The Sun.
London, England, 1869-12-22 00:00:00

LONDON, IVEDAWSDAY, DEC. 22, 1839.

WHEN our children come to be grown men they
will look back with pity upon their fathers, who
were condemned to spend all the best years of youth
in learning dead languages and mathematics. These

aro very good things in their way, but the absurdity
has been that they have been considered the only
means of education, the only objects worthy the
attention of teachers and pupils. Considering the
large number of our contemporaries who, having
grown up, and having engaged in the duties
of life, never open a classical work,
never solve an equation, it is manifest
that not only have these subjects proved useless in
fitting them for their callings, but they have also
failed as recreations. Thirty, twenty, nay, only ten
years ago the whole world of Nature had no exist-
ence so far as school teaching was concerned. Boys
were taught to make Greek lambics and to master
conic sections ; but no one told them anything of the
sun and the stars over their heads, of the flowers
and the rocks beneath their feet, of the air which
they breathed, of the myriad forms of animal life in
I all its stages, from the sponge and upwards through
the microzoon, the mollusc, the inferior mammal up
to man, " the roof and crown of things." A
lad was considered grossly ignorant if he were un-
acquainted with the names of all HonAcE's mis-
tresses and the relations of the sine and the cosine,
but he was not expected to know anything of the age
or structure of the earth or the parts of his own body.
Within the last ten years science has been introduced
into the curriculum of our public schools. The result
we shall not see at present, but we may partly guess
it. If, in spite of neglect on the part of educationists,
of suspicion on the part of religionists, scientific
1 knowledge has made the progress that it has
made, what may we not expect when scientific
research is no longer confined to the few,
but is shared by the many ? Hitherto only one
man here and there has devoted himself to this kind
of knowledge, and he has had to devote years of man-
hood to acquiring the first principles which might
have been imparted to him in boyhood. What loss of
time and waste of power will be saved when science

is as much a part of every boy's education as the
lEneid of VIRGIL and the first six books of EUCLID
have been hitherto.

In the present state of education, when science is
struggling for recognition, everyone who does
anything to popularise science is a public benefactor.
For this reason we notice in our leading columns the
English edition of M. POUCIIET'S most beautiful
volume, " The rniverse, or the Infinitely Great and
the Infinitely Little," which has just been published
by Messrs. 13LAcKiE and SON. A better Christmas
gift book for an intelligent boy or girl we cannot
imagine. Men like Canon KINGSLEY have lately
been endeavouring to impart science to very
young children under the form of parables whose
meaning is, to say the least, somewhat recondite.
M. POI:CHET has no need of imaginary "water-
babies " or Mesdames How and When, in order to
interest his readers in the marvels of the world
around them. These are miracles, thowvh repeated
every day; "fairy tales of science," though all sober
facts. It is not everyone who can afford to bestow
this sumptuous book even upon the most hopeful
Young student. Let us, then, select a few—they are
only a very few—of the facts which our Author tells.
Thereby we may induce both teachers and pupils to
ask themselves if there is not in science a world
worth exploring.
Looking at the moon, which has just been shining
so brightly to enliven the longest nights of the year,
we see a world in ruins. The silver orb, that
emblem of calm serenity, that luminary which has so
1
often shed its mellow light on whispering lovers, is a
frightful wreck. " Probably," -says M. Pot:CHET,
"no star was ever so horribly torn by the fury of