nother and larger question, and
one to which we shall presently recur.

Under the recall of the minds of educators among us to fundamental
principles of methods and tendencies in teaching, which we have pointed
out, it was but natural to expect attempts to be made toward remedying
the defects and supplying the needs that could not fail to be detected
in our teaching processes. Naturally, too, such attempts would result in
the bringing forward, sooner or later, of novelties in the topics and
form of the school-books. What the pen--which, in the outset, proposed
the necessity of molding the school-work into a course of re-discoveries
of the scientific truths--should reasonably be expected to do toward
supplying the want it had indicated; or what it may, in the interim,
have actually accomplished toward furnishing the working implements
requisite to realizing in practice the possible results foreshadowed by
the best educational theories, it may be neither in place nor needful
that we should here intimate. Sometimes, indeed, there is in our social
movements evidence of a singular sort of intellectual _catalysis;_ and a
mute fact, so it _be_ a fact, and even under enforced continuance of
muteness, through influence of temporary and extraneous circumstances,
may yet, like the innocent _platinum_ in a mixture of certain gases, or
the equally innocent _yeast-plant_ vegetating in the 'lump' of dough,
take effect in a variety of ways, as if by mere presence.

We shall remember how even Virgil had to write:

'Hos ego versiculos scripsi: tulit alter honores!'

And the veriest bumpkin knows the force of the adage about one's shaking
the tree, for another to gather up the fruit. But Virgil was patient,
and did well at the last; though the chronicles do not tell us how many
pears ever came to the teeth of him that did the tree-shaking. At all
events, it is satisfying to know that time spins a long yarn, and comes
to the end of it leisurely and at his own wise motion!

The English object-lesson system being now fairly and successfully
domesticated among us, and to such an extent as to call for the
invitation and temporary residence among us, in the city of Oswego, of a
distinguished lady-teacher from the English Training Schools, it is
again but natural that the system should call forth books adapted to its
purposes; and it was scarcely possible, under the circumstances we have
now shown to exist, that such books should come f