EDITOR'S TABLE. 



123 



and had bloom all of the ordinary house- 

 plants, and some that were not common in 

 house-culture. 



I have noticed that the worm3 will, if 

 there is a hole in a pot, and the pot is not 

 often disturbed, crawl out at the hole and 

 lie under the pot, if there is room, and the 

 bottoms of most pots will allow this, and 



' this they will do in all sorts of pots. Plants 



frequently become diseased from over-wa- 



I tering, its lack, or from other causes, and 



! too often the worm has to take blame for 



what he is entirely innocent of. 



Yours, respectfully, 



Aoa H. Kepley. 

 Effingham, Illinois, February 20, 1SS2. 



EDITOR'S TABLE. 



"SCIEXCE AKD CULTURE." 



THE reception accorded to Professor 

 Huxley's new volume, under the 

 above title, by the leading organs of pub- 

 lic opinion, is especially significant at 

 the present time. The book is a collec- 

 tion of addresses, lectures, and essays, 

 which have appeared at intervals dur- 

 ing the last seven years, on a consid- 

 erable variety of subjects, educational, 

 biological, and philosophical. They are 

 all of superior merit the maturest and 

 most finished of Professor Huxley's lit- 

 erary productions, and are all of popular 

 interest ; but the critics do not regard 

 them as having equal claims to their 

 attention. It is the first address, from 

 which the volume takes its name given 

 at the inauguration of Josiah Mason's 

 college to which they chiefly devote 

 themselves, and their discussions are 

 noteworthy, as indicating the great 

 change that is going forward in the 

 public mind with regard to the higher 

 relations of science and education. 



It is beyond doubt that the most for- 

 midable hindrance to the progress of 

 rational education is the idolatry of an 

 antiquated and effete system of study. 

 on the ground that it is pre-eminently 

 and exclusively adapted to the promo- 

 tion of " culture." It is by association 

 of classical studies with a dignified and 

 venerated ideal of " culture " that they 

 have acquired their superstitious as- 

 cendency, and have become the greatest 

 drags we have on real educational prog- 

 ress. Human cultivation is, and alwavs 

 must be, the supreme thing, and it is, 

 therefore, difficult to overestimate the 



injurious influence of a false ideal of its 

 means and objects. 



But the difficulty in this case is in- 

 creased by the fact that the ideal of 

 culture, which must now be rejected as 

 wholly inadequate, was once true. The 

 old and the still prevalent idea of cult- 

 ure is that which is derived from liter- 

 ary pursuits, and it is limited to certain 

 literary forms, as most perfect for the 

 purpose. Professor Huxley says of the 

 great majority of educated Englishmen 

 that, " in their belief, culture is obtain- 

 able only by a liberal education ; and a 

 liberal education is svnonymous, not 

 merely with education and instruction 

 in literature, but in one particular form 

 of literature, namely, that of Greek and 

 Koman antiquity. They hold that the 

 man who has learned Latin and Greek, 

 however little, is educated, while he 

 who is versed in other branches of 

 knowledge, however deeply, is a more 

 or less respectable specialist, not admis- 

 sible into the cultured caste." 



But the human mind is no longer to 

 be cultivated merely by the forms or 

 the arts of expression. That these are 

 important things, and that in past times 

 they may have been the main things, no 

 one denies ; but such an ideal of cult- 

 ure is essentially superficial, and breaks 

 down before the serious intellectual de- 

 mands of the present time. The mind 

 of our age has passed from the consid- 

 eration of verbal figments to the laws of 

 reality. The correlative of form is sub- 

 stance, and the correlative of literary 

 form is the substance of thought, and 

 modern science has made this the funda- 



