48 GLAUCUS ; OR, 
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 natu- 
ralist by profession, yet this age offers no more 
wholesome training, both moral and intellectual, 
than that which is given by instilling into the young 
an early taste for outdoor physical science. The 
education of our children is now more than ever a 
puzzling problem, if by education we mean the 
development of the whole humanity, not merely of 
some arbitrarily chosen part of it. How to feed 
the imagination with wholesome food, and teach it 
to despise French novels, and that sugared slough 
of sentimental poetry, in comparison with which the 
old fairy-tales and ballads were manful and rational ; 
