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Connected with our Drill and Gymnasium Hall is a room where football, basket ball, or other games may be played at any time of year, where are ladders, parallel bars, chest weights, etc. A bowling alley and roller-skating rink are also in this building, of which full use is made, especially in bad weather.

In our Gymnasium Hall entertainments are given weekly through the winter season, in which children, teachers, and the Superintendent take part, consisting of tableaux, recitations, dialogues, etc., also views of many foreign countries shown with the stereopticon. These are greatly enjoyed by all our family. Our farm, including the lawns about the buildings, consists of some two hundred and sixty acres, the larger part of which is pasturage. We have some seventy acres of mowing land which supplies our horses and cattle with hay. In our vegetable gardens we raise all kinds of vegetables for our table use. Our orchards supply an unending quantity of good fruit. On our pasture land we can fat the beef used in the establishment, and do so in preference to using meat coming from unknown sources. We know we have no tuberculous cattle, and consume no tainted meat.

The country about here is hilly, very picturesque and beautiful. We look off many miles to the East over hills, forests and farms to the "Great Hill" of the Massachusetts Indians, Wachusett Mountain. By going a mile to the North, and behind the Institution, we can see thirty or forty miles away the peaks of mountains in Western Massachusetts, -- or even the Catskills in an exceptionally clear day, -- while Monadnock rears his lofty head, solitary and alone, forty miles away in New Hampshire. This Institution is located in a beautiful New England village, within five minutes' walk of churches, hotel, stores, postoffice, telegraph, telephone, town library, etc. The village is some distance from the railroad depot, but the prospect seems good for connection by trolley soon.

GEO. A. BROWN, A. B., M. D., CATHARINE W. BROWN, Superintendents.

A SMALL pamphlet was published in Worcester, January 1, 1851, entitled, "Circular of the Institution for the Education of Idiots, Imbeciles, and Children of Retarded Development of Mind." The writer, Dr. Hervey B. Wilbur, of Barre, details his experience in training and developing fifteen pupils "who, by reason of mental infirmity, are not fit subjects for ordinary school instruction." Eight of these cases, with their idiosyncrasies and individual improvement, are specifically delineated, with methods employed, portraying how much he has accomplished in two-and-one-half years of teaching.

In 1847, Dr.Wilbur saw in a number of Chamber's Journal an account of a visit, by one of its correspondents, to a school for training idiots, in Paris, in charge of Edouard Seguin. Later, he met in one or more numbers of a British medical journal a very glowing account of a professional visit to the same school, written by Dr. Conolly, one of the princes of British philanthropy. These two articles inspired him to relinquish his professional work, and devote his life to the same philanthropic purpose. For this work Dr. Wilbur possessed rare qualifications, indomitable will undeterred by the obstacles which ever oppose a novel undertaking, unlimited patience with the feeble efforts of his proteges, a genuine pity for the unfortunate, and faith in the divinity that presides over the feeblest humanity. A true scientist, he had no sympathy with the materialistic philosophy which would put out the light of the immortal soul. To the dignity and innate authority quietly controlling all, was added an unfailing fund of humor that often electrified the dulled intellect of a pupil, placing him for the first time en rappart with a master mind.

The decade commencing with 1842 shows a simultaneous awakening in Europe and America in behalf of the class styled Idiots. Dr. Guggenbuhl opened his school (for cretins) on the Abendberg in 1842, simultaneously with that of M. Saegert, at Berlin. In 1846, Dr. Kern established a school at Leipsig, and the writings of Drs. A. Reed, Twining, and J. Conolly gave birth to the first English institution at Bath. In 1848, Sir M. Peto devoted his own mansion, Essex Hall, Colchester, to the same cause. Scotland opened her first institution in 1852, and in June, 1853, was laid by Prince Albert the cornerstone of the school at Earlswood, Surrey.

Individual cases of idiocy in American schools for the blind, and the mute, had been taught for several years with a measure of success that greatly interested individual educators. But in 1842-3 the visits of Horace Mann and George Sumner to the training school of Edouard Seguin, at Bicetre, with their commendatory letters thereupon, gave a wide impetus upon the subject throughout the educational and philanthropic classes. The result was that memorials were presented to both legislatures of New York and Massachusetts, March 25, 1846, asking for state action as to the education of this defective class.