Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/217

 embodies the entire wealth of the language, as to its epithets, by these means, all the rich scenes of this, our planet, may be lodged in the minds of children, and so may become treasures of thought, imparting hereafter, even when least apparent, a copiousness, and a breadth, and a variety, to the style of speaking and of writing, on whatever subject. Need we compare this kind of enrichment of the Conceptive Faculty with the hard acquired ability to tell you, in a moment, the latitude and longitude of fifty towns, or the population"according to the last returns, and the best authorities," of the capitals of Europe?

But besides going through the characteristic scenes of the four continents, as a traveller does, we must take the earth as a whole, or as a planet, and aid the mind in looking at it as from a point of view whence it might be seen, spinning on its axis, cloud-mottled, snow-tipped, with its bulging tide-wave, heading on daily from the equatorial Atlantic, to the northern straits; with its steady mon-soons, and its angry tornados, its fire-spitting craters, its verdant and swarming patches of life, and its red arid expanses of sand. Let the mind be assisted in its efforts to grasp the contrasted simultaneous condition of the several hemispheres; that is to say, the eastern and western, in their daily, and the northern and southern, in their annual changes. The very effort which we wish to make easy to the Conceptive Faculty, is that of leaping from the scene pre-sent before the senses, to the opposite scene, remote from them. The mental effect is different, and a more vigorous grasp of the IDEAL is had, in conceiving, for example, of noon now scorching the plains of Asia, while we are shrouded by night, or of summer, now glowing in South Africa, while we are buried in snow, than as if our own en-suing night, or our own approaching summer, were thought of. The Conceptive Faculty takes a bolder step in