Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/766

746 mere lesson-learning experiences of the school, and should, in fact, determine the efficiency of the school-agencies themselves, is simply inevitable. Whether a child has the advantages of a quickening home, or is the victim of a stupefying home, is of far more moment than the quality of the school it attends. Home education is, after all, the great fact, whether it awakens or whether it quenches the young minds exposed to it, and it becomes a momentous question whether our exaggerated estimate and desperate cultivation of schoolhouses and public education are not at the expense of the far more important domestic influences by which the characters of children are formed. For we are learning every day that, as this world is constituted, one thing is at the expense of another. If parents believe that the school is all in all, and can do every thing for their children, such are the pressures and strains of social life that they will evade and neglect their own responsibilities. Their children will be committed to stupid and vicious servants, hustled out of the way, turned into the street, or left to themselves; and no pains will be taken to make the home medium one of elevation, stimulation, and improving to the mental characters of their offspring. Where men are exhausted in business, and women are exhausted by society, and there is blind faith in teachers and school-rooms, we may be pretty sure that but little will be done to shape and conduct the home with reference to the higher mental needs of the children who live in it. There are, no doubt, noble examples of parents who appreciate schools and strive to do their corresponding part of the work of exalting and enriching the intellectual life of those committed to their charge; but such cases are lamentably few, and there is reason to fear that, with the increasing faith in public appliances of culture, their proportion will not increase very rapidly.

publish in full the masterly inaugural address delivered August 19th, before the British Association at Belfast, by Prof. Tyndall, its President, for the present year. No scientific paper ever before published has produced so extensive and profound an impression as this. The eminent ability of the speaker, the dignity of the occasion, the confessed importance of the subject, and the eloquence and power of the statement, have all concurred to this result; but it has also been greatly due to that rapid diffusion of information upon the general question which has taken place within the last few years, and to the ripening of public judgment that has followed. In regard to this, Prof. Tyndall has calculated with great sagacity. Could the question have been submitted to the intelligent classes as to the propriety of such an experiment, probably nine out of ten would have condemned its folly and predicted its failure. Yet the address has actually been received with a unanimity of commendation that has fairly bewildered those who make it a business to study the drifts and currents of public sentiment. Some of the leading organs of public opinion, however, still affect to think that Prof. Tyndall has made a mistake, and that to spring upon the public mind this hitherto obnoxious discussion, under such peculiar circumstances, was in a high degree unwise, injudicious, and impolitic.

For example, the Saturday Review, while according to Prof. Tyndall's address much qualified praise, is still dissatisfied and captious, and objects to it as follows: "We confess that we were surprised that the President so wholly abandoned himself to elaborating one idea, and that one so distasteful to a large portion of those interested in science.... He has more than once, it is true, incurred great odium by the