dy is even
thought of. Men did not wait till Aristotle had constructed his logic,
to reason." In short, as grammar was made after language, so ought it to
be taught after language: an inference which all who recognise the
relationship between the evolution of the race and that of the
individual, will see to be unavoidable.

Of new practices that have grown up during the decline of these old
ones, the most important is the systematic culture of the powers of
observation. After long ages of blindness, men are at last seeing that
the spontaneous activity of the observing faculties in children has a
meaning and a use. What was once thought mere purposeless action, or
play, or mischief, as the case might be, is now recognised as the
process of acquiring a knowledge on which all after-knowledge is based.
Hence the well-conceived but ill-conducted system of _object-lessons_.
The saying of Bacon, that physics is the mother of the sciences, has
come to have a meaning in education. Without an accurate acquaintance
with the visible and tangible properties of things, our conceptions must
be erroneous, our inferences fallacious, and our operations
unsuccessful. "The education of the senses neglected, all after
education partakes of a drowsiness, a haziness, an insufficiency, which
it is impossible to cure." Indeed, if we consider it, we shall find that
exhaustive observation is an element in all great success. It is not to
artists, naturalists, and men of science only, that it is needful; it is
not only that the physician depends on it for the correctness of his
diagnosis, and that to the engineer it is so important that some years
in the workshop are prescribed for him; but we may see that the
philosopher, also, is fundamentally one who _observes_ relationships of
things which others had overlooked, and that the poet, too, is one who
_sees_ the fine facts in nature which all recognise when pointed out,
but did not before remark. Nothing requires more to be insisted on than
that vivid and complete impressions are all-essential. No sound fabric
of wisdom can be woven out of a rotten raw-material.

While the old method of presenting truths in the abstract has been
falling out of use, there has been a corresponding adoption of the new
method of presenting them in the concrete. The rudimentary facts of
exact science are now being learnt by direct intuition, as textures, and
tastes, and colours are learnt. Employing the ball-frame for f