SCIENCE AND OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. 697 



beautiful language of Herschel, along the delicate line of his analysis ; 

 no Draper, or Daguerre, or Talbot, had revealed the wonders of actin- 

 ism ; no Mayer or Joule had laid a sure foundation for the grand doc- 

 trine of the conservation of force; no Carpenter had unravelled the in- 

 tricacies of nervous physiology, or analyzed the relations of mind and 

 brain ; no Agassiz had ridden down the Alps on the backs of the gla- 

 ciers and proved their steady flow ; no Darwin had lifted the veil from 

 the mysteries of organic development ; no Schiaparelli or Newton had 

 put the harness of universal gravitation upon the wayward move- 

 ments of the shooting-stars; no Mallet had presented an intelligible 

 theory of volcanic flames and of the earth's convulsive tremors ; no 

 Kirchhoff had furnished a hey to the intimate constitution of celestial 

 bodies or a gauge of stellar drift ; no Huggins, or Secchi, or Young, 

 had applied the key thus presented to enter the secret chambers of the 

 sun, the comets, the fixed stars, and the nebulae ; no Stokes had made 

 the darkness visible which lies beyond the violet ; no Tyndall had done 

 the same for the darkness beyond the red, or had measured the heat- 

 absorbing powers of aeriform bodies, or shown how the tremors of the 

 ether shake asunder the elements of vapors. In short, that period of 

 presumed scientific omniscience seems now, as we look back to it, but 

 the faint dawning of a day of glorious discovery, which we dare not, 

 even yet, pronounce to be approaching its meridian. 



How much of all this has been due to our system of education ? 

 Among the great promoters of scientific progress before or since, how 

 large is the number who may, in strict propriety, be said to have 

 educated themselves ? Take, for illustration, such familiar names as 

 those of William Herschel, and Franklin, and Rumford, and Ritten- 

 house, and Davy, and Faraday, and Henry. Is it not evident that 

 Nature herself, to those who will follow her teachings, is a better guide 

 to the study of her own phenomena than all the training of our 

 schools ? And is not this because Nature invariably begins with the 

 training of the observing faculties ? Is it not because the ample page 

 which she spreads out before the learner is written all over, not with 

 words, but with substantial realities ? Is it not because her lessons 

 reach beyond the simple understanding and impress the immediate 

 intuition ? that what she furnishes is something better than barren 

 information passively received it is positive knowledge actively 

 gathered ? 



If, then, in the future we would fit man properly to cultivate Na- 

 ture, and not leave scientific research, as, to a great extent, we have 

 done heretofore, to the hazard of chance, we must cultivate her own 

 processes. Our earliest teachings must be things and not words. The 

 objects first presented to the tender mind must be such as address the 

 senses, and such as it can grasp. Store it first abundantly with the 

 material of thought, and the process of thinking will be spontaneous 

 and easy. 



