" A frightful majority of our middle-class young men are growing 

 up effeminate, empty of all knowledge but what tends directly to 

 the making of a fortune ; or rather, to speak correctly, to the keep- 

 ing 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 expense 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 them- 

 selves 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 intellect nor 

 the moral sense, and those physical science will give, as nothing else 

 can give it." — Kingsley's Glaucus, p. 45. 



