Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/226

 distinctly understood, when what they relate to has already been clearly understood in its inartificial form.

We now go back to our starting pointthis planet of ours, and take a turn among its organized species. And here again we are to make a choice, as to the method of proceeding. If the mere memory is the first of the faculties to be cultivated, and if then the reason is to be drily exercised, we may go on in the accustomed path of consigning scientific rudiments, nomenclatures, definitions, classifications, to the encumbered brain. But we have supposed a different principle to have been adopted, and that the faculty which nature first sets in movement is the one which education is first to aid, and to furnish with materials.

An initiation in botany and natural history, if adapted to the principle we now recommend, will be purely of a descriptive kind; and not only descriptive in its style, but designedly select, instead of being systematic in its instances: as for example, a systematic method, whatever may be the principle of the system adopted, enjoins that the fixed characteristics of orders, classes, genera, species, should be pointed out, and that the learner, from the commencement, should be qualified to detect them, under all varieties of appearance; and that specimens, in attestation of the principle so assumed, should be collected, irrespectively of any accidental circumstances of the species, which may be adapted to awaken curiosity.

But in place of any such method, I would glean from the vegetable and animated orders, of all climates, whatever recommends itself, the most strongly, by its fitness to fix itself in the imagination. Nor must we lose sight of the fact that the mind is much aided in its individual conceptions by the simple circumstance of the actual juxtaposition of things, and their local concomitance. Thus,