actical teaching will gain quite as much when the school-books shall
have been cast into the right form and method, as when all the teachers
shall have been obliged to imitate good models, in a system of sound
normal and model schools. What has given to the teaching of geometry its
comparatively high educating value through centuries, and in the hands
of teachers of every bent, caliber, and culture? What but the well-nigh
inevitable, because highly perfected and crystalline method of one
book--_Euclid's Elements_? Doubtless we want 'live' men and women, and
those trained to their work, to teach: quite as imperatively we then
want the right kind of text-books, in the pupils' hands, with which to
carry forward their common work. If mind is the animating _spirit_, and
knowledge the shapeless _matter_, still method--and to the pupil largely
the method of the books--is the organizing force or _form_ under which
the knowledge is to be organized, made available and valuable. We shall
suffer quite as much from any lack of the best form, as through lack of
the best matter, or of the most earnest spirit. In education, the
teacher is the fluent element, full of present resources; the book
should be the fixed element, always bringing back the discursive
faculties to the rigid line of thought and purpose of the subject. We
have now the fluent element in better forwardness and command than the
fixed. We have much of the spirit; an almost overwhelming supply of the
matter; but the ultimate and best _form_ is yet largely wanting, and
being so, it is now our most forcible and serious want.

But, rightly understood, all that we have said in reference to the
short-comings of our modes of educating the young, constitutes by no
necessity any sort of disparagement of teachers, or of the conductors of
our school system. If a re-survey of the ground seems to show very much
yet to be done, it is in part but the necessary result of an enlarging
comprehension as to what, all the while, should have been done. It is by
looking from an eminence that we gain a broader prospect, and
coincidently receive the conviction of a larger duty. Much that we
deplore in present methods is the best to which investigation has yet
conducted us, or that the slow growth of a right view among the patrons
of schools will allow. Then, how hard it is to foresee, in any direction
of effort, the effects our present appliances and plans shall be
producing a score of years he