of sufficient importance to our continental commerce, to vary materially the results of its future for the next fifty years, as developed in this paper.

At their present rates of increase, the United States and the Canadas, fifty years from this time, will contain over one hundred and twenty millions of people. If we suppose it to be one hundred and five millions, and that these shall be distributed so that the Pacific States shall have ten millions, and the Atlantic border twenty-five millions, there will be left for the great interior plain seventy millions. These seventy millions will have twenty times as much commercial intercourse with each other, as with all the world beside. It is obvious, then, that there must be built up in their midst the great city of the continent; and not only so, but that they will sustain several cities greater than those which can be sustained on the ocean border. This is the era of great cities. London has nearly trebled in numbers and business since the commencement of the current century. The augmentation of her population in that time, has been a million and a half. This increase is equal to the whole population of New-York and Philadelphia; and yet it is probable that New-York will be as populous as London in about fifty years. A liberal but not improbable estimate of the period of duplication of the numbers of these great cities would be, for London, thirty years, and for New-York fifteen years. At this rate, London will have four millions and seven hundred thousand, and New York three millions four hundred thousand, at the end of thirty years. At the end of the third duplication of New York-that is, in forty-five years, she will have become more populous than London, and number nearly seven millions. This is beyond belief, but it shows the probability of New York overtaking London in about fifty years.

A similar comparison of New York and the leading interior city-Chicago —will show a like result in favor of Chicago. The census returns show the

average period of duplication to be fifteen years for New York, and less than four years for Chicago. Suppose that of New-York for the future should be sixteen years, and that of Chicago eight years, and that New York has now, with her suburbs, nine hundred thousand, and Chicago one hundred thousand people. In three duplications, New York would contain six millions, two hundred thousand, and Chicago, in six duplications, occupying the same length of time, would have six millions four hundred thousand. It is not asserted as probable, that either city will be swelled to such an extraordinary size in forty-eight years, if ever; but it is more than probable that the leading interior city will be greater than New York fifty years from this time.

A few words as to the estimation in which such anticipations are held. The general mind is faithless of what goes much beyond its own experience. It refuses to receive, or it receives with distrust, conclusions, however strongly sustained by facts and fair deductions, which go much beyond its ordinary range of thought. It is especially skeptical and intolerant towards the avowal of opinions, however well founded, which are sanguine of great future changes. It does not comprehend them, and therefore refuses to believe; but it sometimes goes further, and, without examination, scornfully rejects. To seek for the truth, is the proper object of those who, from the past and present, undertake to say what will be in the future, and when the truth is found, to express it with as little reference to what will be thought of it, as if putting forth the solution of a mathematical problem.

If it were asked, whose anticipations of what has been done to advance civilization, for the past fifty years, have come nearest the truth-those of the sanguine and hopeful, or those of the cautious and fearful-must it not be answered that no one of the former class had been sanguine and hopeful enough to anticipate the full measure of human progress, since the opening of the present century? May it not be the most sanguine and hopeful only, who, in anticipation, can attain a due estimation of the measure of future change and improvement, in the grand march of society and civilization westward over our continent?-Hunt's Merchants' Magazine.

MEANS OF CULTIVATING A CORRECT LITERARY TASTE.

THE following practical suggestions to teachers, for the cultivation of a correct literary taste, are taken from an essay read before a Teachers' Institute in Ohio:

"We are a reading people; and writers are as numerous as forest leaves. * * * * After our school days are over, general reading becomes a principal source of mental improvement; therefore it is important that we should know what to select and how to read. But what is the present state of the public mind in this respect? How many adults, intelligent, too, in

some sense, who can not name a dozen standard authors, with the time they flourished, and the nation to which they belonged. If it be true that our literary taste, as well as character, is formed in youth, how can teachers best succeed in so moulding the mental habits of pupils, that they may not waste precious hours, all through life, in the perusal of worthless books? How train them to discern what is valuable and what is not to know why one book should be preferred to another?

“To commence, we would assign to a class, in addition to the lesson they are to read, an account of some popular standard author-say Longfellow or Bryant. Let each pupil prepare a brief biographical sketch, drawing materials from any and all available sources. You have no idea, if you never tried it, of the number of interesting facts that will thus be accumulated. For example, if the lesson be on Bryant, one will tell you where he was born and when, and the profession of his immediate ancestors; another that he published a volume of poems at the early age of fourteen; another that he practiced law for some time, and afterwards travelled through Europe, &c. The statement of these facts will be intensely interesting to the class, and they will wish to learn more of him. You might now tell the class to read all the articles in their book which were written by Bryant, and request each one to select the paragraph he or she thinks the best. Here you will test the inclinations of the different minds.

"At the next recitation have the selected passages read, and ask each pupil the reason for his choice. Compare and analyze each sentence, and bring out beauties and faults; thus you will begin to form taste. Our mind may be different from others, but we have found more delight in conducting such exercises than any other within the range of the profession. It is a joy to see their minds awake to the appreciation of the beautiful and true. Instead of drawling listlessly through the thirty-two stanzas of Gray's Elegy, without acquiring two definite ideas, they will soon learn to drink in the exhaustless richness of the verse. Every line will fill the mind with vivid pictures. When they read

"Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,"

the imagination sees the hills and valleys reposing in the mellow twilight, and the pleasure felt is increased by reading

"And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds."

"Solemn stillness"-they can almost feel its magic charm, and hear those "drowsy tinklings." It were worth a day of toil to read these four lines with a full appreciation.

"Having studied the passages selected from one author, take another, and investigate his compositions in the same manner. Then compare the two, and note the points of agreement and difference in style. See which excels in imagery or in any other respect. Soon the pupil will learn to observe

not only the style but the substance of what he reads, and will discover who are the writers that think.

“After this there will be a definite object in their reading, vain and aimless wanderings from one book to another will be avoided, pure taste will have a chance of development, and useful books will be preferred to trash. Thus will true scholars be made-thus real authors."

SPELLING.

OUR articles upon the incompetence of Public School teachers, however deficient in other respects, had certainly the merit of telling the truth, and, we flatter ourselves, of telling it pretty plainly. We are glad to say that they have excited attention throughout the country, and we are equally sorry to say that they have provoked disclosures of ignorance more profound and widely spread than we had supposed possible. We have ample evidence that this discreditable deficiency is not confined to New-York. Even from New-England, the Public Schools of which are popularly considered the best in the country, we have received numerous and strong complaints, while the letters upon the subject which come to us from the West are of the same tenor. Thus a friend in Illinois sends us word that in the South and West, during the last twenty years, he has had under his direction a great number of teachers, has scrutinized the qualifications of hundreds of others, and found hardly one fit for the profession. He has pursued a sensible course, and has resolutely insisted that instructors under his management should study as well as teach. In doing this, he has discovered that those of the greatest merit, and who were naturally fitted for usefulness in their profession, were the least impatient of suggestion and the least sensitive to correction. It is the teacher who is not only ignorant, but unwilling to make the exertions necessary to supply his or her deficiencies, who whines the most plaintively or flies into the greatest passion at exposure. It is the teacher who is most conscious of deserving rebuke, who cries out the most pitifully that he has been slandered. Under such painful circumstances, instead of writing bad English to the newspapers, it would be a great deal wiser to expend a little money in the purchase of Webster's Spelling Book and Murray's Grammar, and a little time in the study of those venerable volumes.

As the result of his long experience, our friend in Illinois also declares that very few college-bred men can spell decently, or construct English sentences accurately. This is one of the complaints made by us in the very beginning of the controversy, and it is perhaps the very one which has been received with the least equanimity. It was considered really intolerable to hint that one might write A. B. after his name, might have a little knowledge of Latin and Greek and Mathematics, and yet be absolutely unable to

write and spell his own language correctly. And yet it is not difficult to account for this deficiency. In too many of our universities those branches of learning are most esteemed which have not a living utility but a dead respectability. In what college, we should like to know, does the attention paid to the study of the English language bear anything like a decent proportion to that given to the cultivation of the classics, as they are absurdly called, just as if Milton and Addison were not as classical as Homer and Horace? What position does the Professor of Rhetoric occupy in the Faculty? How many such Professors are fit for their places? Who does not know many such, the merest addle-headed pedants, who year after year give out such exciting themes to their classes as “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," and who annually inform wondering freshmen that the first sentence of an essay should be short? The country is searched for able Professors of Latin and Greek, but almost anybody is thought fit to be a Professor of English. The consequence is, that students who learn to write our beautiful language with power and elegance do so after they have left the encircling arms of Alma Mater, have been knocked about a little in the world, and have discovered the difference between the ornamental and the useful.-N. Y. Tribune.

DOES THE MISSISSIPPI RUN UP HILL?

THAT'S the question. Dr. Boynton takes the affirmative, and Horace Mann the negative. Who shall decide when doctors disagree? It is a fact that the figure of the earth is an oblate spheroid, having its equatorial díameter more than 26 miles longer than its polar diameter, and consequently the equatorial regions are some 13 miles further from the earth's center than the poles are. If the earth were at rest, the water in the tropical regions would flow with great rapidity toward the poles, until the equilibrium, as far as water is concerned, would be restored. The Mississippi would flow from its mouth to its source, the former being over two miles further from the center of the earth than the latter. It is therefore evident that the water in this river, as it now flows, rises or recedes from the earth's center between two and three miles, in passing from its source to the Gulf of Mexico.

"But how can water run up hill?" asks Horace Mann and others. For the same reason that water on a grindstone in motion will mount the center ridge instead of running off at the sides. The revolution of the earth round its axis gives all bodies on its surface, especially water, a tendency to the equator; and this tendency is sufficient to counterbalance the rise in the surface in the same direction; in fact, the one is the cause of the other. Water is therefore free to flow in any direction, which inequalities on the surface, thus balanced, may occasion. If the daily rotation of the earth