158 THE CANADIAN NATURALtsT. [Vol. Vi. 



of knowledge derived from education, whicli will duly cultivate 

 all the faculties of the mind, and thus fit a greater and greater 

 number for applying themselves with increased ability and know- 

 ledge to the purposes of their living and its improved condition. 

 If the law of the survival of the fittest be applicable to the men- 

 tal as well as to the physical improvement of our race (and who 

 can doubt that it must be so), we are bound by motives of inter- 

 est and duty to secure for all classes of the people that kind of 

 education which will lead to the development of the highest and 

 most varied mental power. And no one who has been observant 

 of the recent progress of the useful arts and its influence upon 

 the moral, social, and political condition of our population, can 

 doubt that that education must include instruction in the pheno- 

 mena of external nature, including, more especially, the laws and 

 conditions of life ; and be, at the same time, such as will adapt 

 the mind to the ready reception of varied knowledge, "It is obvi- 

 ous too, that while this more immediately useful or beneficial 

 effect on the common mind may be produced by the diff"usion of 

 natural knowledge among the people, biological science will share 

 in the gain accruing to all branches of natural science, by the 

 greater favour which will be accorded to its cultivators, and the 

 increased freedom from prejudice with which their statements are 

 received and considered by learned as well as by unscientific per- 

 sons. 



SPIRITUALISM. 



I cannot conclude these observations without adverting to one 

 aspect in which it might be thought that biological science has 

 taken a retrograde rather than an advanced position. In this, I 

 do not mean to refer to the special cultivators of biology in its 

 true sense, but to the fact that there appears to have taken place 

 of late a considerable increase in the number of persons who be- 

 lieve, or who imagine that they believe, in the class of phenome- 

 na which are now called spiritual, but which have been long known 

 — since the exhibitions of Mesmer, and indeed, long before his 

 time — under the most varied forms, as liable to occur in persons 

 of an imaginative turn of mind and peculiar nervous susceptibility. 

 It is still more to be deplored that many persons devote a large 

 share of their time to the practice — for it does not deserve the 

 name of study or investigation — of the alleged phenomena, and 

 that a few men of acknowledged reputation in some departments 

 of science have lent their names, and surrendered their judgment, 



