Editorial Miscellany. 189 



"Thus far," concludes the distinguished professor, " we have placed 

 our subject in the firm grasp of experiment ; nor shall we find this 

 test failing us further on." 



PEnriTiVE Conceptions. — In his forthcoming work on " Principles 

 of Sociology," Herbert Spencer strikes at the root of those falser 

 theories of education which lead our teachers to ply the juvenile mind 

 with generalities, before it has acquired those concrete facts to which 

 they refer. " When we see mathematics introduced under the purely 

 rational form, instead of under that empirical form with which it 

 should be commenced by the child, as it was commenced by the race — 

 when we see a subject so abstract as grammar put among the first, 

 instead of among the last, and see it taught analytically, instead of 

 synthetically, we have ample evidence of the prevailing inability to 

 conceive the ideas of undeveloped minds." 



From this, the distinguished essayist proceeds to trace the orighi 

 and growth of primitive ideas among savage nations in some of their 

 leading traits, conceiving the surroundings as they appeared to the 

 primitive man. Taking natural occurrences, such as vanishing of 

 clouds, appearance and disappearance of the heavenly bodies, falling of 

 rain, mirages, waterspouts, winds, etc., he endeavors to delineate the 

 mental associations which woidd naturally arise in the primitive mind, 

 by observing the impressions produced upon the minds of young child- 

 ren by similar phenomena, and continues : 



"Significant facts of another order, from time to time disclosed, may 

 next be noted — facts irresistibly impressing the primitive man with 

 the belief that things are transmutable from one kind of substance to 

 another. I refer to the facts forced on his attention by embedded 

 remains of animals and plants. 



"While gathering food on the sea-shore, he finds, protruding from a 

 rock, a shell which, if not of the same shape as the shells he picks u]), 

 is so similar that he naturally classes it Avith them. But, instead of 

 being loose, it is part of a solid block ; and, on breaking it off, he find.s 

 its inside as hard as its matrix. Here, then, are two kindred forms, 

 one of which consists of shell and flesh, and the other of shell and 

 stone. Near at hand, in the mass of clay debris detached from 

 the adjacent cliflT, he picks up a fossil ammonite. Perhaps, like the 

 Gr ypIiKa ^ust examined, it has a shelly coating with a stony inside. 

 Perhaps, as happens with some liassic ammonites, of v.hich the shell 

 has been dissolved away, leaving the masses of indurated clay that 

 filled its chambers locked loosely togctlier, it suggests a series of 

 articulated vertebrae coiled np; or, as with other liassic ammonites of 



