462 Study of Natural History, 



nators of daring schemes, men able and willing to go forth to 

 replenish the earth and subdue it. And in the hours of relaxa- 

 tion, how much of their time is thrown away, for want of anything 

 better, on frivolity, not to say on secret profligacy, parents know 

 too well ; and often shut their eyes in very despair to evils which 

 they know not how to cure. A frightful majority of our middle- 

 class young men are growing up effeminate, empty of all know- 

 ledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune ; or 

 rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up the fortunes which 

 their fathers have made for them ; while of the minority, who are 

 indeed thinkers and readers, how many women as well as men 

 have we seen wearying their souls with study undirected, often 

 misdirected ; craving to learn, yet not knowing how or what to 

 learn ; cultivating, with unwholesome energy, the head at the ex- 

 pense of the body and the heart ; catching up with the most 

 capricious self-will one mania after another, and tossing it away 

 again for some new phantom ; gorging the memory with facts 

 which no one has taught them to arrange, and the reason with 

 problems which they have no method for solving ;' till they fret 

 themselves into a chronic fever of the brain, which too often urges 

 them on to plunge, as it were to cool the inward fire, into the 

 ever-restless sea of doubt and disbelief. It is a sad picture. There 

 are many who may read these pages whose hearts will tell them 

 that it is a true one. What is wanted in these cases is a methodic 

 and scientific habit of mind ; and a class of objects on which to 

 exercise that habit, which will fever neither the speculative intel- 

 lect nor the moral sense ; and those physical science will give, as 

 nothing else can give it. 



Moreover, to revert to another point which we touched just 

 now, man has a body as well as a mind ; and with the vast majo- 

 rity there will be no mens sana unless there be a corpus sanum 

 for it to inhabit. And what out-door training to give our youths 

 is, as we have already said, more than ever puzzling. The diffi* 

 culty is felt, perhaps, less in Scotland than in England. The Scotch 

 climate compels hardiness; the Scotch bodily strength makes it 

 easy ; and Scotland, with her mountain-tours in summer, and her 

 frozen lochs in winter, her labyrinth of sea-shore, and, above all, 

 that priceless boon which Providence has bestowed on her, in the 

 contiguity of her great cities to the loveliest scenery, and hills 

 where every breeze is health, affords facilities for healthy physical 

 life unknown to the Englishman, who has no Arthur's Seat tower- 



