CHAPTER XV.
BERNE—SWISS FOUNTAINS—ZURICH—MUSEUM OF RELICS FROM ANCIENT LAKE-VILLAGES—BAUR EN VILLE—RÉCOLTE DES VOYAGEURS—C’EST UN PAUVRE PAYS
Beyond compare, of all things best
Is water.—Pindar.
September 19.—We spent the day at Vevey. Vineyards were everywhere along the sides of the railway. It is pleasing to note the care with which the vine, that peerless gift of Nature’s bounty to man, is cultivated; how the land is terraced and fenced, and how scrupulously clean it is kept. This indicates the value of the land that is adapted to its growth, and is in keeping with the character of the gift. Had a swim in the lake. My first plunge into it was thirty-one years ago, on returning to Geneva from a walking expedition to Chamouni.
On the following day (dates are no longer needed, for our excursion was now ended, and I was returning home, on my own hook) I started for Zurich by way of Berne. The country, as seen from the rails, looks as if it were fertile, and carefully cultivated. The three points in which, to the eye of a passer-by, their agriculture appears to differ most from ours are, first, the greater cleanness of the land. I know no farmers—of course there are many exceptions, and notably where there is steam-ploughing—who cultivate so many weeds as the famous British farmer. Secondly, their not giving to their land so much manure as we do. One, however, may be mistaken on this point. And, thirdly, in the absence of live stock from the fields. I understood that the price of land is very high: the figures given to me were higher than the price of equally good agricultural land would come to here at home.
Since I was last at Berne, it appeared to me that a great deal had been done in the way of extension and improvement. The place has the look of having thriven much, and of still continuing to thrive. A few years ago a neighbouring stream was diverted, and made to flow through the heart of the city. It supplies, in its new course, several copious public fountains. These are sculptured and decorated, as if the people loved the water, and wished to heighten their pleasure at seeing, and welcoming, and using it. One of the most pleasing sights in a Swiss town—it is the same down to the smallest village—is this abundance of good water with which it is supplied. It is ever in sight, for every use of man and beast. In our English cities there was no want—the omission is still far from having been set right—that was so conspicuously neglected. And this, though an abundant supply of good water is not only a first necessity of life, but equally so of civilisation. The reasons of our negligence, in a matter of so much importance, are not far to seek. As the Swiss manage their own affairs, their first care is to provide themselves with what all need; and, evidently, the first thing of this kind to be attended to is the water-supply. Their system, too, of political, and, as respects the land, to some extent, of possessive equality, has engendered a sentiment of philanthropy; not of the charitable, or condescending, kind, but a general desire in all to attend to the rights, the wants, and the well-being of all. It would be distressing to all alike to find that any one had not as much water as he could require, supplied to him in the handiest way, in which it might be possible for the opportunities, and combined resources of the community to effect this.
Different influences have been at work amongst ourselves. The community has not managed its own affairs in such a manner, and on such a footing, as that the wants and interests of the humbler, and more helpless, classes should be as much felt, and attended to, as the wants and interests of the well-to-do classes, and of those who are able to take care of themselves. This has hindered the importance, or rather the necessity, of an abundant supply of water presenting itself, generally, to men’s intelligence, and conscience, as really one of the primal cares of the community. This has not been one of the points which town councils, and rate-payers (perhaps because they were rate-payers) have seen in a proper light. There has been something which has stood in the way of their seeing it at all. Then there have been influential bodies in every community, whose interests lay in an opposite direction. I mean the water companies, and the manufacturers, and retailers of intoxicating liquors. You could hardly expect them to have seen very distinctly that it was the duty, and the interest, of the community to provide everywhere, and for everybody, a visible, constant, gratuitous supply of fresh, running, sparkling water. Nor, indeed, could the government of the country be expected to be more sharp-sighted in this matter than the local administrations; for it had to collect an enormous revenue for the purpose of enabling it to pay the interest of an enormous debt. There was, therefore, something to indispose it, also, to supply a want, the supply of which must inevitably reduce the number of millions it was collecting, every year, on the production and consumption of intoxicating drinks. These are the reasons which have issued in the fact, that water has been kept out of, or not brought into, the sight of the inhabitants of our English towns, and villages. It was not because water could be supplied on easier terms in Switzerland than in this country, because we find as much attention paid to its abundant free supply in some other continental countries, for instance in Italy, as in Switzerland.
Everyone who will give the subject a little thought will come to the conclusion, that it is this neglect which is mainly answerable for some of the preventable maladies, and for much of the drunkenness, and so of the misery and crime, which afflicts our working classes. The efforts that have been made of late years to set up drinking-fountains in London, and in many of our towns, is an indication that in this supreme matter our eyes are beginning to be opened. When they are completely opened, a public, free, inexhaustible supply of the purest possible water will be the first care of every community, great and small; and drinking-fountains will, everywhere, offer an alternative to the gin-palace and public-house, and in winter as well as in summer.
To the reflecting mind, the overflowing sparkling fountains of the Swiss towns are very pleasing objects. So, too, to the natural eye, and ear, are the brawling stream in every valley, and the trickling rills on every hill-side. There is water, water, everywhere; and every drop to drink. This the pedestrian, at all events, will appreciate; and when the sun is bright, he will be thankful for it a dozen times a day.
At Zurich I was much interested by the public collection of objects, found at the bottom of the lake, and on the site of the old lake-villages. Herodotus mentions a powerful Thracian people, who dwelt in a similarly constructed city on Lake Prasias. The Irish and Scotch cranoges are also instances of ancient structures of the same kind. To this day, in New Guinea and Borneo, and in Africa, we find water-towns still inhabited. In all these cases it was the same necessity, that of providing against sudden attacks from more powerful neighbours, that suggested the idea. And if we may refer to the same class, the lagoon-protected infancy of Venice, then the Queen of the Adriatic, with her St. Mark’s, and her palaces, owes her existence to the idea, from which originated, in a very old past, the little wooden huts of the Lake of Zurich.
The objects which have been recovered reveal the habits, arts, conditions of life, and much of the internal history of those who formed, and used them. About the events of their external history, though much of this can be pretty well imagined, of course they are silent. Nor have they anything to tell us in reply to the questions of who the people were, whence they came, or what became of them? The information they give us begins with the time when men, in central Europe, had not attained to a knowledge of metals, and were using implements of bone and stone for war, hunting, and domestic purposes. Abundance of their stone tools have been found, and also of specimens of the work done with them. For instance, some of the series of piles, upon which the dwellings were placed, and these piles are found by the hundred, we see were hacked to the point, which was to fit them for driving, with stone chisels and hatchets. And then, in other series of piles, we pass on to the era when stone had been superseded by bronze and iron tools. It is very interesting to have thus before us the actual tools, and the actual work done with them, together with ocular demonstration of the way in which, by the superiority of their work, the first metal tools superseded their perfected predecessors of stone.
Everything, one may almost say, has been preserved, and, too, in a most wonderfully perfect state. Besides the tools and weapons in great variety, there are their nets and clothes, their pottery in jars and cups, and utensils for many purposes, the bones of the animals on which they feasted, the different kinds of fruit they had gathered from the forest, and of grain they had cultivated. In all these matters the old lake-dwellers have bequeathed to us the means of comparing notes with them. The bones that have been found of the ox, the sheep, and the dog show that the varieties of the respective species then kept by the dwellers in this neighbourhood were not precisely identical with any of their varieties now known. They were, too, great hunters, and game was abundant in the locality. Among the vast quantities of bones of wild animals, that have been found, are those of the wolf, the bear, the beaver, the wild boar, the stag, the European bison (which still exists in the Forest of Lithuania, and is the largest quadruped next after the rhinoceros), and of the urus, the aboriginal wild ox of Europe, which is now extinct.
They were also agriculturists. One of the kinds of wheat they cultivated was what we call the Egyptian, or Mummy Wheat. Some of the specimens of this could not be more perfect had they been only just harvested. It had several small ears ranged round a main central ear, and from this reason sometimes goes by the name of the hen-and-chickens wheat. It is interesting to know that so distinctly marked a variety was being cultivated at so remote a period, on the banks of the Lake of Zurich, by these trans-Alpine barbarians, and on the banks of the Nile, by the subjects of the early Pharaohs, at the same time. Here is a kind of possible connection between the builders of Karnac and the builders of these pile-supported huts; and also a point in the history of one of our Cereals, of the birth, parentage, and education of all of which so little is known. Two kinds of millet, and a six-rowed variety of barley have also been found. These rude contributories to the ancestry of the modern European were at the same time collecting for food, from the neighbouring forests, sloes, bullaces, wild cherries, beech-mast, crab-apples, elder-berries, the hips of the wild rose, raspberries, blackberries, and hazel-nuts; for well-preserved remains of all these have been found on the sites of the lake-villages. Some of the specimens are supposed to show slight differences from the same fruits now growing wild in the neighbourhood. These differences, if they do really exist, must, notwithstanding their slightness, indicate a long lapse of time.
They also cultivated flax. Nets and lines made from it, together with the very scales of the fish the nets and lines caught, and the woven cloth, with the very fringes that decorated the dresses into which it had been formed, and even the weights used in working the looms, are all here, to teach us how widely spread, in very early times, were the most necessary of the useful arts. There has, then, been no solution in the continuity of man’s history. His wants were from the first substantially the same as they are at this day; and these wants were from the first supplied by the same contrivances as at this day, with the difference that, in every age, the contrivances were raised to the level of the knowledge, and consequent resources, of the times. The spinning-jenny, and the power-loom, in a few large cities, are now doing for millions what the wives and daughters of these old lake-dwellers, seated in summer on the wooden platform above the water, and in winter within the hut, did for each separate family. The wants of what appear to us as the primæval times, but which were in fact very far from that, have been enlarged and multiplied, in proportion as man’s means for meeting them became improved and enlarged; and this kind of growth in the old wants, consequent upon growth in our means for supplying them, constitutes what is generally meant by progress. And this material progress it is, which makes possible moral and intellectual progress, the glory, and privilege, and happiness of man.
One cannot help comparing these relics of the old lake-village with the copiously furnished stateliness of its modern neighbour, the city of Zurich. You set them, in thought, by the side of its handsome streets of stone houses, its rich shops, its large factories, especially of iron, in which labour is so skilfully organised, and so scientifically directed, its university, its general intelligence, its conscious efforts to cultivate, and turn to account, that intelligence, its accumulated wealth, its patriotism, its knowledge of, and connection with, every part of the world. But varied, complex, great, and interesting as all this is, still it is only the step now at length reached, by the labour of many generations, in the true and natural development of what was existing on the lake some thousands of years ago. Society, such as it was, in those old days, in the rude, wood-built, water-protected huts was the embryo of society, such as it now is in the proud, modern city. How natural, then, is the jealous care with which it guards these old relics; for if they do not speak to the Zurichers of their own actual ancestors they show them what were the germs out of which has grown their present condition.
I spoke of the large Swiss hotels exactly as they impressed me. I found in them nothing that was attractive to me. Why it was so I endeavoured to explain. I must, however, here note that what I then said is not applicable to Baur’s Hotel at Zurich. I said as much to the manager on leaving, though I was sure that he must often have received similar commendation from others. The house is as well ordered as you would wish to see your own home. The bedrooms are of a good size, and well furnished. The table is liberal. The cuisine good. A wholesome Rhenish wine is supplied at dinner. The attendants are clean and attentive. Everything you are likely to want is provided; nor are there any traps set, or any wish apparent that you should call, for extras. For meals at irregular hours there is an excellent restaurant in the house, distinct from the dining salon. This hotel, though large, has none of the cold, hard, obtrusive air of its monster brethren. In short, things are so managed that you feel that you are in a good, comfortable hotel, and not in a large factory, where bales of travellers, yourself a bale, are undergoing the process, like truck-loads of brute material, of scientific manipulation. I was at Baur en ville. Baur au lac, at a distance of three or four minutes’ walk, is, I suppose, managed in the same fashion, and is the same kind of thing.
But how about the note? I suppose wages, and the price of provisions, must be much the same in Zurich as in other Swiss towns, but the note did not lighten my purse as much as experience would have led me to have expected. A man, then, even an innkeeper, may sometimes be found, whose merits are obvious to the world, but who enhances them—and this is true virtue—by himself setting a low price upon them.
Hitherto the risings and settings of the sun had been, as I mentioned, almost achromatic. I suppose on account of the clearness of the atmosphere. But now a great change had taken place; there had been falls of rain, and even of snow, and the air had become full of moisture, and there was much cloud; in consequence, there were in the evenings some most glorious atmospheric fields of colour. I keep in mind one of these sunsets above the rest, because of the way in which it placed the murky, swart outline of the ridges and peaks of the Jura in contrast with the usual oranges and reds above, but which, though seen so often, one never tires of looking at. It is almost enough to condemn a country house, that the sunset cannot be seen from it.
I have another reason for recollecting this sunset. I was with several persons at the moment who were observing it together. Among these were two Swiss gentlemen. But in the change of weather which it indicated, they only saw a hint that this year’s récolte des voyageurs, as they phrased it, was drawing to a close: a true harvest, which costs Switzerland little, and is got in with not unthrifty husbandry, and which one is glad should benefit so many, both among those who do the harvesting, and among those who are harvested. A French gentleman, however, who happened to be present, and had been spending the summer on the banks of the Lake of Geneva—it might be inferred that his recollections of the way in which he had himself been harvested, were not in all respects pleasant—turned to me with the aside, C’est un pauvre pays.
CHAPTER XVI.
A REMARK ON SWISS EDUCATION
The proper study of mankind is man.—Pope.
It has long been my practice, wherever I find myself, to inquire into the provisions made for education, and into the modes of teaching adopted; and, also, by observation, and talking to the people themselves, to do what I can, as far as opportunities go, to collect materials for enabling me to form an opinion on the results and fruits of what has been done. I did this wherever I was on this excursion; and as it was my object in going to Zurich to see its Polytechnic University, I will here give one of the conclusions I came to on the subject of Swiss education.
It was constructed by the Swiss to suit their own wants. That it does admirably well. Such a system, however, would be very far from suiting equally well that large class amongst ourselves, who are destined for either a public life, or for what may be called the semi-public life of our men of property, and of a large proportion of those whose special work is that of one of the learned professions: at all events, both law and divinity, as practised in this country, have direct connections with political life. The Swiss, however, are a small, and a poor people, whose affairs are, in the main, managed locally. They have no need of trained statesmen; they have no haute politique. Speaking generally, they are a nation of peasant-proprietors, artisans, manufacturers, and tradesmen. At present, in many parts of the country, the only tritons among the minnows are the innkeepers. Manufactures, which mean also commerce, are, here and there, introducing a moneyed class; and the hundreds of thousands of pounds, spent every year in the country, by tens of thousands of travellers, are enriching bankers, and, through many channels, many others. Now the education such a people requires is one that will make intelligent artisans, intelligent manufacturers, and intelligent tradesmen; and which will give to that portion of the population for whom work cannot be found at home, sufficient intelligence to dispose them to go into foreign countries; and will enable them, when there, to take their bread out of the mouths of the inhabitants of those countries. This is what the Swiss system aims at doing. And wherever it is well carried out,—of course this is done much better in the Protestant than in the Catholic cantons,—it attains its aim. In many of the Catholic cantons the people are content to be as their fathers were: they do not see very distinctly the advantage of cultivating the intelligence of their children; and it cannot be supposed that the village priest will be very forward in enlightening them on this point.
What the Swiss system, true to its object, sets itself to teach is the languages that will be useful in business, arithmetic, mathematics, the principles of the useful arts, and the elements of the sciences. All this is just what will enable the Swiss to get on in the careers that will be open to them. They are an intensely practical people; and these thoroughly practical subjects they take care shall be taught sufficiently for the purpose they have in view. They have no idea of not getting their pennyworth for their penny. Their philanthropy, and their love of home, the unfailing and fruitful source of so many virtues, make them desirous of giving every chance to their children; and they are interested in, and proud of, and spend their money on, their schools for their children’s sake. All this is just as it should be. It is a very good thing for them; and, as far as it goes, it would be a very good thing for us, if we had the same system at work here. It is exactly what is wanted for nine-tenths of our population; and what they must have if we are to keep our place in the world. But when this shall have been done, if there is ever to be a time when it will have been done, there will still remain one-tenth of our population, a number equal to, or greater than, that of the whole Swiss nation, which will be capable of receiving, and will need for the life that will be before them, something different from, and higher than, a Swiss education.
The Swiss system is large and liberal for a tradesman; it almost makes of him a gentleman. But for an English gentleman it would be narrow and illiberal. It would not properly qualify him for the careers that are open to him, and for the life that is before him. It is not the kind of culture that will produce statesmen, jurists, divines, orators, poets, historians, literary lay teachers, or philosophers. If, by the grace of nature, an English boy had been intended for any one of these vocations, to bring him up in the Swiss fashion would be to rob him of his birthright: and the more thoroughly the system had been applied to him, the more complete would be the robbery, and the greater the injustice and the injury.
An English gentleman has not been properly qualified for what is his work in life, unless his education has been such as to make him acquainted with the history of man, and with what may be called the sciences of humanity. By the sciences of humanity I mean ethics, economics, polity, jurisprudence, the history of opinion, the history of literature, dialectics, oratory. An acquaintance with these is what, from the first, should be kept in view. They should be worked up to from the beginning of the process, for they are the crown and completion of the mental training he will require. They are that training. And this is just what our system, not from intelligent and deliberate design, but from a happy accident, does in some degree attempt. It provides for it in the study of the history of Greece and Rome, two of the most important and instructive developments of the history of man; and, furthermore, in the direct study of some of the above-mentioned sciences. I say it does this not so much by intelligent design, as by a happy accident, because that it is doing it at this day is merely the result of our having retained the classical system our forefathers established at a time when there was nothing else to teach; and which they established just because there was nothing else to teach then. We may now, knowing what we want, and what materials we have to work with, very much enlarge and improve their system. We may advance from the classics to general history and humanity; of course still retaining the classics, which contain the most important chapters in the history of the fortunes, of the culture, and of the mind of man. And this, which is just what we ought to do, is what, perhaps, we shall do, when we come to understand what it is that gives it its value, and makes it indispensable for us.
Another capital defect in a system, such as that of the Swiss, is that it does not cultivate, but rather represses and deadens, the imagination. This is the instrument of the creative faculty in man, that in which we make the nearest approach to, and which gives to man in the form and degree possible for him, the plastic power that is exhibited to us in the richness, and diversity, of nature. It is this which makes a man myriad-minded; which enables him to look at things from all sides, and to see them in all lights; to regard them as minds most unlike his own regard them; to be in his single self all men to all things; it is what gives insight; and the power of forming accurate and distinct conceptions of things in the three forms of what they actually are, of what they have been, and of what, with reference to other conceptions that have a bearing upon them, they ought to be. A man cannot be a poet, an orator, an artist, hardly an inventor, or discoverer, an historian, or a statesman, without the exercise of this faculty. His rank in any one of these fields of intellectual work will depend on the degree to which it has been developed within him; and the kind of discipline it is under. Our system, in a rough, and haphazard, kind of a way, and again more by accident than by intelligent, deliberate design, does something for its cultivation, by the study of the poets and orators of Greece and Rome; and by attempts at poetical composition. This is good as far as it goes; but insufficient for the great purpose. And this insufficiency of the means we are employing is aggravated, when they have to be applied under the direction of masters and tutors, who possibly, and probably, too, have never given a thought to the nature and purposes of the imaginative faculty; and, therefore, are, of course, equally heedless of the right methods of using the means, that happen to be in their hands, for awakening, cultivating, and strengthening it.
Its proper cultivation in these times should not be confined to the poetry of the old world. That is valuable, not merely on account of its perfectness of form, but because it is one-sided, unchristian, and narrow. It is the poetry of a small, highly privileged class, when that small class was everything, and the bulk of mankind nothing. It is not the poetry of humanity broadly. The recognition of the humanity of all men equally constitutes one essential difference between the modern and the old world. And this limited, and somewhat abnormal, humanity of the ancient poetry is, furthermore, somewhat unconnected with a knowledge of, and love for, nature—the milieu of man. All this makes it very valuable as a study of a distinct development, under peculiar circumstances, of the poetic faculty. But it is insufficient. It is no substitute for an acquaintance with the poetry of the modern world; which, too, it should follow, and not precede. That is the truer and more normal development. It has additional roots, a wider range, a larger inspiration; it takes cognizance of what is in man, irrespective of conditions, or rather under every condition: and it also consciously regards man and nature connectedly; man’s internal nature, and nature external to man, are to its apprehension correlated. Here, too, it has received a new revelation.
And the attempt to turn a child’s mind in the direction of nature, and to give him some general acquaintance with nature, and with modern poetry, would be invaluable for another reason: for not only is this now necessary, as an indispensable part of mental culture for all, being a part of the rightful mental inheritance of those whose lot is cast in these times, but because experience has taught us that there are many minds, which have no aptitude for the acquisition of languages, either from some congenital defects, or, as is most probable, from some faults and omissions of early teaching and associations—but whatever may have been in their cases the cause is a matter of no consequence now: the mischief exists, and cannot be removed. Still, though deficient to this extent, they may have no disinclination for the study of nature: that, in the young, can hardly be possible. Here, then, is something that will enable them to live a not unworthy intellectual life. It is necessary for all: as a part of complete culture for those who are capable of complete culture; and, for those who are not, as a sufficient culture.
The advocates of the continuance—to the extent and for the purposes I have indicated—of classical study will labour under a great and unfair disadvantage, as long as the classics shall be taught with but slight perception, on the part of those who teach them, of their bearing on the higher work of the day. As long as the main object of our public schools shall continue to be professedly linguistic, and that, too, in a somewhat narrow, and shallow fashion; and their tone, sometimes a little ostentatiously, at variance with that of the world, and of the day, for the work of which they ought to be a preparation (it was so with them originally) so long will the advocacy of classical studies be unfairly weighted with a sense of the justice of the charge of unreality brought against them, as now conducted. Whereas in the advocates of modern knowledge as the object and instrument of education, and in its teachers, there is none of this unreality, or want of connexion with the thought, and with the work, of the world that is stirring around us. We, however, hold that it is a different department of work and thought, to which the latter training mainly and primarily applies. A public man need not, as a public man, know anything of astronomy and geology; though, of course, he is behind the age, and his culture is incomplete, if he does not. Of all such subjects he ought, as an educated man, to have a general knowledge; and he will also be the better, as a public man, for having it; but what is primarily and indispensably required of him is a knowledge of man, and of all kinds of social phenomena in their whole range; what they are, how they came to be what they are, and how they affect man. Here his knowledge should be full and precise: and a very valuable part of this knowledge is contained in the literature of the old world. He ought to have lived through those ages. To have done so is a vast extension of experience of the most useful kind. But he cannot have lived through those times, unless he is familiar with the feelings and thoughts, and actions of the men of those times, together with the circumstances, and conditions, under which they so thought, and felt, and acted. And he cannot have this familiarity unless he has a knowledge of the very words, in which they, themselves, expressed, and described, those feelings, thoughts, and actions.
One word more. There is no knowledge so valuable as that of what is knowledge; nor any intellectual habit so valuable as that which disposes us in every thing to require knowledge, and to separate that which is knowledge from that which is not. Theoretically, there is no reason why either the study of language, or theology, should not be made a training for this knowledge, and for this habit. But as this is a matter of practice, as well as of theory, we must look at things as they are, and see where what we want is actually found, and what has in those cases produced it; and where there has been a failure in producing it, and what has been in those cases the cause of this failure. Who, then, are most conspicuous for knowing in what knowledge consists, and for the habit of requiring knowledge as a ground for thought and action, and for being ever on the alert to separate knowledge from its counterfeits? No one, I think, would hesitate in replying, those who have had some scientific training. And it is easy to see how scientific training gives this knowledge, and this habit. It makes no difference what the matter of the study be, whether the stars, or the fungi; whether the physiology of man, or of an earth-worm. The object is soon seen to be truth; and the motive is soon felt to be the satisfaction which truth gives to the mind, and the desire to escape, in the practical order, from the wastefulness, and the mischief of error. Whatever, therefore, is necessary for the attainment of truth is submitted to, or acquired, or eliminated, or avoided, in accordance with the exigency of each case. In these pursuits men learn to guard against appearances that they may not be misled by them; to sift evidence; to distinguish facts from supposed, or alleged, facts; to observe patiently and closely; to suspend judgment; to distinguish probability from certainty; to distinguish different degrees of probability; to distinguish what they know from what they wish; not to wish for anything but ascertained and demonstrable truth; to examine everything, and to hold fast only that which is demonstrably true; to guard against ambiguities in words; to use words for photographing facts, and not to make them a mist which obscures both the object of inquiry, and the paths which lead to it. As a matter of observation, and of fact, these are the habits of mind, which the scientific study of any subject inculcates, and makes natural to a man. They become his second nature. Of course they ought to be the nature of all educated people. And when a man’s mind has been thus trained in the study, scientifically pursued, of any one subject, he applies these habits to the consideration of all other subjects, with which he may have to do: to those, with which he is not familiar, he addresses himself with the same ideas, and the same ways of thinking, as he does to that, with which he is familiar. He knows what knowledge is; and, while he can suspend his judgment, he cannot be satisfied with anything but knowledge. What he does not know upon these subjects he knows that he does not know. The study of language, and theology, if scientifically taught, are doubtless capable of supplying this training, but looking at our educated classes generally, and at those who have had administered to them the greatest amount of these two studies, it does not appear that the desired effect has been produced. If, then, these things are so, here is both something that should be an object, and something that is a defect, as things now are, in our higher education.