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promises for the future. It is pleasant then to have some flowery path open, where we can enter with our pupils and feel that we can linger there not only without harm, but with the highest profit. Such an opening does the study of nature present, for the delight and profit of both teacher and pupil. And to the examination of this inviting but much neglected pathway in the educational course, I ask your attention at this time. In acting for the present hour the part of a guide, I trust to the landscape through which we pass to supply objects of interest, that need only to be pointed out. And I shall beg the privilege of all guides, to repeat to you the story which I have told to many before.

To drop all metaphor, I propose to speak to you to-day on the Relations of Natural History to Education.

It is the lot of most things that are valuable to be at one time despised and neglected, and at another time to be over-valued. They thus, in both cases, fail of their proper and highest use, until the public mind has oscillated from side to side, and finally settled in its true place. And nowhere has there been more extreme and continued oscillations than in the great and important work of education. We have had all sorts of systems and methods, each claiming perfection, and denouncing the fogyism that would not at a glance appreciate their excellences and superiority.

We have had first one department and then another put forward as the only true basis of a thorough education. And if we visit our different institutions of the highest grade, we shall be struck with the different rank which various studies occupy in these schools that claim to send forth their students liberally educated. In one, we shall find the classics so prominent, that nothing else seems to the student essential to the finished scholar; in another mathematics; in another natural history. So marked is this, that it is not difficult to recognize a particular style of education in the graduates of the different colleges as they come together in our professional schools. While they have much in common, and may be equally well educated, on the whole, it does not take long to discover what department of study was really the great moulding and educating power in their various Alma Maters. I suppose this can never be entirely corrected, because a study will have prominence in proportion to the power of the man who presents it. But it is evident that the rank of these studies has not been agreed upon by educated men. In one institution a particular study is petted, and in another it is treated like an intruder, compelled to take what happens to be left by the rest. This is emphatically true of natural history. It was once hardly mentioned in our list of studies. It is now a favorite, and is often thrust into places where it has no busi

ness, and where it must fail to meet the expectation of its friends. Although natural history is my department, it is not my hobby. It is a very important study, but not the most important, nor will it take the place of any other study in the educational course. It must come in, if it come at all, as an auxiliary, and not as a successor, having turned another out of office. The fact is, a teacher who has a method or a study as a hobby is not fit to direct the education of the young. An educated man may make use of such a person as a teacher. But the student ought to be educated in all directions, and this high work the man of one idea is entirely unequal to. To be of any use in the work of education, he must be directed by some mind of broader views. And yet, from their prominence in some special department, these men of one idea are often selected as educators, regardless of this fatal defect in their character. The harm they have done is very great, while they might have accomplished only good, had they been kept in the proper place and under the proper direction of well-balanced minds. It has been well said, that there is no destructive agency more powerful than a doctor with a hygienic hobby, and there is certainly no destroyer of mental power like a teacher with an educational hobby.

My object to-day is to point out the uses and abuses of natural history in the work of education, and thus

protect it from its enemies and injudicious friends, from whom it is really most in danger. Its enemies are those who are sneering at "bugology," or who lift their hands in pious horror because some bold speculator or lover of notoriety thinks geology contradicts the Bible. Its injudicious friends are those who would throw away the old foundations of education, — the classics and pure mathematics, and substitute the study of rocks because they contain mines, and fossil fishes and polyphs simply because the student has a taste for them, or grasses and butterflies instead of Greek roots and equations of the higher powers. They would consign Horace and Euclid to everlasting oblivion, and install Cuvier and Linnæus in their places.

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NATURAL HISTORY is the study of this earth as one mass, and of every object upon its surface and within its crust. It is therefore the study of those objects that every moment make their impression on the senses the bent and broken strata and the granite mountain on which they rest, the strange forms of ancient life inpressed upon those strata, - the crystals that gleam in the vein and geode, the moss and lichen on the rock,—the algae that fringe the ocean's edge, the countless forms of grass and flowers that carpet the earth, the trees that, rising in serried ranks, stretch in forests from the northern home of the birch and fir to the torrid air that moves the

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feathery palm, the thousands of insects that flit by day and night, and birds of every hue, the monarch of the wood and flood, all the varied forms on the land and in the sea! Every glance of the eye takes in enough for the study of a life-time, and in no place on this earth are these objects wanting. Surely, in the abundance and the constancy of its materials, no department of study can be superior to this. But the question that naturally arises with the teacher is this, What is the value of all this material in education, and how can I avail myself of this abundance constantly within my reach?

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To answer this question fully, we must consider the rank of man in nature, and his relations to the external world. And why, let me ask, do we affirm that man is the masterpiece of creation, and that as an animal he is facile princeps? The eagle has a more piercing eye; the lion can tear him limb from limb, or the anaconda crush him in a moment. hound can follow his prey where every sense of man would fail. The tribes around him are clothed by nature: he left by nature perhaps among the most defenceless against the elements and other enemies. What, then, is the evidence of his high rank in the animal kingdom? And, leaving for the present his moral nature, and considering him merely as an animal, I answer, that his high rank depends upon the number and perfection of his relations to the exter

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