6i2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



civilizations have been destroyed. For no chain is stronger than its 

 ■weakest link, and our glorious statue with its head of gold and its 

 shoulders of brass has as yet but feet of clay ! 



Political economy alone can give the answer. And, if you trace 

 out, in the way I have tried to outline, the laAvs of the production 

 and exchange of wealth, you will see the causes of social weakness and 

 disease in enactments which selfishness has imposed on ignorance, and 

 in maladjustments entirely within our own control. 



And you will see the remedies. Not in wild dreams of red de- 

 struction nor weak projects for putting men in leading-strings to a 

 brainless abstraction called the state, but in simple measures sanctioned 

 by justice. You will see in light the great remedy, in freedom the 

 great solvent. You will see that the true law of social life is the law 

 of love, the law of liberty, the law of each for all and all for each ; 

 that the golden rule of morals is also the golden rule of the science of 

 wealth ; that the highest expressions of religious truth include the 

 widest generalizations of political economy. 



There will grow on you, as no moralizing could teach, a deepening 

 realization of the brotherhood of man ; there will come to you a firmer 

 and firmer conviction of the fatherhood of God. If you have ever 

 thoughtlessly accepted that worse than atheistic theory that want and 

 wretchedness and brutalizing toil are ordered by the Creator, or, revolt- 

 ing from this idea, if you have ever felt that the only thing apparent 

 in the ordering of the world was a blind and merciless fate careless of 

 man's aspirations and heedless of his sufferings, these thoughts will 

 pass from you as you see how much of all that is bad and all that is 

 perplexing in our social conditions grows simply from our ignorance 

 of law — as you come to realize how much better and happier men 

 might make the life of man. 



WAED'S NATURAL SCIENCE ESTABLISHMENT. 



By Pkofessoe JOSEPH LEIDY. 



A RECENT visit to Professor Henry A. Ward's " Natural Science 

 Establishment " at Rochester, New York, led the writer to some 

 reflections on the comparative value of a knowledge of natural history. 

 In the prevailing systems of education, the subject is totally disre- 

 garded, or receives but trifling consideration. The classical languages 

 and history, on the other hand, have always been taught, and are 

 yet considered by the greater portion of the cultivated people as 

 essential to a complete education, while the sciences have been treated 

 as only of secondary importance. The information possessed by a 

 country boy, gained by intelligent observation, of the birds or plants 



