ns, may be met on its own ground. It will by and by be
found that a knowledge of the laws of life is more important than any
other knowledge whatever--that the laws of life underlie not only all
bodily and mental processes, but by implication all the transactions of
the house and the street, all commerce, all politics, all morals--and
that therefore without a comprehension of them, neither personal nor
social conduct can be rightly regulated. It will eventually be seen too,
that the laws of life are essentially the same throughout the whole
organic creation; and further, that they cannot be properly understood
in their complex manifestations until they have been studied in their
simpler ones. And when this is seen, it will be also seen that in aiding
the child to acquire the out-of-door information for which it shows so
great an avidity, and in encouraging the acquisition of such information
throughout youth, we are simply inducing it to store up the raw material
for future organisation--the facts that will one day bring home to it
with due force, those great generalisations of science by which actions
may be rightly guided.

The spreading recognition of drawing as an element of education is one
among many signs of the more rational views on mental culture now
beginning to prevail. Once more it may be remarked that teachers are at
length adopting the course which Nature has perpetually been pressing on
their notice. The spontaneous attempts made by children to represent the
men, houses, trees, and animals around them--on a slate if they can get
nothing better, or with lead-pencil on paper if they can beg them--are
familiar to all. To be shown through a picture-book is one of their
highest gratifications; and as usual, their strong imitative tendency
presently generates in them the ambition to make pictures themselves
also. This effort to depict the striking things they see is a further
instinctive exercise of the perceptions--a means whereby still greater
accuracy and completeness of observation are induced. And alike by
trying to interest us in their discoveries of the sensible properties of
things, and by their endeavours to draw, they solicit from us just that
kind of culture which they most need.

Had teachers been guided by Nature's hints, not only in making drawing a
part of education but in choosing modes of teaching it, they would have
done still better than they have done. What is that the child first
tries to