Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/227

 for example, to study natural history in its several branches on the principle of bringing together things which really meet the traveller's eye, in the same scenes, imparts far more of vividness to single ideas, and gives much more of richness to the mind in general, than is done by considering objects nakedly and disjunctively, in their scientific relations. Thus I would paint upon the fancy, the natural historyvegetable, animal, and mineral, of Lapland, as a whole, of Siberia, as a whole, and so of Brazil, of India, of Africa. This method vivifies the mind, and is consonant with the laws of its natural development; but to discourse of the whale and of the ape, of man and of the kangaroo, as associated by an abstruse point of analogy, is a process proper indeed toa later era of education, but utterly improper, as I think, to its earlier stages.

The faculties afterwards to be cultured will work with far more readiness, and reach results with vastly greater rapidity, when thus richly furnished with materials, and when all these materials are associated with agreeable impressions. The opposite practice, which has prevailed so much in education, of commencing by the rudiments of the sciences, is to be attributed, in part, to the prejudice, so besetting to limited minds, of paying more regard to logical order, in the conveyance of knowledge, than to the order of nature in opening the faculties ; and partly to the facility of imposing a drudgery of tasks upon the learner, as compared with the animated method which, in rendering the learner’s task more agreeable, requires a little more effort to be made by the teacher. There are some who would rather be at the pains of carrying forward the most rigorous processes of instruction, than find themselves called upon every day, and every hour, to convey various information, in a vivacious manner.

It will be easy to advance from the natural history of countries, to the characteristics and manners of the nations