434 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 
short of the remedy. It is essential, however, to fill this enormous blank 
in every course of education which has hitherto been acted on, by a due 
provision of some course of study and instruction which shall meet the 
difficulty, by showing how valid propositions are to be drawn, not from 
premises which virtually contain them in their very words, as is the case 
with abstract propositions in mathematics, nor from the juxtaposition of 
other propositions assumed as true, as in the Aristotelian logic, but from 
the broad consideration of an assemblage of facts and circumstances 
brought under review. This is the scope of the Inductive Philosophy— 
applicable, and which ought to be applied (though it never yet has fairly 
been so) to all the complex circumstances of human life; to politics, mo- 
rals, and legislation; to the guidance of individual conduct, and that of 
nations. I cannot too strongly recommend this to the consideration of 
those who are now to decide on the normal course of instruction to be 
adopted in your College. Let them have the glory—for glory it will really 
be—to have given a new impulse to public instruction, by placing the Wo- 
vum Organum for the first time in the hands of young men educating for 
active life, as a text book, and as a regular part of their College course. It 
is strong meat, I admit, but it is manly nutriment; and though imper- 
fectly comprehended, (as it must be at that age when the college course 
terminates,) the glimpses caught of its meaning, under a due course of col- 
lateral explanation, will fructify in after life, and like the royal food with 
which the young bee is fed, will dilate the frame, and transform the whole 
habit and ceconomy. Of course it should be made the highest book for the 
most advanced classes. 
Among branches of knowledge purely formal, langnage of course stands 
foremost. Its importance is doubtless great as the key to the depositories 
of knowledge, and as the most powerful instrument of human reason. Of 
course it must form an essential part of every system of instruction. But 
it should be studied as a means and not as anend. ‘The books chosen in 
every language (after its first rudiments are acquired) ought to be vehicles 
of other than mere verbal instruction, and the attention of the pupil ought 
to be much more strongly directed to the matter than to the words. In- 
deed, a foreign tongue can never be said to be in fair train of being mas- 
tered, till the sense is seized and the words begin to pass unheeded. Much 
of course will depend on the tact of the teacher in determining the point 
where the strictness of literal construction may be relaxed or altogether 
abandoned, and fluent translation substituted for it. And here I would 
incidentally remark, how infinitely preferable a close written translation is 
to any oral construing. A boy should come up ‘to construe” with his 
written, or even—in the case of beginning—his printed, translation in his 
hand ; he should read it aloud, and then be called upon to prove by literal 
construction that such zs the true sense of the passage. Thus and thus 
only can we be sure that the sense has not escaped him in the turmoil of 
words and rules, which it is to be feared is too often the case in the usual 
method. As for composition, or even translation from the vernacular into 
a foreign tongue, till the point of fluent construing or translation at sight 
is attained, I consider it as time mispent*. The usual practice at schools 
of setting boys who know nothing, or next to nothing, of Latin, to write 
Latin exercises, has always appeared to me a mere waste of their own and 
their master’s time. One hour spent in acquiring a fluency of rendering 
at sight is worth a week of such unnatural effort. 
* [On this point we venture to express our dissent, We are inclined to think 
that these two species of exercises, simultaneously practised, assist and test each 
other,—R. T.] 
