WE cannot imagine a complete education of man without music. It is the gymnastic of the affections. In suitable connection with exercise, it is necessary to keep body and soul in health.

JEAN PAUL RICHTER.

THINGS, NOT WORDS.

Do not treat the child to discourses which he cannot understand: no descriptions, no eloquence, no figures of speech. Be content to present to him appropriate objects. Let us transform our sensations into ideas. But let us not jump at once from sensible objects to intellectual objects. Let us always proceed slowly from one sensible notion to another. In general, let us never substitute the sign for the thing, except when it is impossible for us to show the thing. I have no love whatever for explanations and talk. Things! things! I shall never tire of saying that we ascribe too much importance to words.

J. J. ROUSSEAU.

MAN AND NATURE.

As to the knowledge of the facts of nature, I would have you devote yourself to them with great care, so that there shall be neither sea, river, nor fountain whose fish you do not know. All the birds of the air; all the trees, shrubs, and fruits of the forests; all the grasses of the earth; all the metals concealed in the depths of the abysses, the precious stones of the entire East and South, none of these should be unknown to you. By frequent dissections, acquire a knowledge of the other

world, which is man. In a word, I point out a new world of knowledge.

FRANÇOIS RABELAIS.

A HARD MODE OF THOUGHT.

NATURAL Science, when its pursuit is one-sided, like every other activity so pursued, narrows the field of view. Natural science, under such circumstances, confines the glance to that which lies immediately at hand and within reach, to what offers itself as the immediate result of sense-perception with apparently unconditional certainty. It turns the mind aside from more general, less certain observations, and disaccustoms it to exercise itself in the realm of the quantitatively indeterminable. In a certain sense, we extol this as an invaluable virtue of science; but where it is exclusively dominant, the mind is apt to grow poor in ideas, the imagination in pictures, the soul in sensitiveness, and the result is a narrow, dry, and hard mode of thought deserted by the Muses and the Graces.

E. DU BOIS-REYMOND.

LEARNING WITH EFFORT.

WE acquire without doubt notions more clear and certain of things we thus learn of ourselves than of those we are taught by others. Another advantage also resulting from this method is, that we do not accustom ourselves to a servile submission to the authority of others, but by exercising our reason, grow every day more ingenious in the discovery of the relations of things, in connecting our ideas, and

in the contrivance of machines; whereas, by adopting those which are put into our hands, our invention grows dull and indifferent, as the man who never dresses himself, but is served in everything by his servants, and drawn about everywhere by his horses, loses by degrees the activity and use of his limbs. Boileau boasted that he had taught Racine to rhyme with difficulty. Among the many admirable methods taken to abridge the study of the sciences, we we are in great want of one to make us learn them with effort.

J. J. ROUSSEAU.

TALENT AND GENIUS.

MEDIOCRITY characterizes the great mass of intelligences that are merely mechanical, and that wait for external impulse as to what direction their endeavors shall take. Not without truth, perhaps, may we hypothetically presuppose a special talent in each individual; but this special talent in many men never makes its appearance, because under the circumstances in which it finds itself placed, it fails to find the exciting occasion which shall give them the knowledge of its existence. The majority of mankind are contented with the mechanical impulse which makes them something, and impresses upon them certain characteristics. Talent shows itself by means of the confidence in its own especial productive possibility, which manifests itself as an inclination, or as a strong impulse, to occupy itself with the special object which constitutes the object of its ability. Education has no difficulty in dealing with mechanical natures, because their passivity is

only too ready to follow prescribed patterns. It is more difficult to manage talent, because it lies between mediocrity and genius, and is therefore uncertain, and not only unequal to itself, but also is tossed now too low, now too high; is by turns despondent and overexcited. The general maxim for dealing with it is to spare it no difficulty that lies in the subject to which its. efforts are directed. Genius must be treated much in the same way as talent. The difference consists only in this that genius, with a premonition of its creative power, usually manifests its decision with less doubt for a special province of activity, and, with a more intense thirst for culture, subjects itself more willingly to the demands of instruction. Genius is in its nature the purest self-determination, in that it feels in its own. inner existence the necessity which exists in the object to which it devotes itself; it lives, as it were, in its object. But it can create no valid place for the new idea, which is in it already immediately and subjectively, if it has not united itself to the already existing culture as its objective presupposition; on this ground it thankfully receives instruction.

JOHANN KARL FRIEDRICH ROSENKRANZ.

ON TEACHING MATHEMATICS.

WHAT We contend for, therefore, is that the teacher of mathematics should himself study them not exclusively, but in their relation to philosophy, to logic, to the arts, and to history. In no other way can he have the materials, sphere, and nature of mathematical reasoning so distinctly and sharply defined in his own

mind as not to confound it in the class-room with other departments of education. We contend, further, that in teaching he should not presume that his pupils, even the best of them, will see all the points in which this science touches other sciences and the arts. Unaided, very few indeed will discover any relation between mathematical formulas and logical forms of thought; between the science of optics and the various arts founded upon it. . . . Five minutes' sharp discussion, here and there, by a professor whose mind is full of such thoughts as we have ventured to suggest, will rob the mathematical course of that reputation for dryness and tediousness which it so universally bears. Students will cease to be mere reciters, and become real inquirers. What is so co-ordinated with the other departments of a liberal course of study will be continually brought to the mind, till it is fixed never to be forgotten.

OTIS H. ROBINSON.

THERE is no free-trade measure which will ever lower the price of brains; there is no California of common

sense.

JOHN RUSKIN.

A DESIRABLE FACULTY.

THE faculty of perceiving what powers are required for the production of a thing is the faculty of perceiving excellence, in which men, even of the most cultivated taste, must always be wanting, unless they have added practice to reflection; because none can estimate the power manifested in victory unless they have personally