OUTLINES FROM THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION. 747 



the orbit fifteen degrees along the ecliptic would not leave the group 

 such a compact train as we found it in 1866. If this result is at all 

 possible, it is because the total action is scattered over so many centu- 

 ries. But it seems more probable that the fragments are parting 

 more rapidly from the comet than we have assumed, and that long 

 before the complete ring is formed the groups become so scattered that 

 we do not recognize them, or else are turned away so as not to cross 

 the earth's orbit. 



Comets by their strange behavior and wondrous trains have given 

 to timid and superstitious men more apprehensions than have any 

 other heavenly bodies. They have been the occasion of an immense 

 amount of vague and wild and worthless speculation by men who knew 

 a very little science. They have furnished a hundred as yet unan- 

 swered problems which have puzzled the wisest. A world without 

 water, with a strange and variable envelope which takes the place of 

 an atmosphere, a world that travels repeatedly out into the cold and 

 back to the sun, and slowly goes to pieces in the repeated process, has 

 conditions so strange to our experience, and so impossible to reproduce 

 by experiment, that our physics can not as yet explain it. Yet we may 

 confidently look forward to the answer of many of these problems in 

 the future. Of those strange bodies, the comets, we shall have far 

 greater means of study than of any other bodies in the heavens. The 

 comets alone give us specimens to handle and analyze. Comets may 

 be studied, like the planets, by the use of the telescope, the polariscope, 

 and the spectroscope. The utmost refinements of physical astronomy 

 may be applied to both. But the cometary worlds will be also com- 

 pelled, through those meteorite fragments with their included gases 

 and peculiar minerals, to give up some additional secrets of their own 

 life and of the physics of space to the blow-pipe, the microscope, the 

 test-tube, and the crucible. 







SOME OUTLINES FROM THE HISTORY OF EDUCA- 

 TION. 



By W. E. BENEDICT, 



PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY AND LOGIC IN THE rNIYERSITY OF CINCINNATI. 



II. 



WE may define history as the narration of events in their causal 

 relations. Nowhere does this definition find more instructive 

 application than in the evolution of education. We see here, and 

 with unmistakable plainness, the effect of distinctive contributions 

 from the sides of our common nature. The stages in the history of 

 education are natural growths ; each movement in the unfolding was 

 a necessity. Our present paper will consider many facts which, by 

 themselves, would appear so unnatural, so out of relation to modern 



