At the Model School connected with the Oswego Normal School, natural history is made the central subject, and reading, writing, and drawing are made to bear upon it. The natural history course, including both plants and animals, is most carefully planned to suit the seasons of the year. As each plant or animal is studied, it is drawn by the children, stories are told about it, the children write about it, read about it, and make it a general object of study for some time. The work is carefully graded for different ages, but the subject or topic of study is the same throughout the school at the same time. At the Cook County Normal School, Illinois, all the teaching is made to group itself round three subjects--science, geography, history; and these subjects are made to include everything forming the environment of the child. The study of form and number, instead of being followed as separate subjects in themselves, are considered merely as means of studying these three comprehensive subjects--as modes of thinking in fact. Hearing, observing, and reading are regarded as different ways of gaining ideas, and as such, silent reading is encouraged, and many devices are used for helping the child to get quickly and clearly the ideas from the printed or written page. Writing, music, modelling, painting, drawing, speaking, are considered as means of expressing ideas about objects studied--the act of expression making the ideas clearer. Thus, number or arithmetic is taught, not, as is usual, by means of problems specially made and arranged in books of arithmetical examples; but in close connection with any class subject. I heard part of a course of excellent laboratory lessons in Science, given to Summer School Students at this school, and as the methods employed were those of the ordinary Normal School Course, I may mention them here. At the end of each lesson the teacher used the numerical results obtained by individual students, and worked them into arithmetical problems. For example, the subjects used for successive number lessons were as follows: Conductivity of heat in metals. Expansion of metals by heat. Determination of boiling-point of fresh and salt water. Such a treatment of subjects is a strong protest against routine work and rigid method. It allows great scope to the teacher by concentrating attention on the child and its needs, rather than on the artificial divisions into so-called subjects, and their methods. On the other hand, it puts great responsibility upon the teacher, and taxes his skill to the utmost. There are many difficulties in adopting the plan, one of the chief being the construction of the school time-table. In any case, the practical application of such a system can only be partial, until all teachers are enthusiasts and experts; but the lines of work seem to be true lines, and may be suggestive of much that shall reform some of our own old methods. PRACTICE IN TEACHING.