in details, disclose an undertone of growing conviction of the incompetency and unsatisfactoriness of our present modes of teaching and training.  The Oswego School Report, speaking of primary education, tells us ‘There has been too much teaching by formulas;’ and that ’We are quite too apt, in the education of children, to “sail over their heads,” to present subjects that are beyond their comprehension,’ etc.  Its way of escape ‘out of the rut’ is by importation into our country of the object-lesson system, as improved from the Pestalozzian original through the labors of Mr. Kay, now Sir J.K.  Shuttleworth, and his co-laborers, of the Home and Colonial Infant and Juvenile School Society, London.  In the report of Mr. Henry Kiddle, one of the four making up the collective School Report of the City of New York for 1861, the radical error of our present teachers is very forcibly characterized, where the danger of the teachers is pointed out as that of becoming ’absorbed in the mechanical routine of their office, losing sight of the end in their exclusive devotion to what is only the means—­teaching the THING, but failing to instruct the PERSON—­eager to pour in knowledge, but neglecting to bring out mind.’  Is there not indicated in these words a real and a very grave defect of the manner in which subjects are now presented, studied, recited, and finished up in our schools?  We think there is.  And then, what is the effect of this study and teaching, with so much less thought toward the end than about the material?—­what the result of this overlooking of the mind, the individuality, the person?—­what the fruitage, at last, of having given so much time to the ‘finishing up’ of arithmetic, geography, and the rest, as to have failed to bring out the mind that was dealing with these topics, and is hereafter to have so many others to deal with?  The physiologists have to tell us of a certain ugly result, occurring only in rare instances in the bodily organization, such that in a given young animal or human form the developing effort ceases before completion of the full structure; the individual remaining without certain fingers or limbs, sometimes without cranium or proper brain.  They name this result one of ‘arrest of development.’  Is it not barely possible that our studies and recitations are yet in general so mal-adapted to the habitudes of the tender brain and opening faculties of childhood, as not merely often to allow, but even to inflict on the intellectual and moral being of the child a positive arrest of development?  And if it be possible, what question can take precedence of one concerning the means of averting such a mischief?  Pestalozzi intuitively saw and deeply felt the existence of this evil in his day, when, we may admit, it was somewhat more glaring than now.  But Mr. Spencer truly characterizes Pestalozzi as, nevertheless, ’a man of partial intuitions, a man who had occasional