o the
ground.'

We had put the essential thought here insisted on into words, before
object-lessons had acquired the impetus of the last and current year.

'The 'object lessons' of Pestalozzi and his numerous followers, had,
in a good degree, one needed element--they required WORK of the
pupil's own mind, not mere recipiency. But they have [almost]
wholly lacked another element, just as important--that of
CONSECUTION in the steps and results dealt with. In most of the
schools in our country--in a degree, in all of them--these two
fundamental elements of all right education, namely, true work of
the learner's mind, and a natural and true consecution in not only
the processes of each day or lesson, but of one day on another, and
of each term on the preceding, are things quite overlooked, and
undreamed of, or, at the best, imperfectly and fragmentarily
attempted. But these, in so far as, he can secure their benefits,
are just the elements that make the thinker, the scholar, the man
of real learning or intellectual power in any pursuit.--_New-York
Teacher, December,_ 1859.

A like view begins to show itself in the writings of some of the English
educationists. The object-teaching is recognized as being, in most
instances, at least, too promiscuous and disorderly for the ends of a
true discipline and development, and certainly, therefore, even for
securing the largest amount of information. It too much excludes the
later, systematic study of the indispensable branches, and supplants the
due exercise of the reasoning powers, by too habitual restriction of the
mind's activities to the channels of sense and perception. Isaac Taylor,
in his _Home Education_, admits the benefits of this teaching for the
mere outset of the pupil's course, but adds: 'For the rest, that is to
say, whatever _reaches its end in the bodily perceptions_, I think we
can go but a very little way without so giving the mind a bent _toward
the lower faculties as must divert it from the exercise of the higher._'
This thought is no mere fancy. It rests on a great law of _derivation_,
true in mind as in the body; that inanition and comparative loss of one
set of powers necessarily follows a too habitual activity of a different
set. Thus it is that, in the body, over-use of the nervous, saps the
muscular energies, and excessive muscular exertion detracts from the
vivacity of the mind.