Now, how is it that pupils get on at all with such lessons and such books?  The explanation is a simple one; but the consequences it is fraught with are not trifling.  The simple fact is, pupils are not yet allowed to study (in the best sense and manner of that process) the subjects they are prosecuting.  When, now, they undertake in earnest to study, they are but too constantly confused and delayed by the no-method of the treatises they are being carried through.  In a course of earnest intellectual work, the pupil must too often, with his present aids, become aware of absence of comprehension; he is ever and anon brought to stand still and cast about for the unsupplied preliminary facts and truths, for the unhinted hypotheses and inferences, which his situation and previous study do not enable him to supply, but which are necessary to a comprehension of the results set down for him to deal with.  Barren results, per se, our learners are now too much required to ingest; and such they are expected to assimilate into intellectual life and power!  As well feed a boy on bare elements of tissue—­carbon, sulphur, oxygen, and the rest; or, yet more charitably, dissect out from his allowance of tenderloin, lamb, or fowl, a due supply of ready-made nerve and muscular fiber, introduce and engraft these upon the nerve and muscle he has already acquired, and then assure our protege, that, as the upshot of our masterly provision for his needs, we expect him to become highly athletic and intellectual—­that so he is to evolve larger streams of muscular energy and more vivid flashes of spiritual force!

As it is, we too nearly put the pupil’s intellect asleep by our false method; and he endures it because of his unnatural condition.  He thinks he ‘gets on’ with it; and in an imperfect way and degree does so.  Rarely, we find, does such a one get so far as into the ‘conics;’ and he is not certain to be in the habit of reading reviews:  if we were sure, however, that he could comprehend and would meet with our simile, we would say to him, that the tardy inclination up which he now plods painfully, must, if graphically represented, be shown by an oblique line descending, in fact, below the curve of his possibilities, more rapidly even than it ascends above the horizontal cutting through the point of his setting out.  True, with pupils who are spontaneously active-minded from the first, or who at some point in their course become positively awakened to brain-work, very much of the repressive influence of imperfect methods is prevented or overcome.  The number of those so fortunate is doubtless small in the comparison.  The few who would know, by a necessity as imperative as that by which they must feed, and sleep, and probably toil with hands or head for subsistence, are able to supplement many of the deficiencies, and supersede some erroneous processes of our methods, by the play of their own powers of investigation upon and about their subject.  To these, a false method can bring perplexity and delay, but not repression nor veritable intellectual torpor.