Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/218

 realizing what is remote, than what is future, even if the objects be substantially the same.

In connexion with these same subjects, the teacher has an excellent theme before him if he be qualified to picture forth the successive conditions of our planet, as indicated by geological science: and I shall be understood as meaning that what, in this stage of education, he is in quest of, is vivid description of visible and palpable objects; not scientific statements, conducive to the establishment of a theory: these are to come in their time, but not yet; and it is an utter error, in my opinion, to put into the hands of children, or even of young persons, in the first instance, a rudimental book, condensing the abstruse and ratiocinative principles of the sciences.

From the description of the earth, it will be easy to make good our way outward toward the heavens. Whether or not children have yet heard of the signs of the zodiac, or know any thing of declination, equation of the centre, or the syzygies of the moon’s orbit, they may be led on until they can plunge boldly into the abyss of worlds around us, and by the aid of the telescope, and of vivid descriptive discourses, hold a steady flight, from point to point, of the visible universe. How many who have learned all about the celestial globe, and can twirl it to admiration, or even lecture upon the orrery, yet, within two years after they have left school, are not only destiiute of taste for the sublimest of the sciences, but seem not to retain, if ever they have had, any mental correspondence, connecting the technicalities of "the globes," with the wonders revealed to the favoured eye of man in a cloud-less night:for them, a treble tier of vapours might as well have wrapped this ball of ours in perpetual obscurity and ignorance.

It will be far otherwise with young persons who have been intellectually dealt with, and who have obtained an