merly,
leaving the right conception of the land-surfaces to the pupil's unaided
imagination.

Among the decisive and important steps marking the revival of
educational interest among us, is that looking to the introduction into
our primary schools of the simple lessons for what is called the
'education of the senses,' and what is in fact the solicitation of the
perceptive faculties, and the storing of them, with their proper ideas,
through the avenues of sense. When employed about observing or finding
and naming the parts or qualities and uses of objects, as _glass,
leather, milk, wood, a tree, the human body_, etc., this sort of
teaching takes the name of 'Object Lessons;' when it rises to
philosophizing in the more obvious and easy stages about natural
phenomena, as _rain, snow,_ etc., or about parts of the system of
nature, as _oceans, mountains, stars,_ etc., it is sometimes termed
'Lessons in Common Things.' In the year 1860, Mr. E.A. Sheldon, the
enterprising superintendent of the schools of that city, first
introduced with some degree of completeness and system, this sort of
teaching into the primary schools of Oswego. In March, 1861, under the
leadership also, as we infer, of their superintendent, Mr. William H.
Wells, the Educational Board of the city of Chicago adopted a still more
minutely systematized and more extensive course of instruction of this
sort, arranged in ten successive grades, and intended to advance from
the simple study of objects, forms, colors, etc., gradually to the
prosecution of the regular and higher studies. The greater naturalness,
life-likeness, and interest of this kind of mental occupation for young
learners, over the old plan of restricting them mainly to the bare
alphabet, with barren spelling, reading, definitions, and so on, is at
once obvious in principle and confirmed by the facts; and for the
younger classes--a stage of the utmost delicacy and importance to the
future habits of the learner--the fruits must appear in increased
readiness of thought and fullness of ideas, and in a preparation for
more true and enlarged subsequent comprehension of the proper branches
of study; provided, we must add, that these also, when reached, be
taught by a method best suited to their subject-matter and to the higher
range of mental activity required to deal with it. Whether, now, the
object-lesson system and plan is the one competent to carry on the
learner through those later studies, is a