which they are placed. An average capacity for this purpose is possessed by all persons who are not mentally defective. No doubt the acquisitions will be made in different degrees, according to aptness to learn and retentive power to remember; but all will gain something, and the general intelligence will be advanced. Ulterior education will take its character from the line in life which it is intended the pupil shall follow. This ought, of course, to be chosen according to the particular bent of mind-in other words, the relative power of particular faculties.

Are FEMALES to be educated to the same extent as males? My answer is by another question-Why not? The faculties must determine the education, and, unless it can be shown that these differ in the male and female human being, the question is answered in the affirmative. Nay, it concerns society even more that those who are the first imparters of knowledge and trainers of faculties should be themselves well-informed and thoroughly trained. But I would go further-I would have the two sexes educated together. While no evil can result from this-for they never can be more safely together-much good in mutual encouragement and refinement will be attained. The female pupils as well as the males will, moreover, have the benefit of the best male instruction, females assisting and communicating to their own sex needle-work and other strictly female branches. This plan has been pursued, in Lancasterian and other large schools of both sexes, with marked

success.

Last of all, it will be asked, is it intended that a complete elementary education shall be given to all classes, including the WORKING CLASSES ?—It is so intended. An elementary education, equally extensive in its quantity and excellent in its quality, should be given to the child of the day-labourer as to that of the peer; and till the time shall come that this is realized, the condition of the working classes will not be improved, for this alone will enable them to improve their own condition. But, it will be replied, how can the working classes continue their children at school till they are fourteen ?—They need, and will have, their labour earlier. In the unfrugal and intemperate habits which want of education renders so prevalent among that class, every aid to the scanty means is laid hold of eagerly by the half-starving families, and the labour of the very infant is put in requisition. This is a most injurious course, arising from a deep-seated social vice. The young should not be engaged in regular labour till fourteen: neither their, muscular frame nor nervous energy is in the required condition. The

parents ought, by their own exertions-so far assisted by their children as in no respect to interfere with their school hours, by far the most important to them, and the best preparative for future prosperity and happiness-to be perfectly competent to support the whole family; if they are not, by all their exertions, and by the utmost frugality and temperance, there is social disease somewhere, but there is none that may not be discovered and removed. I am merely pointing out the best course, not modifying my views to meet prejudices, or giving way to prevailing errors. No child, till fourteen, ought to be for a less period in school every day than four hours; and there would remain sufficient time for that degree of moderate and wholesome labour which the parents ought reasonably to demand.

The silly objections to over-educating the working classes, as it is called, are now only urged by the uneducated. Instead of indisposing them to labour, the great lesson which a knowledge of man and his relation to Creation will teach them, that labour is no evil and no degradation, and, above all, that it is called for by Nature and necessity, will render them more willing as well as more intelligent labourers, will induce them to abridge their own hours of labour, and employ their leisure in the enjoyment of the superior faculties, intellectual and moral, which would not have been given them if they had not been intended for human happiness.* Some vital changes in social institutions are called for to allow an improved education to produce all its beneficial effects; but these are changes from ignorant and, therefore, hurtful errors to cover truth, and truth is ever attended with blessings in its practical application. Education will facilitate those changes even by that partial diffu sion which, in spite of vicious institutions, will follow from a natural over the established system. There will long be a force disturbing the progression, drawing back the machine, but there will be two steps onward for one retrograde; gain will be made on the whole, and in a future and more favoured generation it will be all gain together.

I must reserve the vital subject of the TRAINING OF TEACHERS of proper normal establishments-for another number of the

• This is precisely the state to which we should like to see the labouring classes brought,—namely, to a proper sense of their own rights and import. ance. To such a condition they will assuredly come, and the arrival of it will be materially hastened by the spread of knowledge amongst all classes, despite the narrow-minded opposition which vainly endeavours to maintain arbitrary superiority.-EDs.

Analyst. I would only here remark that the immensely improved elementary education advocated in the foregoing pages will call teachers of very superior qualifications into that field of labour, and elevate the character of that most useful class of men to the rank it ought to hold, namely, that of a fourth learned profession. It is despised now, because, from its intellectual poverty, it is not worthy of a higher estimation.

I have thus sketched, much more briefly than the important subject merits, a sYSTEM OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. A plan for its realization-in the establishment of a minister of public instruction, a board of commissioners, subordinate boards, normal schools, and an infant and juvenile school in every parish of the empiremay yet afford matter for much future discussion.

[Our thanks are due to our talented correspondent for the able and impartial manner in which he has treated the important subject of the above paper. Were views such as these generally admitted, and universally practised, the benefit to future ages would be incalculable. We feel convinced, with Mr. Simpson, that schools, on however good a general plan, must fail in their objects unless the teacher has a thorough knowledge of human nature in other words, unless he be a good phrenologist. His learning may be great, his intentions good, but still he may fail as an instructor; and we hold that schools and instructors will be alike useless and pernicious as long as any one set of faculties is cultivated to the partial or entire exclusion of all others. In fine, to be aware what are the primitive faculties that belong to man, and hence to know what studies are fitted for him, PHRENOLOGY must be our guide, our sure and never-failing instructor.-EDs.]

REMARKABLE PLANTS FOUND GROWING IN THE VICINITY OF BIRMINGHAM IN THE YEAR 1836.

"Qualis apes æstate novâ per florea rura

Exercet sub sole labor."-VIRG., Æneid, lib. i., 430.

As one of the objects of the Analyst is to register and make known to the public the personal observations of individuals in the various branches of Natural History, perhaps a few notices of the habitats of some of the less common of our native plants found growing, during the year 1836, in the neighbourhood of Birming

espe

ham, may not be without interest to many of its readers, and cially to those who, in common with the writer, are fond of the study of indigenous Botany.*

I need scarcely observe that the extensive changes which have taken place in Birmingham and its environs during the last forty years, or since Dr. Withering published the last edition of his Systematic Arrangement of British Plants, make it an object of some interest to ascertain which of the localities of plants that gentleman's long residence near this town enabled him to point out still exist, and which modern improvements have destroyed.

Birmingham Heath and Washwood Heath-where, in Dr. Withering's time, the rambles of the botanist were rewarded by Hypocharis glabra, Vaccinium oxycoccos, or Eriophorum vaginalum -now exist as heaths only in name. Houses, canals, and the murky steam engine, cover the place where "once the wild flower smiled;" the busy hum of men has long succeeded "the buzzing wing of the drowsy Dorr," even in spots as yet unconscious of the march of bricks and mortar. The labours of agriculture have swept away almost all the gleanings of the botanist: the Common Potato (Solanum tuberosum) now occupies, far more profitably, the place of its noxious congeners, Solanum dulcamara and S. nigrum (the two Nightshades); while the slender Sea Cabbage (Brassica oleracea) has been doomed, "'neath the gardener's plastic art," to undergo more metamorphoses than ever Proteus tried or Ovid sang.

The crowding host of Savoy, Cauliflower, and " Cabbages of low degree," up to that greatest among the Anakim of culinary vegetables, "the Cæsarean Cow Cabbage," oppress the groaning soil,—

"In square battalion rang'd, line after line
Successive;"

It may be as well to notice that the united committee of the Birmingham Botanical and Warwickshire Floral Societies, at a meeting held in the early part of the present year, offered a prize medal for "the best hortus siccus of native plants, correctly named, with their local habitation, collected within ten miles of Birmingham, from the 1st of August, 1835, to the 1st of August, 1836." Having myself previously formed the design of botanizing the neighbourhood of Birmingham, this notice was an additional excitement to exertion; and I was enabled to collect, though the season was on the whole an unfavourable one, about three hundred and twenty phænogamous plants and ferns, for which collection the botanical committee awarded me the prize medal.

and every Iclod of earth within a circle of not less than twenty miles in circumference, if it can do nothing better, must "maintain its Cabbage."

Even the "stubborn glebe" of Moseley Common has been partially subdued by the ploughshare, and waving fields of grain proclaim the victory; and the gouty pedestrian who starts from the centre of the busy circle to take a country walk, and enjoy the wildness of Nature, long before he regains the haven of "his own elbow chair," will find that it is "no joke."

But, great as is the change around us, it is a change which not even the most enthusiastic lover of Nature can for a moment behold with regret; it has probably promoted the happiness of thousands of human beings; and if the man who has caused one blade of grass to grow where none grew before, may justly be said to have conferred a substantial benefit on his species; surely the numerous agricultural improvements-to say nothing of the commercialwhich, during the last half century, have been made in the neighbourhood of Birmingham, cannot be contemplated without feelings of the highest pleasure.

As, however, the obvious consequence of this alteration of the natural face of the country has been to render useless for the purpose of reference eight out of every ten of the localities assigned to plants by Dr. Withering and the authors of the Botanist's Guide, I trust no apology is necessary for attempting to point out to the collecting botanist the "local habitations" of some of the rarer native plants found growing wild in the vicinity of Birmingham during the last summer; and I shall notice each species in the order of the natural arrangement, as simplified in the recently published Catalogue of British Plants, by Professor Henslow, of Cambridge; without, however, following in all cases the titles or terminology of the orders as adopted in that work.*

DIVISION I-VASCULARES, OR COTYLEDONEÆ.

CLASS I.-DICOTYLEDONES.

ORDER, RANUNCULACEA.-Thalictrum flavum, Yellow Thalick; bank of the Tame, below Hamstead Mill; Perry Barr. Anemone nemorosa, Wood Anemone; a field at Upper Saltley, crossed by a

A Catalogue of British Plants, arranged according to the Natural System, with the Synonyms of De Candolle, Smith, Lindley, and Hooker. By the Rev. J. S. Henslow, M.A., Professor of Botany in the University of Cambridge. Second Edition, pp. 61. Cambridge, 1835.