idea of a curve? We think the misnomer yet greater and worse, when we come to such captions as ‘To develop the idea of God, as a kind Father;’ especially when the amount of the development is this:  ’Now, children, listen very attentively to what I say, and I will tell you about a Friend that you all have, one who is kind to all of you, one who loves you better than your father or your mother does,’ and so on.  All this, and what precedes and follows, is ‘telling,’ as the author acknowledges; of course, then, it is not developing.  How is the child here made to find and know that it has such a Friend?—­that this Friend is kind to all?—­that this Friend loves it better than do parents, or, in fact, at all?  This is the way the nursery develops this and kindred ideas, and if the child be yet too young for its own comprehension of the most obvious truths of Natural Theology, then better defer the subject, or at least cease to call the nursery method by too swelling a name!

As to arrangement of topics, though the geographical lessons properly come late, as they stand, the idea of place, as well as those of weight and size, all belong earlier than the positions they are found in; and number, later.  Such mental anachronisms as talking of solids before the attempt has been made to impart or insure the idea of a solid, should, where practicable, be avoided; and more notably, such as bringing a subsequent and complex idea, like that of ‘square measure,’ before scarcely any one of the elementary ideas it involves, such as measure, standard, or even length or size, is presented.  As to the substance of the teaching, we will indicate a few points that raise a question on perusal of them.  What will the little learner gain, if the teacher follows the book in this instance?  ’Where is the skin of the apple? On its surface.’’ This is in the lesson for ’developing the idea’ of surface.  When, by and by, the young mathematician gets the true idea of a surface, as extension in two dimensions only, hence, without thickness, then will follow this surprising result, that the whole thickness of the apple-skin is on—­outside—­the apple’s surface, and hence, is nowhere:  a singular converse of the teaching of those smart gentlemen who waste reams of good paper in establishing, to their own satisfaction, that even the mathematical surface itself has thickness!  In the lesson on ‘perpendicular and horizontal,’ the definition of perpendicular is correct; but all the developing, before and after, unfortunately confounds the perpendicular with the vertical—­a bad way toward future accuracy of thought, or toward making scientific ideas, as they should be, definite as well as practically useful.  If we judge by the brevity and incompleteness of the lesson on ’Developing ideas of Drawing’(!), ideas of that particular ‘stripe’ must be scarce.  The Object Lessons at the close of