PLAN OF STUDY. 
IX 
By the latter method, the memory may, no doubt, be highly 
improved ; but it is, almost without exception, at the expense 
of the judgment, which, by the method here recommended, is 
the chief faculty exercised. The memory of children is in 
many cases too ready, and it might be more advantageous to 
check than to foster it, like a hot-house plant, into premature 
growth, which is certain to be followed by premature decay; 
while, at the same time, every chance of originality and inde- 
pendence of mind must be utterly extinguished. It was remarked 
by Aristotle, that precocious prizers, at the Olympic games, 
were rarely afterwards distinguished, and every day’s experience 
proves the correctness of his observation. It would not, indeed, 
be difficult to demonstrate, that the mode here recommended of 
discriminating the objects of Natural History, is a more effi- 
cient instrument for exercising the judgment, than even mathe- 
matics ; at least when they are taught on the plan so frequently 
followed in our schools and Universities, of merely committing 
to memory, or, what is the same thing, conning over, the demon- 
strations of Euclid, or Sir Isaac Newton ; instead, as is done on 
the continent, of pupils inventing the diagram, and working out 
the demonstration of a proposition, as much as possible, by their 
own efforts. The consequence of this leading-string system has 
been, that it has nearly extinguished the mathematical reputation 
of Britain, formerly so high ; it being as impossible to make a 
Newton by parroting the Principia, as to make a Milton by com- 
mitting to memory the Paradise Lost. In the same way in Natural 
History; the trusting to books alone, which, in so many cases, are 
the compilations of men altogether ignorant of the subject, has 
virtually placed the authority of a few names (Linnaeus for ex- 
ample, and some of his disciples) far above nature itself, and has 
thereby checked the progress of original and independent obser- 
vation. We may well say wdth Lactantius, that ‘‘they make 
shipwreck of their wisdom who thus adopt, without judgment, 
the opinions of their ancestors, and allow themselves to be led 
by others like a flock of sheep.”* 
In books (whose principal use I shall presently advert to) 
we can only obtain knowledge at second hand, and this, like 
Sapientiam sibi aclimunt, qui sine ullo judicio inventa majomm probant, 
et ab aliis pecudum more ducuntiir. — Lactantius, Divin. Institut. ii. 7. 
