7 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



suit of which most men spend their energies : three of them refer to 

 self namely, property, pleasure, and political advancement ; the other 

 three imply devotion to ideas namely, religion, science, and art. 

 Without a doubt, as M. de Candolle says, the former three occupy 

 one half of the moral sphere of the human character, and the latter 

 three the other. 



It appears that the men distinguished in science have usually been 

 born in small towns, and educated by imperfect teachers, who made 

 the boys think for themselves. Nothing is brought out more clearly 

 in the work than that the first desideratum in scientific education is 

 to stimulate curiosity and the observation of real things, and that too 

 much encouragement of the receptive faculty is a serious error. The 

 author justly laments that the art of observation is not only untaught, 

 but is actually discouraged by modern education. Children are apt 

 and eager to observe, but, instead of encouraging and regulating their 

 instincts, the school-masters keep them occupied solely on internal 

 ideas, such as grammar, the vocabularies of different languages, arith- 

 metic, history, and poetry. They learn about the living world which 

 surrounds them out of books, and not through their own eyes. One 

 of the reformations he proposes is, to make much more use of drawing 

 as a means of careful observation, compelling the pupils to draw quickly 

 the object they have to describe, from memory, after a short period 

 allowed for its examination. He is a strong advocate for the encour- 

 agement of a class of scientific sinecurists like the non-working fellows 

 of our colleges, who should have leisure to investigate, and not be 

 pestered by the petty mechanical work of continual teaching and ex- 

 amining. Science has lost much by the suppression of the ecclesias- 

 tical sinecures at the time of the French Revolution, for there used to 

 be many abbes on the lists of foreign scientific members, but they 

 have now almost wholly disappeared. The modern ideas of democracy 

 are adverse to places to which definite work is not attached, and from 

 which definite results do not regularly flow. This principle is a wise 

 one for the mass of mankind ; but how utterly misplaced when ap- 

 plied to those who have the zeal for investigation, and who work best 

 when left quite alone ! 



There is a curious chapter on the probability of English becoming 

 the dominant language of the world in fifty or a hundred years, and 

 being the one into which the more important scientific publications of 

 all nations will, as a matter of course, be translated. It is not only 

 that the English-speaking population will outnumber the German and 

 the French, as these now outnumber the Dutch and the Swedish, but 

 that the language has peculiar merits, through its relationship with 

 both the Latin and the Teutonic tongues. It also seems that, in fami- 

 lies where German and French are originally spoken, French always 

 drives out the German on account of its superior brevity. When peo- 

 ple are in a hurry, and want to say something quickly, it is more easi- 



