acquirements necessary for a business or a profession may have been delayed in the cultivation of them. There is no profession, no station in life, in which a love of intellectual exertion, a habit of attention, a retentive memory, a quick discernment, a comprehensive capacity, clearness of views, and soundness of judgment, a knowledge of the use of knowledge, that habit of mind, in short, which by experience and reflection gathers wisdom, is not far more valuable than any amount of mere knowledge.'

The fallacy, however, which we have been discussing, is founded mainly upon another, which must be considered separately.

THIRD FALLACY. It is considered that teaching Latin and Greek is teaching words merely, and not things; which, it is contended, is inverting the order of nature, of propriety, and of use.

This is stated in so many words by Pestalozzi and his disciples, by George Comb and the Scotch phrenologico-educational school, and is dwelt on by Mr. Wyse in his work on 'Education Reform.' It is not a new conceit; it was the favorite maxim at the time of the French Revolution, and the leaven has spread to Germany, as well as to our own country. The Polytechnic schools were to teach things, and not words only; and the Real-schulen of Germany profess a similar object. Men had formerly been taught to think that the young should be accustomed from early years to a familiarity with virtuous and heroic thoughts, with stirring histories, and ennobling poesy: our forefathers, good people, had, in their simplicity, imagined that the praise of integrity and justice, the condemnation of meanness and vice, the study of the sublime and beautiful in language inseparable from the sublime and beautiful in thought, the narrations of the deeds of war and the arts of peace, the struggles of human passion, the alternations of power, generosity towards the vanquished, the feeling never wholly extinct of a Power holding the smaller circles of human change in subordination to a grander cycle comprehending all time, these they conceived to be the proper objects of youthful study. They thought that man was the proper study of man: man in all his mental and moral developments, especially the nobler and more dignified. They considered that an oration of Demosthenes or the Æneid of Virgil was a better school for training the mind in than a treatise on pneumatics or a catechism of farriery. They imagined that history, and oratory, and poetry, would cultivate the mind, and discipline it for virtuous and noble acts better than all the diagrams of Euclid. The contemplation of men with their hopes and fears, business and pleasure, greatness and littleness, they thought more effectual in educating men than any of the sciences, even geometry, with its circles and its radii, its angles and its squares. Not

that they disparaged geometry or any other of the sciences, they valued them too highly to put them in an unnatural position, or to assign to them an office which they knew they were unable to perform. The great Barrow, whose inexhaustible eloquence never flows in a richer stream than when he is extolling the mathematics, himself no less illustrious as a scholar than he was as a mathematician, never dreamed of science supplanting literature; each had its proper functions, and its appropriate vocation, and he would not have sanctioned an interference of the claims of the one with those of the other.

But we are wandering from the fallacy which we have proposed to consider. What is meant by teaching words and not things? An example given by Mr. Comb in his first lecture (p. 19) will sufficiently explain what is intended. Mr. Comb conceives that it would be more useful to teach a boy the points of a horse than to teach him that the Latin of horse' is equus, the Greek inо, the German pferd, the French cheval, and so on. The one would be what he calls real knowledge, the other merely verbal knowledge. Now, this we wholly and entirely deny. We contend that to the majority of boys, to nine boys out of ten, teaching the points of a horse and the various uses of the limbs, and muscles, &c., would be little else than teaching words, words denoting in many cases things with which they are not familiar, mere hard names. Of course, if no new words were given, the boy would learn nothing. It would be no use to tell him a horse has four legs, a tail, two eyes, two ears, &c.; he can see this as well as we can; this would be what they call an object lesson; and to a boy who is not an idiot, an object lesson is either mere waste of time in frivolous questions and frivolous answers, or the communication of certain hard names. But to return to Mr. Comb's horse. We deny that it would be at all a good discipline for a boy's mind to teach him the points of a horse and we maintain that it is an excellent discipline to make him learn the declension of equus, and decline other words like it. We maintain that it is a far more useful exercise for a boy to read and work out the meaning of a Latin sentence, and to form another sentence by rules deduced from that, imitating, and, therefore, necessarily closely observing, the peculiarities of construction, and thus building up a period of good sense and good grammar: we maintain that this is a far more useful exercise than to be telling the colour of this animal or the height of that, the name of this mineral or that plant,-more useful than to be distributing the weeds and plants of the back-garden into endogens and exogens,

* Educated at the Grammar School of Felsted in Essex, before he went to Cambridge.

cotyledons and dicotyledons, or to be discussing tertiary strata and primitive rocks, alluvial and diluvial deposits, or the fossils of the ecthyosaurus and the Plesiosaurus. But there are some who would not introduce many of the sciences formally, but would give familiar lessons on the most familiar objects which come before us, such as glass, india-rubber, coal, bricks, shells, &c. And such lessons are called object lessons. But what does all that is taught in such lessons amount to but mere observation? And who, that has eyes, has any difficulty in observing what he wants to observe? No one would be simple enough to teach a boy of ten that a table has legs, or that india-rubber is elastic, or that he cannot see through a brick wall; and why? Because he must have learnt this of himself, by the unavoidable observation of every day life. And yet there are people who would actually have the precious hours of school instruction frittered away in such rubbish as this. Object-lessons is the term commonly employed to describe them, or rather to conceal their intrinsically empty and vapid nature. It should ever be re'membered,' says the learned Dr. Vicesimus Knox, that a 'great part of things around us, glaring objects of the senses ob'trude themselves on the mind spontaneously; and that it is ' ridiculous to include such things in a course of education. Man, like the animals around him, learns by the use of his eyes only, 'an infinite number of things not to be found in books, because 'they are obvious on intuition.' Yet some educational zealots would fain have rejected the classics, and all institution in language for this wretched drivelling, this apology for work, in teacher and scholar. Pestalozzi and a host of successors in his wake, have raised a hue and cry in favor of this sort of instruction. We can only say we never saw a class of boys of the most moderate abilities who would not have thought their object lessons beneath contempt. One remark, however, should be made on the mode of investing the lessons with something like an appearance of information. The most difficult terms are used to describe the most common properties of the most common objects, -terms, denoting, things indeed, which they understood long ago, but terms which they cannot now understand without much explanation. So that in fact, in such lessons they are not learning things; the things they knew before; but they are learning the meaning of a set of hard, crabbed words which they never saw before, and which they might as well not learn.

Whereas in language they learn things. The words are the things. They treat the words as things. They strip them of their terminations, they add prefixes, they add suffixes, they decline them, they conjugate, compare, make them agree with one another, classify, arrange, and collocate the whole. In fact, words

are objects, and the objects with which they are most familiar, and on them they exercise their memory, ingenuity, fancy, and all the powers of their mind. We are glad again to have the opportunity of confirming our opinions by the admirable and lucid statements of Professor Malden.

The pupil goes on reading and hearing of animals, and plants, and minerals, which he has never seen, and machines which he has never handled, and manufactures which he has never witnessed, of lemures, and cuttle-fish, palms and eucalyptuses, selenite and steatite, and, it may be, even of divers protochlorides and dentoxides; and the teacher boasts that he is teaching things, while all with which he is loading the memory is mere words. Even in the most simple and elementary teaching of things after the Pestalozzian model, it is much more easy than theorists are aware of, to fall into this error. There is a little book in great vogue, and of considerable merit, the Lessons on Objects,' as given in Dr. Mayo's school at Cheam but I never yet saw this book in the hands of a teacher without finding that the little pupils during the greater part of their lessons were not really learning the properties of glass, or chalk, or copper wire, but were in fact learning the meaning of sundry hard words, such as 'transparent, opake, friable, malleable, ductile, insipid, sapid;' very useful knowledge, no doubt, but not exactly knowledge of things.

'But when a boy is learning Greek or Latin, the words themselves are the things with which his mind is busied, and these he has perpetually before him. He is not merely told about them; but he sees them, reads them, pronounces them, writes them, uses them. Every classical book that he reads is to him and his master an inexhaustible museum of them: he is always trying experiments with them with more or less success, analysing and compounding, that is, translating and writing exercises: and thus the ideas which he conceives of their formation and analogies, their derivation and composition, and the laws of their structure in sentences, attain at last to the distinctness and precision which belong to the ideas of objects with which the mind is immediately and practically conversant. In the spirit, if not in the letter, this is a study of things. And this I believe to be the cause, why the study of the ancient languages, even in those who do not carry it far enough to make much progress in the literature, is found, by an amount of experience which no theory can countervail, to be most beneficial in developing and strengthening the intellectual faculties.'

It is amusing to see how the visionaries, while on the one hand they all agree in their hostility to Latin and Greek, differ as to what should be put in their place. They are in favor of the sciences, as we have been saying. But as to how or by what

* On the Introduction of the Natural Sciences into General Education. A Lecture, &c. By Henry Malden, M.A. Taylor and Walton.

means they are to be taught in detail, or even which of the sciences should be taught, or which first and which second, hardly any two will be found to think alike. One thinks chemistry the most important, another gives the preference to geology or botany, he is not certain which, a third thinks anatomy and physiology more necessary than any thing else, a fourth agrees that science is the right thing, and astronomy the right science.

It is no wonder that such diversity exists, seeing that the parties in question have no one common leading idea by which to steer. One science will appear to one more useful, and another to another, and a third to a third. But if a person takes the low view of education which regards it as a mere preparation for the office or the counting-house, and would make every thing that is learnt bear directly upon that, be useful, as they call it, in after life, it is not possible to answer him or to satisfy him. His notions on the subject must be broken up altogether before he can form a correct opinion on it at all. The Romans described an ignorant person as one who nec literas didicit nec natare. Walter Scott, when asked respecting his son's education, replied, that he had taught him to ride, shoot, and speak the truth,' like the ancient Persians. Now, both ideas contain more than at first sight would appear. The Romans educated the mind and the body the Persians chiefly educated the body and the moral habits. Some people have very strange notions on what they consider the chief part of education. One person gravely considers dancing to be the principal thing: another regards the three r's-reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic-as the main ingredients : a third would give nothing for all besides if the globes were neglected. Now, there is no prospect at all of convincing persons of this kind that Latin and Greek are the best instruments of education, until they can be brought to see that mental training is the object, not mere knowledge, as in drilling, firmness of muscle, and an erect gait, are the ends to be attained, not any particular posture which may be required as a means for attaining them. A boy is not taught drilling that he may mark time in the middle of Cheapside, nor is a boy taught the Latin grammar that he may decline magister in his father's counting-house. A boy is not taught dancing in order that he may dance a hornpipe in the public street, but that he may acquire a suppleness of limb and an ease of manner. The thing taught is the medium by which we reach the end. Latin and Greek are taught not as ends, but as means. By them, as by an instrument, we develop and strengthen the intellectual faculties. Learning Latin and Greek is the vipya, mental power the pyov. Now, the study of the 'ancient languages,' says Professor Malden, even in those who 'do not carry it far enough to make much progress in the litera"ture, is found by an amount of experience, which no theory can