If further extenuation of present short-comings should be deemed needful, the history of science--and let us not forget that this history is almost wholly a very _recent_ one--presents it in abundant force. Though practical arts have led to sciences, yet they have never advanced far until after they have felt the reactive benefits of the sciences springing from them. Finally, in its highest phases, the art becomes subordinated to the science; thenceforth, the former can approach perfection only as the latter prepares its way. Education has advanced beyond this turning point: the art is henceforward dependent on the sciences. But a science of education is an outgrowth from the science of mind; and among sciences, the latter is one of the latest and most difficult. Thus, our investigations result, not in casting blame upon educators, but in revealing, we may say, what is still the intellectual 'situation' of the most cultivated and advanced nations. We have our place still, not at any sort of consummation, but at a given stage in a progress. And still, as ever in the past, the things that in reality most closely touch our interests are farthest removed from our starting-points of sense and reason, and by a necessity of the manner and progress of our knowing, are longest in being found. And in this we have at least the assurance that the perfection of our race is to occur by no sudden bound or transformation, but by a toilsome and patient insight and growth. Granting, however, all that has now been said in palliation of existing defects in education, that the whole business is a thing remote from immediate interests, and not less so from immediate perceptions and reasonings--a thing that, to all eyes capable of seeing in it something more than so many days devoted to spelling, penmanship, and arithmetic, begins at once to recede from the vision, and to lie in the hazy distance, obscure and incomprehensible--granting all this, and yet any one who realizes what education is, a formative and determining process, that for so many years is to operate persistently upon the plastic and intrinsically priceless mind, will assuredly be surprised in view of the actually existing indifference about questions as to the _method or methods_ by which the work can most fully and satisfactorily be accomplished. We have enacted laws, built school-houses, provided libraries, employed teachers, and in a tolerable degree insisted on the attendance of pupils, duly equipped with treatises of knowledge. We have lavished money on a set of instrumentalities, more or less vaguely considered requisite to insure qualification of the young for active life, and the perpetuity of the national virtue and liberty. What we, in America, however, have least essayed and most needed, has been to get _beneath the surface_ of the great educational question; to look less after plans of school buildings, and the schemes of school-districts and