Btudy of Natural History. 46 1 



raestic relations ; men for the most part of manful heads, and yet 

 of childlike hearts, who have turned to quiet study, in these late 

 piping times of peace, an intellectual health and courage which 

 might have made them, in more fierce and troublous times, 

 capable of doing good service with very different instruments than 

 the scalpel and the microscope. 



I have been sketching an ideal : but one which I seriously 

 recommend to the consideration of all parents ; for, though it be 

 impossible and absurd to wish that every young man should grow 

 up a naturalist by profession, yet this age offers no more whole- 

 some training, both moral and intellectual, than that which is 

 given by instilling into the young an early taste for out-door 

 jDliysical science. The education of our children is now more than 

 ever a puzzling problem, if by education we mean the develop- 

 ment of the whole humanity, not merely of some arbitrarilj^ chosen 

 part of it. How to feed the imagination with wholesome food, 

 and teach it to despise French novels, and that sugared slouo-h of 

 sentimental poetry, in comparison with which the old fairy-tales 

 and ballads were manful and rational ; how to counteract the ten- 

 dency to shallow and conceited sciolism, engendered by hearing 

 popular lectures on all manner of subjects; which can only be 

 really learnt by stern methodic study ; bow to give habits of enter- 

 prise, patience, accurate observation, which the counting-house or 

 the library will never bestow ; above all, how to develope the phy* 

 sical powers, without engendering brutality and coarseness, — are 

 questions becoming daily more and more puzzling, while they need 

 daily more and more to be solved, in an age of enterprise, travel 

 and emigration, like the present. For the truth must be told 

 that the great majority of men, who are now distinguished by 

 commercial success, have had a training the directly opposite to 

 that which they are giving to their sons. They are, for the most 

 part, men who have migrated from the country to the town, and 

 had in their youth all the advantages of a sturdy and manful hill- 

 side or sea-side training; men whose bodies were developed, and 

 their lungs fed on pure breezes, long before they brought to work 

 in the city the bodily and mental strength which they had o-ained 

 by loch and moor. But it is not so with their sons. Their busi- 

 ness habits are learnt in the counting'-house ; a good school, doubt- 

 less, as far as it goes ; but one which will expand none but the 

 lowest intellectual faculties ; which will make them accurate ac- 

 countants, shrewd computers and competitors, but never the origi- 



