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This grouping introduces the subject of education; and what can be more interesting to the mind than the process by which another mind is let out or freed from the bondage and fetters which have hitherto imprisoned it? The success may be but partial; but it is absolute, so far as it goes.

The first problem is to disengage and develop the mind of an idiot, which has hitherto been as if hidden beneath the useless muscles and the insensate nerves, components of his weak and inefficient body. The second problem, though by no means the last, is to apply this partially-liberated intellect to the acquisition of useful knowledge and good habits.

These ends are accomplished, in Syracuse, by a series of agencies whose key is in the hand of the superintendent, and whose movements are intrusted alternately and unceasingly to attendants, gymnasts, and teachers. The idiots (Idioc means isolated) are not for a moment let alone. From morning till night they are led from one mode of activity to another -- seated only to rest, and constantly working out their own progress through experimental and lively teachings. Early in the morning, as soon as dressed and fed, these children of the neant begin to do something. From half hour to half hour, they pass from singing or hearing music to exercises of locomotion, standing, training of the hand to prehension, imitation, feeling; then the errors of the senses are corrected, their modes of perception improved in quickness or accuracy, and raised progressively to phenomena more and more intellectual. The speech, its concordance with actions, the movements performed on command, the exercise of the will through obedience, the morality of labor, of partaking of food, of helping relations to each other, of pleasure and pain, all these exercises have a very different moral, intellectual, and hygienic result from those obtained in schools where book, child, and chair, are screwed together three hours at a time, or in reformatories where children drive the same kind of peg in the same kind of sole from morning to night, from day to day, etc.

"But," does the reader ask, "are not reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, etc., taught also?" Oh, yes. Dr. Wilbur has provided abundantly for instruction in these, and has devised and procured much apparatus to aid in the matter, and all the children, so far as they can, acquire a knowledge of these studies. Some become, after a time, remarkable proficients in penmanship; and one, occasionally, in geography, or in the rapid combinations or evolutions of numbers, astonishing even skilful, teachers by his readiness on these subjects; but the majority profit more by the physiological than by the mental training; they are decidedly poor scholars, and are only proficient in kindness, honesty, and love of labor proportionate to their power.

This seemingly small success is really very great, when we compare it with the original incapacity of idiots. Dr. Wilbur has attained it by his superior administrative capacity, his tact in choosing, commanding, and keeping his helpers, but more than all by his adherence to physiological training. Without group-teaching, he could not have taught so many idiots with so few subordinates; without the incitement of systematic imitation, he could not have developed wills where even instincts were scarcely to be discovered; without sensorial exercises, he could not have accumulated distinct sensations pabulum for comparison and judgment; without general gymnastics, he could not have rendered human the balanced animal gait; and, without special gymnastics, he could never have given precision to localized movement, nor restored the paw-like hand of the idiot to the exalted place assigned it by Galen, at the summit of the creation, on a level with the brain itself. This, at least, Dr. Wilbur has done, and is doing every year better and better for the idiot children of the New York State Asylum.

II.

TURN we now to Barre, and see what Dr. George Brown has accomplishled for a class of children of similarly incomplete development, but of wealthier parentage. Though I had expected to find a marked difference between a State and a private institution, yet the contrast was even greater than I had anticipated.

Leaving the Boston and Albany Railway at Brookfield, we rode among the hills of central Massachusetts to Barre, which we found a scattered village, and its institution for idiots a dis-collection of elegant or well-appointed buildings. It is situated on a broad and healthy plateau, ensconced in trees. You come upon it suddenly; without preliminary approaches, you have before you a shallow and large basin of flowers set in raised margins of rich velvety turf, served to the surprised senses like a repast of scent and colors, guarded by stately evergreens trimmed after the manner of Versailles, and fronted to the left by the principal building, whose steps, columns, architraves, and galleries, rise above each other in Vitruvian ordonnance.