children must nowadays be offered
free instruction in agriculture; because the public, and especially the
urban public, believes that by disseminating better methods of tillage,
better seed, and appropriate manures, the yield of the farms can be
improved in quality and multiplied in quantity. In regard to all
material interests, the free peoples are acting on the principle that
science is the knowledge of most worth. Spencer's doctrine of natural
consequences in place of artificial penalties, his view that all young
people should be taught how to be wise parents and good citizens, and
his advocacy of instruction in public and private hygiene, lie at the
roots of many of the philanthropic and reformatory movements of the day.

On the whole, Herbert Spencer has been fortunate among educational
philosophers. He has not had to wait so long for the acceptance of his
teachings as Comenius, Montaigne, or Rousseau waited. His ideas have
been floated on a prodigious tide of industrial and social change, which
necessarily involved wide-spread and profound educational reform.

This introduction deals with Spencer's four essays on education; but in
the present volume are included three other famous essays written by him
during the same period (1854-59) which produced the essays on education.
All three are germane to the educational essays, because they deal with
the general law of human progress, with the genesis of that science
which Spencer thought to be the knowledge of most worth, and with the
origin and function of music, a subject which he maintained should play
an important part in any scheme of education.

CHARLES W. ELIOT.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS. _The Proper Sphere of Government_, 1843; _Social Statics_, 1850;
_Theory of Population_ (_Westminster Review_), April 1852; _The
Development of Hypothesis_ (_The Leader_), 20th March 1852; _The
Ultimate Laws of Physiology_ (_National Review_), April 1857; _Essays,
Scientific, Political and Speculative_, 2 vols., 1858-63; _Education_,
1861; _A System of Synthetic Philosophy_ (12 vols., 1862-96), made up as
follows: _First Principles_, 1862; _Principles of Biology_, 2 vols.,
1864-7; _Principles of Psychology_, 2 vols., 1870-2; _Principles of
Sociology_, 3 vols., 1876-96; _Ceremonial Institutions_, 1879;
_Principles of Morality_, 2 vols., 1879-93 (vol. i, part I published as
_Data of Ethics_, 1879; part 4 as _Just