Under the recall of the minds of educators among us to fundamental principles of methods and tendencies in teaching, which we have pointed out, it was but natural to expect attempts to be made toward remedying the defects and supplying the needs that could not fail to be detected in our teaching processes.  Naturally, too, such attempts would result in the bringing forward, sooner or later, of novelties in the topics and form of the school-books.  What the pen—­which, in the outset, proposed the necessity of molding the school-work into a course of re-discoveries of the scientific truths—­should reasonably be expected to do toward supplying the want it had indicated; or what it may, in the interim, have actually accomplished toward furnishing the working implements requisite to realizing in practice the possible results foreshadowed by the best educational theories, it may be neither in place nor needful that we should here intimate.  Sometimes, indeed, there is in our social movements evidence of a singular sort of intellectual catalysis; and a mute fact, so it be a fact, and even under enforced continuance of muteness, through influence of temporary and extraneous circumstances, may yet, like the innocent platinum in a mixture of certain gases, or the equally innocent yeast-plant vegetating in the ‘lump’ of dough, take effect in a variety of ways, as if by mere presence.

We shall remember how even Virgil had to write: 

     ‘Hos ego versiculos scripsi:  tulit alter honores!’

And the veriest bumpkin knows the force of the adage about one’s shaking the tree, for another to gather up the fruit.  But Virgil was patient, and did well at the last; though the chronicles do not tell us how many pears ever came to the teeth of him that did the tree-shaking.  At all events, it is satisfying to know that time spins a long yarn, and comes to the end of it leisurely and at his own wise motion!

The English object-lesson system being now fairly and successfully domesticated among us, and to such an extent as to call for the invitation and temporary residence among us, in the city of Oswego, of a distinguished lady-teacher from the English Training Schools, it is again but natural that the system should call forth books adapted to its purposes; and it was scarcely possible, under the circumstances we have now shown to exist, that such books should come forth without presenting a more conscious aim toward embodying something of the principle and order of discovery than has marked even their English prototypes.  These anticipations we find exactly realized in the first book of the new pattern that has yet made its appearance—­the ’Primary Object-Lessons’ of Mr. Calkins.  Of this book, issued June, 1861, the author thus states the motive:  ’With an earnest desire to contribute something toward a general radical change in the system of primary education in this country—­a change from the plan of exercising the memory chiefly to that of developing the observing powers—­a change from an artificial to a natural plan, one in accordance with the philosophy of mind and its laws of development, the author commenced the following pages.’