the book we find generally very good models of such exercises, clear and to the purpose.  Once in a while there is a lapsus, as in this:  The criterion of a liquid is presented as being in the circumstances that it does not ’hold together’ when poured from a vessel, but ‘forms drops.’  Now, since it forms drops, it has cohesion, and the criterion is wrongly taken; In fact, the same thing appears in that the liquid, even in pouring out, does hold together in a stream, and a stream that experiments with liquid jets show it really requires considerable force to break up.

Finally, Mr. Calkins’s book, in the bands of discerning and skillful teachers, can be made the instrument of a great deal of right and valuable discipline for primary classes; but without some guarding and help from the teacher’s own thought, it will not always do the best work, nor in the best way.  It is an approach to a good book for early mental development; but it is not the consummation to be desired.  Many of its suggestions and patterns of lessons are excellent; but there is too large a lack of true consecution of topics, of accuracy of expression, and of really natural method of handling the subjects.  We say this with no unkindly feeling toward the attempt or the author, but because, though no matter by how fortuitous circumstances, it comes to us as in this country the first effort toward a certain new style of books and subjects, and certain more rational teaching; and we hold it, as being the privilege of teachers whose time may be too much consumed in applying, to criticise minutely, as no less our right and duty, and that of every independent man, to recognize and point out wherein this new venture meets, or fails to meet, the new and positive demand of the pupils and the teachers in our time.  If, in a degree, the working out shows defects such as we have named, is it not yet a question, whether we have in the book an illustration ’how this system of training may be applied to the entire course of common school education’?—­to say nothing now of the question whether, even in its best form, it is a system that ought to be so applied.

After the author of a book for young learners is sure of the comprehensibility of his subjects, and the accuracy of his ideas and expressions of them, the highest need—­and one the lack of which is fatal to true educative value—­is that of a natural and true synthesis and consecution of the successive steps of fact and principle that are to be presented.  We would not be understood that every successive lesson and every act of voluntary thinking must thus be consecutive:  to say this, would be to confine the mind to one study, and to make us dread even relaxation, lest it break the precious and fragile chain of thought.  Our growth in knowledge is not after that narrow pattern.  We take food at one time, work at another, and sleep at a third:  and so, the mind too has its variations of employment,