‘Loses, discountenanced, and like folly shows’ BEATTIE.’

Now, it is true, the whole sentence, in its best state, would have shown to our green understandings like enough to ‘folly,’ if we had once made the effort to find meaning of any sort in it; nor can it be considered the most profitable use of school time, thus to ‘like folly show’ to unknit juvenile brains the abstract and high thought of mature and great minds, who uttered them with no foolishness or frivolity in their intentions!  We see reasons to expect substantial advantages from Mr. Willson’s books; and we believe teachers will appreciate and use them.  We could wish they had not gone so far to mechanicalize the pupil’s enunciation; by too freely introducing throughout the points of inflection; but it is safe to predict that most pupils will take up with interest the simplified readings in science; that they will comprehend and remember a useful portion of what they read; that the lessons will afford both them and the teachers points of suggestion from which the mind can profitably be led out to other knowledge and its connections; and that they who go through the series can at least leave school with some more distinct ideas as to what the fields of human knowledge are, and what they embrace, than was ever possible under the regime of merely fine writing, of pathetic, poetic, and generally miscellaneous selections.

The educational interest that grew up in our country between the years 1810 and 1828, about the year 1835 gave place to a stagnation that has marked nearly the whole of the period intervening between the last-named and the present date.  In the year 1858, the New-York Teacher was made the first medium of some thoughts in substance agreeing with those set forth in the earlier part of this paper, claiming the indispensableness to true education of a more true and liberal work on the part of the learner’s intellectual faculties, and of a more true and logical consecution than has yet been attained, and one corresponding to the natural order of the intellectual operations, in the books and lessons through which the usual school studies are to be mastered.  ’Make’—­said the first of the articles setting forth this thought—­’the [form of the] facts and principles of any branch of study as simple as you choose, and unless the order of their presentation be natural—­be that order, from observation to laws and causes, in which the mind naturally moves, whenever it moves surely and successfully—­the child, except in the rare case of prodigies that find a pleasure in unraveling complexity, will still turn from the book with loathing.  He will do so because he must.  It is not in his nature to violate his nature for the sake of acquiring knowledge, however great the incentives or threatenings attending the process.’  ’The child’s mind ... with reference to all unacquired knowledge ... stands in precisely the attitude of the experimenters