STRUCTURE AND GROWTH OF DOMESTICATED ANIMALS. 657 
instruction, we have not. We have to build them up, and we shall 
not have them before the community understands what are the 
conditions necessary fer the acquisition of new knowledge which 
may improve the conditions of our success in the practical affairs 
of a civilized community. 
You may ask what text-books you shall take to begin with. 
There are none that I would recommend. You cannot use the 
present text-books, for most of them are manufactured by people 
who know nothing or precious little of the subject about which 
they write. They are mere compilations, made for the market, by 
men who have no sort of knowledge of what should be the sub- 
Stance of a text-book; and, what is worse than that, our schools 
are crowded with so large a number of pupils that the teachers, 
even the very best of them, have to resort to all sorts of devices 
in order to keep alive. Instead of teaching, that is, instead of 
giving out of their knowledge and their substance something by 
which they can vivify the intellect of their pupils, they are forced 
by the pressure of numbers to direct their pupils to commit to 
memory some superannuated book, and to make them recite things 
not worth knowing. So there we must begin. We must begin by 
relieving the teacher from a task to which no human being is 
equal; for it is impossible for any one person to teach eighty 
pupils well, in one and the same room, at the same time, and to 
teach every branch of human knowledge in close succession. It is 
physically impossible. It is past endurance; and all those who 
have tried to do this kind of work, honestly and faithfully, have 
paid for the effort with the loss of health. And then there is 
another point. In order to get men capable of performing the 
difficult task of teaching, you must give greater inducements to 
able intellects to devote themselves to the task. The teacher’s 
profession must not be the least remunerative of any profession 
in the community, as at present it is. Only those who by nature 
cannot help being teachers go into it, and their willingness to 
teach is misused by the community by giving them a pittance 
for their existence. So one more thing is needed: you must or- 
ganize normal schools to educate teachers of natural history and 
Science generally. You must not only determine that you will 
introduce these branches of knowledge into your schools, but you 
must prepare teachers for the task. 
AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. VII. 42 
