Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/216

 been not a whit less beneficial to thousands of those who, in their sorrowful school-days, have learned, repeated, and instantly afterwards forgotten it. It is not that the technical parts of the sciences should not be learned, but that they should be kept out of sight until after the mind has become familiar with the visible realities to which they relate.

A description of the earth, combining many topics, separately treated of in five or six sciencesthat is to say, astronomy, geography, geology, hydrography, mineralogy, meteorology, and, to some extent, natural history, affords as good an opportunity as we can any where find for calling the Conceptive Faculty into play, and for en-riching it with splendid ideas. What we want, in the training of this faculty, is, to accustom the mind to stretch out from the boundary of things actually seen, and to give itself a sort of intellectual ubiquity, by the vigorous effort which realizes remote scenes as analogous to surrounding objects, and yet as unlike them. A child is to be tempted on, until he breaks over his horizon; he is to be exercised and informed until he can wing his way, north or south, east or west, and show his teacher, in apt and vivid language, that his imagination has actually taken the leap, and has returnedfrom the tempest-rocked Hebrides, or the ice-bound northern ocean, from the red man’s wilderness of the west, from the steppes of central Asia, from the teeming swamps of the Amazon, from the sirocco deserts of Africa, from the tufted islets of the Pacific, from the heaving flanks of Etna, from the marbled shores of Greece.

By taking up the elements of natural scenery, as found in our own landscapes and climateby the copious use of pictorial representationsby well-selected passages from the most lively of our modern travellers, and, as the master method, by combining the whole in a vivid, condensed, and even florid colloquial stylethe vivâ voce painting that