Allow me then to express my firm persuasion that it is not only useless but injurious to the education of young minds to present to them at the outset any department of physical science as a body of definitions, principles, laws, or theories; and that in elementary schools only such facts should be taught as can be verified by the experience of the pupil, or by such simple experiments as the pupils can try for themselves. The usual method of committing by heart the words of a school-book, and repeating them at the dictation of a teacher, may afford a good exercise for the memory, but it is absurd to regard such a task as a lesson in physical science, and this kind of study can be spent with vastly greater profit on the spelling-book. There is one department of physical science which has been taught in this absurd way in our schools from time immemorial. I refer, of course, to the study of geography, and I leave for you to judge whether the result is worth the one hundredth part of the toil and drudgery spent in obtaining it. Let us suppose that your child is able to give you the names of all the rivers, bays, and capes from Greenland to Patagonia, how much more does that child know of the structure and social relations of this globe on which its lot has been cast than it did before this senseless feat was attempted, a feat, moreover, to which only a child's memory would be equal? And, when you turn to your own experience, what is the outcome of all the time and labor spent on geography? Is it not solely just that portion of your knowledge which, in spite of the system, was direct object-teaching--the images you insensibly acquired from the maps and pictures in the school-books?