$80 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 
ation on the particular classes educated at college 
will show the weakness of such reasoning: they 
consist almost exclusively of the sons of the nobility, 
of the clergy, and of the wealthy gentry: the first 
and the last are almost exempt from the necessity 
of following any profession, while those who are in- 
tended for the church are equally freed from the 
obligation of acquiring a theoretic knowledge of 
their calling (as the physician and the lawyer are 
obliged to do), after they have quitted the walls of 
the university. Academic studies are rather 
intellectual than practical; that is to say, they 
have no fellowship with the commercial and manu- 
facturing —the military, the naval, or the empirical 
arts: how important is it, then, to the future happi- 
ness of young men, educated and nurtured with such 
feelings, to infuse into their minds a love of physical 
science, —te supply them with intellectual and pure 
resources in after life, suited at once to those habits 
of abstract reflection they have acquired at college, 
and to the leisure which attends upon rank and 
wealth? Some, indeed, will be called into active life, 
and will be destined to fill important stations in the 
state ; but these, in comparison to the majority, are 
few ; and if our statesmen and legislators had been 
early impressed with the beauties or imbued with a 
taste only for philosophy, and had been better in- 
structed in its objects, the science of Britain would 
not, at this time, be so utterly neglected. 
(261.) But by far the larger portion of those 
young collegians, not destined for the church, on 
finishing their education, enter upon a life of indo- 
lence and pleasure, without having imbibed a taste 
we 
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