dinary effort a place which neither nature nor circumstances have made possible. Many unfortunate children have been ruined for life, in body and mind, by being stimulated with various inducements to make exertions beyond their age and mental capacity. A feeble frame and a nervous temperament are the too sure consequences of a brain overworked in childhood. Slow progress, rather than rapid growth, tends to establish vigor, health and happiness. It has always appeared to me that a desirable and profitable mode of school education would be one in which every hour of study should be offset by another hour of exercise required to be taken in the open air.

To illustrate the impossibility of making any one what may be called a general scholar, we need but to take a slight view of the extent and recent progress of a few of the most familiar and popular sciences at the present day. Let us take geography, which treats of the earth's external structure, and geology which treats of its internal. In the first of these the education of many of the present generation abounded in what are now found to be errors and defects. We were taught that the Andes were the highest mountains of the globe, and the Amazon the longest river. Discoverers had then stopped a thousand miles short of the sources of the Nile and of the Missouri. The Columbia and the Sacramento were geographical myths, while a fabulous Oregon or River of the West was laid down on the maps on the hearsay authority of Carver, displacing what are now the Rocky Mountains, and entering the Pacific Ocean about latitude 43°. The existence of the African Niger was known to the Romans, yet the Royal Geographical Society until 1820 did not know where it reached the ocean, though a hundred Englishmen at various times had laid down their lives in African deserts in fruitless attempts to resolve the mysterious problem. It was not until a still later period that the world knew that

there was a continuous Arctic Sea, or any thing like an Antarctic continent.

But if so much has been done in the more difficult and inaccessible parts of our globe, how much more has been achieved in the parts accessible to settlement and cultivation. The American continent, the interior map of which was almost a blank at the close of our Revolution, is now profusely dotted with towns, cities, forts, post offices and rail stations, until the most diligent compiler of a Gazetteer is obliged to pause in despair at the manifest defects of his latest edition.

Geology may be considered as almost a creation of the present age. When Werner visited Paris, in 1802, it could hardly be said to consist of more than insulated observations with a few crude and unsettled theories. But now it has become a great, organized, and overshadowing department of science. In every language of Europe it has its voluminous systems and its unfailing periodicals. Societies of special organization carry forward its labors, and every country of the globe is traversed by its observers and collectors. The shelves of museums are weighed down by its accumulations, and in its palæontology alone the Greek language is exhausted to furnish factitious names for the continually developed species of antecedent creations.

Chemistry in a limited degree appears to have attracted the attention of the ancients, but of their proficiency in this pursuit we know more from their preserved relics and results than from their cotemporaneous records. In modern times the chemists constitute a philosophical community having a language of their own, a history of their own, methods, " pursuits and controversies of their own, and a domain which is coextensive with the materials of which our globe is made.. Many men of gifted minds and high intellectual attainments, have devoted their lives to the prosecution of this science. Chemistry has unravelled the early mysteries of our planet,

and has had a leading agency in changing the arts and the economy of human life. It now fills the civilized world with its libraries, laboratories and lecture-rooms. No individual can expect to study even its accessible books, still less to become familiar with its recorded facts. Yet chemistry is probably in its infancy, and opens one of the largest future fields for scientific cultivation.

Natural history in its common acceptation implies the investigation, arrangement and description of all natural bodies, including the whole organized creation. If no other science existed but this, there would be labor enough and more than enough to employ for life the students and observers of the world. Each kingdom of organic nature already offers to our acquaintance its hundred thousand specific forms, and these are but the vanguard of a still greater multitude believed to cover the surface of countries yet unexplored, and to fill the mysterious recesses not yet penetrated by the microscope. And as far as we know, every one of these organisms, great or small, carries with it its parasites, to which it affords habitation and food, and which may be supposed not only to double but to multiply in an unknown ratio its original numbers. Again, when we reflect that every one of these species has its own anatomy, its physiology, its peculiar chemistry, its habits, its sensations, its modes of reproduction, its nutrition, its duration, its metamorphoses, its diseases and its final mode of destruction, we may well despair of knowing much of the whole, when a single species might furnish materials of study for a human lifetime.

The foregoing are examples of the claim on our attention and study advanced by a portion only of the progressive sciences. They serve to develop truths and laws appertaining to the material earth, which truths and laws must have existed had there never been minds to study them. The relations of number and figure, the laws of motion and rest,

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of gravity and affinity, of animal and vegetable life, must have been the same had the dominant race of man never appeared on earth. But there is another extensive class of scientific pursuits, the subjects of which are drawn from his own nature. He has devised metaphysics to illustrate the operations of his own mind. He has introduced ethical and political science to promote order and happiness, and military science to assist for a time at least in destroying both. He has built up history with "her volumes vast," which volumes are as yet a small thing compared with those that are to come. Under the name of news the press daily inundates the world with a million sheets of cotemporaneous history, for history and news, under small qualifications, are identical. The annals of the last four years may deserve as large a place in the attention of mankind as was due when the poet Campbell informed the Egyptian mummy that since his decease, “a Roman empire had begun and ended." The greatest part of what should have been history is unwritten, and of what has been written the greatest part is of little general value. If all that has actually been committed to papyrus, parchment or paper had by chance been preserved from the effects of time and barbarism, the aggregate would be so vast and the interest so little, that the busy world could hardly turn aside for its examination from more absorbing and necessary pursuits. But the world is not contented with history which states, or professes to state, the progress, arts, dates, successes and failures of distinguished men and nations. It requires further, the supplementary aid of fiction which finds facts, not in testimony, but in probability; not as they are recorded to have happened, but as they ought to have happened under the circumstances and with the actors. Fiction, moreover, not being restrained by the limits of circumstantial truth, is at liberty to seek embellishment from exaggeration, from ornament, from poetry, from dramatic utterance and passionate

expression. Hence it has taken the lead in modern literature, and it is not probable that at this day the most accomplished bibliographer or bookseller could point the way to one-half of its multiplied and perishable productions.

There is neither time nor inducement to refer to the pseudo-sciences, which in all ages have made serious drafts upon the limited lifetime of man, nor to the ephemeral and unprofitable issues which consume his time and labor and wear out his strength. At the present day we have not much to fear from alchemy, palmistry or astrology, nor yet from spiritualism, homoeopathy or mormonism. But it is not easy to prevent men from wasting their time in the pursuit of shadows, from substituting exceptions for general laws, from believing things, not because they are probable, but because they are wonderful and entertaining. Still less can we divert them from yielding to the guidance of an excited will, from following prejudices or creating them, from adopting one side of a controversy or party strife for no better reason than that some other party has adopted the opposite.

It would be unnecessary to add to what has already been said, even an inventory of other studies, which present seducing but interminable claims on the life and labor of man. It would be vain to open the flood gates of philology, and to follow the thousand rills of language which have intersected and troubled each other ever since they left their fountains at Babel. And we pause in humility before the very portals of astronomy, which has revealed to us that we roll and revolve, and perhaps again revolve, around we know not what. And helpless as animalcules on the surface of a floating globule, we are ever striving to see, to explore, and to mark our way through the "starry dust" of infinite space. Strong and devoted minds have piled up unreadable tomes, the result of their life-long studies and observations, yet few, save the pro