THE WONDERS OF THE SHORE. 5] 
often misdirected ; craving to learn, yet not knowing 
how or what to learn; cultivating, with unwhole- 
some 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 
themselves in 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 seas of 
doubt or of superstition. It is asad 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. 
Moreover, to revert to another point which we 
touched just now, man has a body as well as & 
E 2 
