NOTES. 



719 



occasionally troubled with sleeplessness and 

 frequently took for it morphia, chloral, ne- 

 penthe, or bromide of potassium. It is 

 lamentable, says the " Lancet," to see medi- 

 cal men drift into such uses of drugs, which 

 engender the very evils for which they arc 

 taken, and are so apt to issue in results 

 quite uncontemplated. " Such evils are to 

 be cured, and meantime borne with patience, 

 not met by dangerous medicines in random 

 doses." 



Mechanical and Vital Education. 



" Some dangers of education " are treated 

 with much intelligence in a thoughtful 

 essay in the "Saturday Review." One of 

 the dangers relates to the difference be- 

 tween what may be called mechanical and 

 vital education. By mechanical education 

 is meant " the imbuing the mind with those 

 elements which can be taught by pure rule ; 

 in which no demand is made on the child 

 or youth beyond attention and industry ; 

 into which the clement of choice on his 

 part does not enter. Such elements there 

 are in every subject." Among them are 

 the teaching of the alphabet, of the pro- 

 nunciation of written words or syllables, of 

 spelling, of writing, of the multiplication- 

 table, of rules for the addition or subtrac- 

 tion of fractions, of many other arithmetical 

 processes, and, in the higher subjects, the 

 inculcation of the Greek and Latin gram- 

 mar and vocabulary, of the propositions of 

 Euclid, of historical dates and facts, and of 

 many elements in the most difficult branches 

 of learning, the processes of which are me- 

 chanical and nothing more. "But in all 

 sound education these mechanical rules are 

 never treated as an end in themselves, nor 

 again as a mere stepping-stone to other 

 mechanical rules of a more difficult kind. 

 They are, each and all of them, keys to 

 unlock the several successive chambers of 

 the world in which we live ; and, whether 

 the treasures stored up in those chambers 

 are of a material or spiritual kind, . . . the 

 unfolding of these several treasures is not 

 in any way a mechanical, it is a vital process. 

 And here a totally new element comes in on 

 the part of the student. It is no longer 

 with him a matter of attention only ; he will 

 begin to exercise choice. It is found by 

 experience that boys and girls are not in- 

 capable of taking interest in the world in 



which they live ; but no prescribed plan for 

 creating such an interest in them is pos- 

 sible. Thousands of interesting topics may 

 be unfolded before the eyes of a boy, and 

 he will have none of them : at last some- 

 thing occurs which touches him ; curiosity 

 or sympathy is awakened ; and from that 

 moment he takes an initiative, his vital 

 education is on the move. And from that 

 moment the mechanical inculcation of rules 

 ought to be somewhat relaxed ; not that it 

 may not still be necessary sometimes, but 

 it ought not to be suffered to interfere with 

 the more important element the spontane- 

 ous pursuit of knowledge, the spontaneous 

 feeling of sympathy with men. Now, here 

 is the delicate, the critical point in educa- 

 tion, the point at which the teacher or the 

 educational authority has such serious diffi- 

 culties to contend with in making a decision. 

 . . . There is a proper medium in the en- 

 forcement of the mechanical part of educa- 

 tion : if it is enforced too little, there is the 

 mischief attendant upon idleness on the 

 child's part, besides the loss of ' the use of 

 a valuable instrument ; if it is enforced too 

 much, vital energies will be quenched, and 

 the whole result will be dry and formal." 

 The tendency in the primary schools, and of 

 all formal competition in the higher schools 

 and universities, is to produce mechanical 

 rather than vital excellence. 



NOTES. 



Dr. Charles M. Culver, of West Troy, 

 a graduate of Union College and of the Al- 

 bany Medical College, has been making the 

 study of the eye a specialty under the guid- 

 ance of eminent professional men in Lon- 

 don, Berlin, and Paris, and is now an as- 

 sistant of the celebrated oculist, Professor 

 Landolt, at the French capital. Dr. Culver 

 is at present engaged in translating from 

 the French into English the treatise on 

 " The Refraction of Light," by Professor 

 Landolt, which forms the second volume of 

 the comprehensive work on " Ophthalmol- 

 ogy " by Wecker and Landolt. It will be 

 an interesting contribution to our scientific 

 literature. 



Dr. George M. Beard, a physician well 

 known for his investigations in nervous dis- 

 orders, and the contributor of several arti- 

 cles to " The Popular Science Monthly," died 

 in this city, January 23d, at the age of forty- 

 three years. 



