1885.: 
Things versus Words. «j Ig 
comparisons or references. Hence we constantly find in the 
text-books, when the properties of any object are bein" 
described, such remarks as “ Its smell somewhat reminds 
us of” &c. Yet odours, at least on a person who does not 
deaden his olfactory organ by the use of narcotics, make 
very well-defined and permanent impressions. I know an 
instance where the scent of buchu, once experienced, was 
distinctly and at once identified nearly forty years afterwards. 
This proves that, as I remarked above, we can remember 
and identify sense-impressions direCtly, without the inter- 
vention of language. The person who thus recollected the 
smell of this herb had no name for his sensation, nor do I 
see that if he had applied some name to it he would have 
been by that means at all the better enabled to identify it 
when again met with. 
Indeed it will be found, as a general rule, that we remem- 
ber our observations, or at least our sense-impressions, 
direCtly without the intervention of language, and that we only 
seek to clothe them in words to aid in communicating them 
to others. 
Seeing, therefore, from the few examples I have brought 
forward, how very impotent is language, unaided , to convey 
precise knowledge, the question arises — Why is such exclu- 
sive attention paid to words, both in lower and higher edu- 
cation, to the almost entire negleCt of things ? Verbal 
memory is cultivated above all other faculties of the human 
mind. Much care is taken to train up youth in the correct 
use of language. But in what school is the art of observa- 
tion systematically taught ? Who heeds or asks whether 
the observing faculties are strengthened ? Quite the con- 
trary ; these faculties, if perhaps not intentionally, are 
not the less weakened and crowded out by dominant 
verbalism. 
It is sometimes said — and said most falsely — that if the 
mind is, at the outset of its growth, trained in words and 
abstractions, it will afterwards deal with things all the more 
successfully. This assumption has been refuted by the 
direct experience of Prof. Galloway, M.R.I.A., who has put 
it on record that the junior classes of boys in schools under- 
stand and profit by lessons in Chemistry better than do their 
seniors, whose observant faculties and whose power of 
learning from things had been relatively weakened by their 
longer course of grammar-school training. 
But the all but exclusive a^ention paid to words, and the 
corresponding negleCt of things, engrained as it is in modern 
systems of education, and though it is the very heart and 
