THE ELEMENTARY, OR PROPER FOLK'S-SCHOOLS. In matters of school economy, the Catholics in Germany continued far behind the Protestants, because they cherished the notion that diffusion of knowledge amongst the people was dangerous to the state; and therefore most carefully cut off all possible opportunities for advancing popular instruction; whereas the Protestants, on the contrary, from the last half of the eighteenth century, spared no sacrifice for the promotion of such an object. Such men as Campe, Salzmann, Trapp, rendered services to instruction in a more restricted sense, since they began to reduce the science of tuition to a system; but Rochou was the first who undertook, in the spirit of philanthropy, to work a genuine reformation in the Folk's-schools. Then appeared Pestalozzi, who grounded education on the natural developement of the powers and capacities themselves. His system, which proved its worth in the severe trials that it underwent in the hands of Tillich, Plaman, Schwartz, Ewald, Türk, Ladomus, Herbert, Zeller, Harnisch, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Jean Paul, Arndt, P[oe]litz, Stephani, Dinter, and others, found, by degrees, general acceptance; and our present school system may with perfect justice be styled the Pestalozzian. But for the necessary preparatory education of teachers themselves, earnest care was soon taken, and a great number of school-teacher seminaries were founded, in which this class of men must study and qualify themselves, and which to them must stand in the same relation as the universities to the professors of scientific and general knowledge. By these means the general improvement of the business of education experienced only accelerating circumstances; and now even Catholic countries, particularly those in which many Protestants dwell, ceased to hang back, and there is now scarcely a place in Germany which does not possess a school; scarcely a state whose government has not thrown out a plan of education more or less adapted to its end. Yes; foreign nations themselves now acknowledge the preeminence of Germany in school economy.