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ed with the bright consummate flower ? What a sarcasm on 

 our modern improvements in teaching, for the graduates of our 

 schools to quit the academic halls of learnings ignorant of the 

 morals, uses, habits and natural history of the very trees, which 

 have so very kindly sheltered them from the hot sun in their 

 pastimes, and of the weeds, -which would grow, though never so 

 much neglected, around the steps of the very doors they have 

 daily and yearly passed in and out ! What a parade of words 

 to measure, by mathematical formulas, the march and order of 

 star and sun, of the beams of light traversing space almost in- 

 finite, and yet unable to know the worm that is basking 

 in its rays, or the difference of the emerald grasses, which are 

 ■wiser than they, in a practical knowledge of how vivifying the 

 chemistry of this or of that pencil of the life-giving element. 



The hall containing shells, birds, beasts, fishes, insects, 

 plants — in fine, the thousand specimens of our collection, is 

 always open to every school boy or school girl, and they arc 

 Avelcome to see and admire — for it will be admitted that the 

 second steps of learning are naturally and readily taken from 

 first seeing and then admiring. 



But the Essex Institute has a wider and higher office to per- 

 f 3rm towards the young of this city. Among its three hun- 

 ured members are the very parents or guardians, in many in- 

 stances, of those young persons, who are supposed to be the 

 friends and patrons of all kinds of public instruction. From 

 the ever increasing crowds of boys and girls, we are to take, 

 by and by, the future members of our body, to help us bear 

 forward the sacred ark of science, and to maintain its usefulness 

 ■when we are gone. For though the naturalist like the poet,— 



nascifcur noa fit — 



yet the embryo naturalist is to be sought for in the school- 

 form, and school-desk, and his early taste should be aided even 

 there. 



Every human mind -was framed for the contemplation of 

 Nature, and constituted to throw itself lovingly and trustingly 

 upon her great maternal bosom. It can draw from it the 

 gushing fluid of a true future life — and in every other harder, 



