in any individual instance, which make our scientific men, as a
class, the wholesomest and pleasantest of companions abroad, and at
home the most blameless, simple, and cheerful, in all domestic
relations; men for the most part of manful heads, and yet of
childlike hearts, who have turned to quiet study, in these late
piping times of peace, an intellectual health and courage which
might have made them, in more fierce and troublous times, capable
of doing good service with very different instruments than the
scalpel and the microscope.

I have been sketching an ideal: but one which I seriously
recommend to the consideration of all parents; for, though it be
impossible and absurd to wish that every young man should grow up a
naturalist by profession, yet this age offers no more wholesome
training, both moral and intellectual, than that which is given by
instilling into the young an early taste for outdoor physical
science. The education of our children is now more than ever a
puzzling problem, if by education we mean the development of the
whole humanity, not merely of some arbitrarily chosen part of it.
How to feed the imagination with wholesome food, and teach it to
despise French novels, and that sugared slough of sentimental
poetry, in comparison with which the old fairy-tales and ballads
were manful and rational; how to counteract the tendency to
shallowed and conceited sciolism, engendered by hearing popular
lectures on all manner of subjects, which can only be really learnt
by stern methodic study; how to give habits of enterprise,
patience, accurate observation, which the counting-house or the
library will never bestow; above all, how to develop the physical
powers, without engendering brutality and coarseness - are
questions becoming daily more and more puzzling, while they need