•^16" STATE BOARD OF AGRlCULTUllE. 



the lauguage.s, in liis .Sarter Regartu?. "My teachers," said he, '''were hide- 

 bound pedants, without knowledge of man's nature or of boys' ; or of aught 

 save their lexicons and their account books. Innumerable dead vocables tlier 

 orammed into us, and called it fostering the growth of mind. How can an 

 inanimate, mechanical gerund-grinder foster the growth of anything : much 

 more of mind, which grows, not like a vegetable (by having its roots littered 

 with etymological compost), Init like a spirit, by mysterious contact Avith spirit; 

 thought kindling itself at the lire of living thought. * * The Ilinterschlag 

 professors knew syntax enough, and of human soul thus much : that it had a 

 faculty called memory, and could be acted on through the muscular integu- 

 ments by appliance of birch root." — Pedagogy, p. 84. Or come down to this 

 fery winter of 1875-6, when the distinguished professor of Greek in Edinburgh 

 complains of the great University of Oxford that '''a grjat deal of harm is done 

 to young men, who are merely drilled like a parcel of old Prussian pipe-clay 

 sergeants." — Weekly Scotsman, Nov. 20, 1875, p. G. 



Of course, when the metjiods used in the languages rule in the study of sci- 

 ence the results are not satisfactory. "This, therefore,'' said Bacon, "is the 

 iirst distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter." Science, 

 to be disciplinary, has its own methods. Properly pursued, they have probably 

 no superiors in the development of the perceptive and discriminative faculties, 

 of the judgment, the imagination, and the power of generalization. Their 

 influence over the moral emotions is profound and healthy. The subject has 

 received so mneh discussion of late years that I forbear to enter it farther at this 

 time. 



A (JOXTEAST. 



Here, then, is a nuxn who has been classically educated. He expatiates free 

 o'er all this scene of man. He understands the languages in which the litera- 

 ture of the world is written. He writes histories, guides thought on manv 

 subjects. Shall we not call him learned? The Avorld does so and justly. And 

 yet perhaps nature seals from his eyes its mysteries. He knows no chemistry, 

 nor botany, nor geology. The enlargement of the sun as it rises in the east, the 

 shifting colors and scenes of animal and vegetable life are outside of his 

 thoughts and knowledge. Ijearned and cultured as he is, it is after all in a 

 confined sphere of thought and enjoyment. He goes to spend his vacation at 

 the sea side. What takes he for his thoughts and study? a pocket volume of 

 the Greek poet Euripides, and writes us the thoughts that arise as he reads, in 

 prose so beautiful that wc are constrained to read, and to look again at the 

 Grecian tragedies in his guidance. Eroude may know more science than I 

 credit him Avith. I make his name stand only to represent the kind of culture 

 which many have who are called cultured and learned. 



Here is another. He walks the sea shore in his vacation, and a piece of 

 chalk at his feet awakens a train of thought that goes back to centuries before 

 Homer wrote, recalls to his mind the action of forces which in their wild, and 

 varied, and yet law-abiding action, have made the world what it is to-day ; not 

 a motion of cloud or condition of the air, but recalls the results of the investi- 

 gations of hundreds of observing and of comparing students, who have, besides, 

 supplied from deeper sources within themselves, through the exercise of high 

 powers of insight, the key by which nature's workings are entered into and com- 

 prehended. He needs no book. Like Shakspeare's Jaques he finds 



" Tongues in trees, books in the runnuig brooks. 

 Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 



