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Geography.—Recitations in this study should be something
more thau mere verbatim repetitions of answers to questions
on the maps, or of brief descriptive paragraphs. The teacher
should be ready to give an account of the countries men-
tioned in the lesson, their peculiar vegetable and animal
products, the manners and customs of their inhabitants.
Without some ability to give this kind of instruction, Geog-
raphy is not attractive to (scholars; with it Geography be-
comes a favorite study. Let the definitions be made intelli-
gible to the child, and then strive to put life into the skele-
ton frame-work, which constitutes all that our Text-Buoks
give us of Geography. To do this well, the teacher must
read, must increase his own stores of information, and freely
employ the same when engaged in instructing his pupils. A
late writer asks, with much torce, " here is a glorious and
beautiful world before us, of hill, and valley, and moun-
tain, and plain, and ocean, instinct with life, filled with
objects whose marvelous nature the profoundest wisdom can-
not fathom; a world whose structure has been the problem
of science, whose beauty has been the inspiration of poetry,
ever since science and poetry existed; can it be right that
we should reduce the study of this glorious creation to learn-
ing such names, we will say, as' Michilimackinac, Moorsheda-
bad, and Petropalofski?" The question involves its own pro-
per answer.

Grammar.—The Text-Books on this subject must be con-
sidered as furnishing the outline only of what is to be ac-
quired by the scholar. Oral instruction, replete with illus-
trations, showing the application of rules—or rather replete
with examples from which it will be easy to deduce rules ;
black-board exercises; exercises in composition; correction
of errors and inaccuracies in ordinary conversation; these
will make the science real to the scholar, and, at the same
time, useful and popular.

History of the United States,—It is advised that this be
taught orally, to all the scholars. Teachers should frequent-
ly talk with them conferring the prominent facts of Ameri-
can history, the lives and- characters of the great, good and
brave men who have aided in building up and sustaining
our Government, and the peculiar mission which seems to
have been made ours by Providence. If this be done, with,
spirit, their words will be seized and retained by the very
youngest with the same interest they show for the nursery
tale. When they have made sufficient advance in other
studies, then, either of' the Text-Books adopted by the State
Board may be put into their hands for the purpose of syste-
matizing their historical knowledge; but even then the
teacher must put life into recitation to make it interesting or
useful. Until the last year, in, the Grammar School, oral in-