A LIBERAL EDUCATION 53 



iterranean two thousand years ago were imprinted on the 

 minds of scholars; if ancient history were taught, not as a 

 weary series of feuds and fights, but traced to its causes in 

 such men placed under such conditions; if, lastly, the study 

 of the classical books were followed in such a manner as to 

 impress boys with their beauties, and with the grand simplic- 

 ity of their statement of the everlasting problems of human 

 life, instead of with their verbal and grammatical peculiar- 

 ities; I still think it as little proper that they should form the 

 basis of a liberal education for our contemporaries, as I 

 should think it fitting to make that sort of paleontology with 

 which I am familiar the back-bone of modern education. 



It is wonderful how close a parallel to classical training 

 could be made out of that paleontology to which I refer. In 

 the first place I could get up an osteological primer so arid, 

 so pedantic in its terminology, so altogether distasteful to 

 the youthful mind, as to beat the recent famous production 

 of the head-masters out of the field in all these excellencies. 

 Next, I could exercise my boys upon easy fossils, and bring 

 out all their powers of memory and all their ingenuity in 

 the application of my osteo-grammatical rules to the inter- 

 pretation, or construing, of those fragments. To those who 

 had reached the higher classes, I might supply odd bones 

 to be built up into animals, giving great honour and reward 

 to him who succeeded in fabricating monsters most entirely 

 in accordance with the rules. That would answer to verse- 

 making and essay-writing in the dead languages. 



To be sure, if a great comparative anatomist were to look 

 at these fabrications he might shake his head, or laugh. 

 But what then? Would such a catastrophe destroy the 

 parallel? What, think you, would Cicero, or Horace, say 

 to the production of the best sixth form going? And. would 

 not Terence stop his ears and run out if he could be present 



