238 POPULAR EDUCATION. [CHAP, XXXVII. 



deemed Utopian, if it were necessary that all should understand 

 the patient and laborious trains of research and reasoning by which 

 we have arrived at grand generalizations in geology, and other 

 branches of physical science. But this is not requisite for the 

 desired end. We have simply to communicate the results, and 

 this we are bound to do, without waiting till they have been 

 established for half a century. We ought rather carefully to 

 prepare the public mind for new conclusions as soon as they 

 become highly probable, and thus make impossible that collision 

 of opinion, so much to be deprecated, between the multitude and 

 the learned. 



It is as easy to teach a peasant or a child that the earth moves 

 round the sun, as to inculcate the old exploded dogma that it is 

 the motionless center of the universe. The child is as willing to 

 believe that our planet is of indefinite antiquity, as that it is only 

 6000 years old. Tell him that the earth was inhabited by other 

 races of animals and plants before the creation of man, as we now 

 know it to have been, and the idea is not more difficult for him 

 to conceive than the notion which is usually allowed to take root 

 in his mind, that man and the species of animals and plants, now 

 our contemporaries, were the first occupants of this globe. All 

 that we require, when once a good system of primary and normal 

 schools has been organized, is a moderate share of moral courage 

 and love of truth, on the part of the laity and clergy ; and then 

 the academical chair and scientific lecture-room, and every pulpit, 

 and every village school, may be made to speak the same lan 

 guage, in regard to those natural phenomena, which are of a kind 

 to strike and interest the popular mind.* 



* The substance of the above remarks, on the fossil foot-prints of Greens- 

 burg, was given by me in a Lecture to the Royal Institution, London, Feb. 



4, 1848. 



