8.  If, however, after mature deliberation, you conclude that you have the plan of a school-book which you ought to try to mature and execute, be slow and cautious about it.  Remember that so great is now the competition in this branch, nothing but superior excellence or very extraordinary exertions will secure the favorable reception of a work.  Examine all that your predecessors have done before you.  Obtain, whatever may be the trouble and expense, all other text-books on the subject, and examine them thoroughly.  If you see that you can make a very decided advance on all that has been done, and that the public will probably submit to the inconvenience and expense of a change to secure the result of your labors, go forward slowly and carefully in your work, no matter how much investigation, how much time and labor it may require.  The more difficulty you may find in gaining the eminence, the less likely will you be to be followed by successful competitors.

9.  Consider, in forming your text-book, not merely the whole subject on which you are to write, but also look extensively and thoroughly at the institutions throughout the country, and consider carefully the character of the teachers by whom you expect it to be used.  Sometimes a man publishes a text-book, and when it fails on trial, he says “it is because they did not know how to use it.  The book in itself was good.  The whole fault was in the awkwardness and ignorance of the teacher.”  How absurd!  As if, to make a good text-book, it was not as necessary to adapt it to teachers as to scholars.  A good text-book, which the teachers for whom it was intended did not know how to use!! In other words, a good contrivance, but entirely unfit for the purpose for which it was intended.

10.  Lastly, in every new plan, consider carefully whether its success in your hands, after you have tried it and found it successful, be owing to its novelty and to your own special interest in it, or to its own innate and intrinsic superiority.  If the former, use it so long as it will last, simply to give variety and interest to your plans.  Recommend it in conversation or in other ways to teachers with whom you are acquainted, not as a wonderful discovery, which is going to change the whole science of education, but as one method among others which may be introduced from time to time to relieve the monotony of the teacher’s labors.

In a word, do not go away from the established institutions of our country, or deviate from the great objects which are at present, and ought continually to be pursued by them, without great caution, circumspection, and deliberate inquiry.  But, within these limits, exercise ingenuity and invention as much as you will.  Pursue steadily the great objects which demand the teacher’s attention.  They are simple and few.  Never lose sight of them, nor turn to the right or to the left to follow any ignis fatuus which may arise to allure you away, but exercise as much ingenuity and enterprise as you please in giving variety and interest to the modes by which these objects are pursued.