The Normal College of New York City.

The aim of the entire course through which the Normal students pass is not so much to burden the mind with facts as to develop intellectual power, cultivate judgment, and enable the graduates to take trained ability into the world with them. "Because teaching is intangible," says President Hunter, "and can not he weighed like flour, nor measured like muslin; because it is spiritual in its nature, and deals with the human mind, the evil influence of a weak, foolish, or incompetent teacher is not felt until it is too late — is not seen by those in authority until the helpless children have been so bent and twisted that no subsequent training can make them straight. The thirsty, tempest-tossed mariner had better not drink at all than drink salt-water, for madness and death inevitably ensue. The ignorant had better not be taught than have their moral and intellectual natures destroyed by empirics. Our great free-school system is an organized body of which the normal schools and colleges are the head, and it would be well for friends of this system to remember that a severe blow on the head is very apt to paralyze the whole body. Injury can not be inflicted on a vital part without endangering the life of the whole, and any crippling of the Normal system would react disastrously on every public primary school in the United States."