Acknowledging his indebtedness to the manuals of Wilderspin, Stow, Currie, the Home and Colonial School Society, and other sources, the author tells us that the plan of developing the lessons ’corresponds more nearly to that given in Miss Mayo’s works than to either of the other systems;’ and we understand him to claim (and the feature is a valuable one) that in this book, which is not a text-book, but one of suggestive or pattern lessons for teachers, he directs the teacher to proceed less by telling the child what is before it and to be seen, and more by requiring the child to find for itself what is present.  Again, an important circumstance, the purpose of the book does not terminate in describing right processes of teaching, but on the contrary, ’in telling what ought to be done, it proceeds to show how to do it by illustrative examples,’ (sic.) Now, spite of some liberties with the President’s English, which may properly be screened by the author’s proviso that he does not seek ‘to produce a faultless composition,’ so much as to afford simple and clear examples for the teacher’s use, we are compelled to inquire, especially as this is matter addressed to mature and not to immature minds, which it is the author really meant us to understand; that is, whether, in fact, the book ’proceeds to show how to do it by illustrative examples;’ or whether, in reality, it does not aim to show by illustrative examples how to do it—­that, namely, which ought to be done.  If we still find Mr. Calkins’s philosophy somewhat more faultless than his practice, perhaps that is but one of the necessary incidents of all human effort; and we can say with sincerity that, in some of its features, we believe this a book better adapted to its intended uses—­the age it is designed to meet being that of the lowest classes in the primary schools, or say from four to seven or eight years—­than any of its predecessors.  It will not, we hope, therefore, be understood as in a captious spirit, that we take exception to certain details.

The author is clearly right in his principle that ’The chief object of primary education is the development of the faculties;’ though doubtless it would have been better to say, to begin the development of the faculties; but then, he recognizes, as the faculties specially active in children, those of ’sensation, perception, observation, and simple memory,’ adding, for mature years, those of ’abstraction, the higher powers of reason, imagination, philosophical memory, generalization,’ etc.  But that any one of all these is in the true psychological sense, a faculty—­save, it may be, in the single instance of imagination—­we shall decidedly question; and Mr. Calkins will see by the intent of his very lessons, that he does not contemplate any such thing as ‘sensation’ or ‘observation,’ as being a faculty:  but, on the other hand, that he is so regarding certain individual powers of mind, by which we know in nature Color and Form and Number and Change and so on.