generally distasteful to the young. Do not enlighten them upon the subject at present. As they advance, repeat to them (it would lose half its interest if read, instead of repeated,) some interesting anecdote with a good moral, and require them to write it from recollection, and present it at the next recitation. As soon as they can parse a few words, give them a sentence or phrase upon the blackboard, to be parsed on the succeeding day. This method may be continued till they are able to parse from a text-book. If this course is pursued, we are confident that there will be no lack of interest among boys or girls, and no need of resorting to various methods, such as choosing sides, to excite emulation, as they will study from the love of it, which is far the better motive.

A word upon Writing, and I have done. Some would not have children learn to write before they are ten or twelve years of age. Much is lost by this delay, and it is doubted whether anything is gained. We have seen children who commenced writing before they were eight years of age, and who, before they were ten, could write a page of which a young lady of eighteen need not be ashamed. And has not such a child a decided advantage in learning spelling, composition, &c., over one who never handles a pen till twelve years of age? Sometimes a child becomes so much interested in writing, as to be reluctant to leave it at the given time. If possible, take advantage of such stimulus, taking care that the energies be not too much exhausted. It will be found that more improvement may be made in one hour at such times, than in many hours when the task is reluctantly performed.

If more has here been said of thoroughness and correctness, than of ease, in methods of instruction, it is because it is believed that no method will in the end prove easy, that does not combine these two essential requisites.

THE CULTURE OF IMAGINATION.

BY REV. JAMES PYCROFT, B. A., TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.

IMAGINATION is to the mind what moral sense is to the heart. Without moral sense, mere reason and cold calculations of expediency might rudely join the members of society together, but would never nicely articulate or cement them. The present would owe no duty to the future, no allegiance to the past; man would forget that he held all worldly things on the noblest feudal tenure, for the homage and service of the Lord of all. Every generation, literally "nati consumere fruges," would greedily devour the crops, not generously improve the soil. So, without

imagination, reason might show abstract proprieties, but it never would temper the "utile dulci," the useful with the attractive: "Non satis est pulcra esse poemata dulcia sunto."

It might show us the fair proportions, but not the loveliness of nature; it might assert, for instance, the benefit of a home, but it would not furnish the thousand silken ties, that law of moral attraction that makes free men the willing serfs of their native soil. It would limit our thoughts to the present; there would be nothing to make man blend in feeling and sympathy with those who had gone before him, nothing to ensure his harmony with those who should come after. All the monuments of by-gone days, whether raised by the devotion and gratitude of man, or wildly strowed by nature, as landmarks of the plain or bulwarks of the ocean, would speak to cold and senseless hearts; they would cease to aid the unison of a nation's sentiments, by touching the same chords in the breasts of all; and, to have walked in the same deep solitudes, to have shuddered at the same chasms, to have felt the spray and been deafened by the roar of the same cataracts, all these incidents would cease to add the slightest charm to the sympathy of man for man.

Such being the reality, and such the sphere of the imaginative powers, how are we to cultivate them?

All exercise of the imagination is not calculated either to please or to improve us. The pleasure of Taste, or of the perception of the Beautiful or the Sublime, I consider has been abundantly proved to result from the imagination when employed only about objects capable of suggesting emotions or affections, as pity, terror, awe, cheerfulness. And since imagination only combines old forms and scenes in new arrangements, the first part of its culture will consist in storing the mind with matter for such combinations; we may also call attention to peculiar objects calculated to produce the emotions of Taste, pointing out peculiar parts most suited to call up pleasing associations. This is precisely the part that the Poet performs; he points out beauties in nature that we never saw before; though we before felt a general effect from peculiar scenes, we never, without the Poet's aid perhaps, discerned the peculiar points from which it proceeded. By drawing more attention to these peculiarities, he increases the impression, and invests the scenes with new interest, from the associations with which he connects them. The Poet acts like a guide, to point out objects of pleasing interest; and many a dull traveller has learned more from his guidebook than from his own observation. Just such a guide will a master of Taste be to his pupil in literature; he may draw at tention to cadence and to rhythm, and also to the power of similar sounds to cause similar emotions; he will show what part

of a fine passage is the most effective, identify a similar cause with similar impression in other lines. Let him set before his pupil poetry expressive of tender feelings, of grief and pity, he will soon teach the suitableness of sound to sense, and of the sense to one class of emotions; the pupil will also learn to analyze and see the points of resemblance in the several passages. Let him practise the same with a heroic or a cheerful strain, and, according to the peculiar temperament of the pupil, he will call forth a sensibility to the charms of each. You cannot create taste, but you may draw one forth. Natural sense is insufficient for the true worship even of the works of God; we want the revelation of science to add authority and completion. From Education we seek not only a shrewd and subtle mind, but an understanding heart. This even heathen wisdom knew, and taught, that this taste for right grows from habituation to right things; as it does, of an insufficient kind and in a very small extent. So also accustom youth to those subjects which pass current with the man of literary taste, and you will develop the understanding of the mind, that is, the feeling, the intellectual as well as the moral taste. Paley reminds us of the merciful arrangement that alone forbids every note in the grove to be discord to the ear, every leaf to be dazzling to the eye; he might have added the merciful permission that man enjoys to bring the delicate feelings, to which these organs are mere ministers, more nearly in unison and harmony with the subdued tints and blending lines of the landscape and the mellowed music of the vocal grove; he might have added the yet nobler privilege of so storing the mind with a knowledge of all the subtle links in the slender chain connecting moral effects with physical causes, that these objects can call forth the imagination to soar into a sphere far beyond the scope of reasoning, and remind us of our dependence on the God who made them all.

On this branch of education an extract from the Biographia Literaria, of Coleridge, will be most in conformity with my rule of preferring experience to speculation. The master to whom allusion is made was the Rev. James Bowyer, many years Head Master of Christ's Hospital.

"At school I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid; he habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and, above all, the chaster poems of Ca tullus, not only with the Roman poets of the (so called) silver and brazen ages, but even those of the Augustan era; and, on grounds of plain sense and universal logic, to see and assert the superiority of the former, in the truth and nativeness both

1

of their thoughts and diction. At the same time we were studying the Greek tragic poets he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons, and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learned from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more, subtle, more complex, and dependent on more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets,' he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.' And I well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose, and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original

text.

"In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force or dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, lyre, muse, muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene, were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? harp? lyre? pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, muse? your nurse's daughter you mean! Pierian spring? oh! ay! the cloister pump, I suppose!' Nay, certain introductions, similes, and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdictions. Among the similes there was, I remember, that of the Manchineal fruit, as suiting equally well with too many subjects, in which, however, it yielded the palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was it ambition? Alexander and Clytus! Flattery? Alexander and Clytus! Anger, drunkenness, pride, friendship, ingratitude, late repentance? Still, still, Alexander and Clytus. At length the praises of agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that had Alexander been holding the plough he would not have run his Clytus friend through with a spear, this tried and serviceable old friend was banished by public edict, in 'secula seculorum.'

Dr. Bowyer was evidently a master worthy such a pupil, and exemplifies my position that the book or the subject of a boy's study depends for its character and for its effect almost entirely on the master. "It is the command which he obtains, the confidence which he inspires, the relative importance which he attaches to the different branches of study; his own taste, feeling, judgment, which are reflected in the answering mirrors of the young minds around him. In him resides the power of convert

ing the dry and irksome task into an exercise of the imagination, of the memory, and of the reason, cheerfully and emulatively, instead of heavily and reluctantly performed."

SCIENCE OF POPULAR HUMAN BIOLOGY.

BY DR. LAMBERT.

Irs philosophy, utility, and the method of teaching it most

advantageously.

{

Professional.

Vegetable.

Sensory Ganglia, Nerves, Organs of Sense.
Emotory Ganglia.

Motory Ganglia, Nerves, Muscles, Skeleton.

Sympathetic ganglia and

Circulatory apparatus.

nerves.
Rub- Clothe.

WORLD.

I. THE PROPRIETY OF THE NAME.

Biology, (bios, life; logos, a discourse,) as the derivation signifies, is the name of that department of science which treats upon life. Things which exhibit it may be arranged under three heads: Vegetable, Animal, and Human. The last class may be considered under seven sub-divisions. But the study of four is of special utility to the professional man only, while of the third a complete, and of the first two a limited knowledge is essential to the highest welfare of any person. They may therefore be appropriately called popular. By observations and experiments science gathers facts, then compares them and deduces inferences, thereby determining what results will be produced under given circumstances, and how to modify circumstances so as to produce desirable results.

It follows that each word of the above caption is a nucleus of several important ideas, and that the entire caption is a precise