Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/80

70 of which most men spend their energies: three of them refer to self—namely, property, pleasure, and political advancement; the other three imply devotion to ideas—namely, religion, science, and art. Without a doubt, as M. de Candolle says, the former three occupy one half of the moral sphere of the human character, and the latter three the other.

It appears that the men distinguished in science have usually been born in small towns, and educated by imperfect teachers, who made the boys think for themselves. Nothing is brought out more clearly in the work than that the first desideratum in scientific education is to stimulate curiosity and the observation of real things, and that too much encouragement of the receptive faculty is a serious error. The author justly laments that the art of observation is not only untaught, but is actually discouraged by modern education. Children are apt and eager to observe, but, instead of encouraging and regulating their instincts, the school-masters keep them occupied solely on internal ideas, such as grammar, the vocabularies of different languages, arithmetic, history, and poetry. They learn about the living world which surrounds them out of books, and not through their own eyes. One of the reformations he proposes is, to make much more use of drawing as a means of careful observation, compelling the pupils to draw quickly the object they have to describe, from memory, after a short period allowed for its examination. He is a strong advocate for the encouragement of a class of scientific sinecurists like the non-working fellows of our colleges, who should have leisure to investigate, and not be pestered by the petty mechanical work of continual teaching and examining. Science has lost much by the suppression of the ecclesiastical sinecures at the time of the French Revolution, for there used to be many abbés on the lists of foreign scientific members, but they have now almost wholly disappeared. The modern ideas of democracy are adverse to places to which definite work is not attached, and from which definite results do not regularly flow. This principle is a wise one for the mass of mankind; but how utterly misplaced when applied to those who have the zeal for investigation, and who work best when left quite alone!

There is a curious chapter on the probability of English becoming the dominant language of the world in fifty or a hundred years, and being the one into which the more important scientific publications of all nations will, as a matter of course, be translated. It is not only that the English-speaking population will outnumber the German and the French, as these now outnumber the Dutch and the Swedish, but that the language has peculiar merits, through its relationship with both the Latin and the Teutonic tongues. It also seems that, in families where German and French are originally spoken, French always drives out the German on account of its superior brevity. When people are in a hurry, and want to say something quickly, it is more