that is now acknowledged—­what are the FACULTIES of the very minds we are dealing with, nor what are the PROCESSES by which those minds begin and keep up their advance in knowledge? So, also, those who in the most charitable mood could see in education only something too hum-drum and narrow for their better fancies, find it now rising and expanding into a new and large field for intellectual effort, full of interesting problems, and fraught with realizations as yet undreamed of.

It may be said, that the young mind had always learned what it did learn, by discoveries; we answer, our methods and our books have not in any sufficient degree recognized the fact, provided for it, nor taken advantage of it.  It may be said, that writers had previously acknowledged that the mind learns well—­some of them even, that it learns best—­when it discovers:  we answer, that nevertheless, no one had recorded it as a well-grounded, universal conclusion and positive law, that the mind only can learn, in all strictly scientific matters, as it discovers, and that hence, the canons of the method of discovery become rules for directing, in studies of this character, the education of the young.  Aristotle and Bacon have recognized and enforced upon the adult mind its two master methods of advance by reasoning.  But our children have their knowing also to attain to, their discoveries to make, their logic of proof, on occasions, to employ.  Shall we lavish all the treasures of method on those who have passed the formative stage of mind, and acquired the bent of its activities?  Rather, we think, the true intellectual method—­combining both Baconian induction and Aristotelian deduction—­yet waits to realize some of the best of the application and work for which its joint originators and their co-workers have been preparing it; and that perhaps one of the highest consummations of this one method of thought may yet appear in the carrying forward, with more of certainty, pleasure, and success in their attaining of knowledge, the lisping philosophers of our school-rooms and our firesides.

From one source, disconnected latterly from those to which I have thus far called attention, there has arisen a decidedly progressive movement in the direction of right teaching, and one that, at least in geographical studies, promises soon to result in a consummation of great importance.  Though Pestalozzianism, as further developed by the Prussian educators and schools, has never yet realized the completely inductive and consecutive character here contended for, it has been tending in a degree toward such a result; and this is perhaps seen in the most marked way in the method of teaching geography developed by Humboldt and Ritter, and represented in this country by their distinguished pupil, Professor Guyot.  This method subordinates political to physical geography, proceeding from facts to laws, and by setting out with the grand natural features of the globe, leads the learner to