May i, 1864.] THE TECHNOLOGIST, 



ON GRANITE AND ITS USES, 



utilitarian, though perhaps not become more poetical, only this time the 

 slower the better. Let no one, then, quarrel with utilitarianism for 

 being utilitarian. You might as well quarrel with a ball for being 

 round. If poetry threatens to suffer, let the poets defend it from 

 wrong. 



There is one respect, however, in which I think too great a devotion 

 to utilitarianism is doing mischief. An endeavour is being made to 

 indoctrinate children with what is called useful knowledge, to the ex- 

 clusion of fairy tales and other so-called useless imaginative literature. 

 I have no sympathy with this. It is wrong in principle, and wrong in 

 policy. The childhood of an infant, like the childhood of a nation, is 

 a time when the imagination is the great inlet to knowledge, and it 

 should be allowed to remain so. The poet is entitled to the childhood 

 of every man and woman. The utilitarian may touch the finger tips of 

 the youth, and often may entirely clasp the hand of the man ; but the 

 child is as useless to him as his knowledge is useless to the child. 1 

 count it, for example, an unwise and even a cruel thing to tell a won- 

 dering child that a diamond is not a fairy marvel, but only so much 

 black soot or charcoal. The fact has no interest for a child. It is, 

 indeed, beyond its comprehension, and to the small extent that it is 

 apprehended it can only occasion perplexity. Tell a child, if it must 

 be spoken to on the matter, that a diamond is so much sunlight con- 

 densed and crystallised, and you may enlarge its conception of that ex- 

 quisite gem without misleading it. For, in a sense which the greatest 

 philosophers would acknowledge to be a just one, a diamond is so much 

 imprisoned sun-light ; and if you burn the diamond you can set the 

 light free again. On such a conception a child's mind can lay hold, and 

 grasp it as it grows older better and better, till by-and-bye it learns to 

 qualify it by the added idea of a ponderable solid embodying the im- 

 ponderable light, and so gives wings to the chrysalis thought. I am 

 not objecting to teaching children utilitarian facts, but to teaching such 

 facts so as to cripple the imagination and morbidly develop or distract 

 the intellect. A dwarfed and chilled imagination will help no one to 

 study or to work. The boy who is greatly interested in " Aladdin s 

 Wonderful Lamp " is sure, by-and-bye, to be greatly interested in all the 

 wonderful safety lamps, electric lamps, and self-lighting lamps of Davy 

 and his successors ; and I have noticed that all my schoolfellows who 

 have since distinguished themselves as men of thought or action, were 

 great story-readers in their early clays. 



I wash my hands free, as Professor of Technology, of any approval 

 of the so-called intellectual style of teaching. I have listened, on 

 occasion, by request, to the uttered -wisdom of little girls, who told me 

 that the specific gravity of gold is 19.5 ; that the proper name of salt is 

 chloride of sodium, and that the animal kingdom is divided into Mam- 

 malia, Aves, Reptilia, and Pisces : all which I heard with suppressed 

 groans. The knowledge was good of its kind, but did the child no good, 



