legislators were aware of this; and the ancient Spartans were celebrated for their symmetry and strength. We look to personal attractions, a fine form; and forget all other things. Well, what is made intelligible to the mental eye from these premises? A fine form is one marred by the officious, busy, meddling hand of art. Spider waists and false calves anon. If people are so satisfied, do not complain of the consequences, even with respect to intellectual powers: but if we regard merely the physical development, something more than money and a fine face must be attended to. Spurzheim well remarks-Some beings seem born for each other, but the longer they are together, the less they like each other. Let the recent Divorce Bill teach us a little more foresight. Every one must know his own powers, and must look for the same powers in another, and then such persons will live in peace. Moreover, the diseases of the body exist, and have an influence on the children; and if every one will be cautious, reflect, and be an independent thinker, he must see that there are certain configurations propagated from parents to offspring; if parents will have small brains, small brains will come. There are talents in all families, but certain faculties are more active in certain families than others. Now, if you see persons, who, in the third generation, have a great tendency to become consumptive, do you think that Moses was right in preventing promiscuous marriages with even the third and fourth generations of such families? The ancient legislators, be it known to the precise and prudish ones, attended to the laws of propagation and degeneration. Some families still intermarry with each other, and what has been the result-a result attempted to be guarded against by the Mosaic law? Degeneration is the consequence. What do you do in nature? Does the naturalist continue to sow the same seed? Does the same tree thrive in the same soil? or does he find it necessary to change the seed and change the soil? Does he not find it necessary to cross the breed of animals, if he wishes to preserve the integrity of the race? But nothing of the kind is attended to in man. It is well known that words are retained in childhood without any ideas being attached to them. Now it is an important point in education to know what degree of exercise to give to each power, not too much, or too little, but just as much as can be borne without fatigue; just as some persons can walk two miles, others only one, or less. The powers being individually more or less active, let them be exercised according to the degree of their natural strength. We are sometimes astonished at the premature genius displayed by some children; the talent is encouraged too rapidly, it reaches speedily to the highest degree, and then as suddenly sinks. The weaker children are, the more precocious; they often die too soon. The object should be to repress the inordinate activity of the talents, and manage the growth, and support the animal powers a little more; and then the future. man will, with a strong body, display powerfully the manifestations of the mind. CHAPTER VIII. EFFECTS OF THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE INFERIOR FACULTIES. GOD'S WORKS THE BEST EPISTLES TO MANKIND. "To be carnally minded, is death." "Little things, on little wings, THE triumph of human passions, burning like the fires in the volcano of human life, still goes on-all imitating nature very badly. There are faces scarcely human, positively brutified out of all trace of intelligence by vice, gin, and want of education. No wonder the ugly faces have the lines turned the wrong way, and all the colours in the wrong places; dinner is eminently destructive, non-conservative, anything but preservative. How often is benevolence misapprehended? your best and only friend villified, contemned, and despised by those who allow the inferior faculties to be over-cultivated. The many prefer viper broth to good mental portable soup: more inconsistent than vegetarians, even though their places in natural history is a little ambiguous, being herbiverous and graminiverous. In our revolutionary movements, when plumbing the depths of profundity, and essaying to discover the first causes of evil, let us not forget innovation is not destruction. Some revolutionary weathercock suggests inquiringly-" Is not the sun revolutionary? The earth spinning on its own axis is very revolutionary. Break a single tooth in the axis of a single wheel, and your watch no longer serves a measure of time:" and then asks-How can the social machine revolve steadily, even to the coming to a dead lock, if you compel men to serve purposes nature never intended them? No clans, clique, or class can any more absolve itself from the duty of reciprocating good offices with other clans, than the earth can detach itself from the gravitating influences of the moon, or its more princely leader the sun. Destroy gravity in the realm of space, destroy social and natural interchanges on earth, and in either case you come to chaos speedily. Correct taste is always true to nature: the beautiful appearance of the earth and heavens,-the regular change of the seasons, the succession of day and night, fill the heart of him who is influenced by it with rapture. The nearer the works of art approach the perfection of nature, the more consonant they are with good taste, and they command lasting and universal admiration. Many are of opinion that our object in life should be to live comfortably, and that there is no need of such furious exertion to thrust serpentine men into straight paths. But these are men who look more to the good of the body than to that of the mind; who reflect not what a glorious thing a mind is that is decked out in all the graces of cultivation. For our part, we cannot see in what respect these low-souled beings who bear about, or rather trail painfully after them, their huge carcasses, differ from the beasts of the field, except so far as this, they speak, and do not low. Their faces are stupid, their look besotted, their lips thick; they are always carnal, looking to earth, and to food; their stomachs are overgrown, which four or five times a-day they take care to replenish. Surely noble souls were made for higher things. We reiterate the query in Household Words-Where are we? Where are those hereditary bondsmen who to free themselves must strike the blow? where is the blow to be struck? and how are the bondsmen to strike it? Above all, may we not with some show of reason inquire-Where are the men who hold up the New Testament as a waybill to Heaven, who point to us in season and out of season the way, the truth, and the life? how it happens they so often fall out by the way, and add new stumbling-blocks and difficulties not to be named, sometimes pursuing the very opposite course they teach their neighbours to tread ? How much longer is rowing one way, and looking another, to continue? Are we to sacrifice our individuality of character? or do our sage monitors intend us to act upon the homoeopathic principle of giving as a cure the cause of the disease? All plans of education will fail, that contravene the order of nature. You pedagogues, who cut and trim your children into shape, you know well enough, that if you trim a rosebud with your penknife, you destroy that upon which you cut your mark. Water the roots, let the wind blow, the sun shine, and the rain fall; remove all that is hurtful, enrich the soil by which the plant is fed; but let the laws of Nature take their course. If you know well that you must act so by a rosebud which you wish to |