book on what he calls this method, and the life is killed out of the method by the very process which seemed to preserve it-it is strangled in the grasp of stereotype. And there are now hundreds of books, used mostly in ladies' schools, in which this base-born plan is still followed, to the irretrievable loss of those who are subjected to the process. An eminent Cambridge mathematician at present trains all his pupils on this heuristic method-and without book; and his success at the university as well as in school is marked and solid. But if he were to give a sketch of his method in writing, it would be ignobly stuck to and slavishly followed-to the death of the very method he had been endeavouring to set forth and recommend. If we could only train all our teachers to the use and constant practice of the heuristic method, we should make them themselves more strong in thought and purpose, more firm and real in their intellectual life, and more capable of firing their pupils with a single and undivided zeal for truth.

We are in fact overdone with machinery; our education is choked by the means we use to promote it; and the informing spirit is too often absent.

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Our mechanical methods blind us to the necessity of seeking to analyse our subjects in the fullest manner, and so to arrange the steps that the children may go up with ease and pleasure. We are constantly giving knowledge prematurely; we are every day anticipating results which the child will reach for himself; and

all over our pupils suffer in their brains from the. malady of the day-imperfect digestion." (Meiklejohn, Inaug. Address, Bell Chair of Education, pp. 33-36, 1876.)

134. The expressions "Methods of Nature," "Nature's Methods," "Consult Nature for Methods of Education and Teaching," are heard from time to time. It may be profitable to examine this conception a little. What is Nature? How does she work? Where shall we find her? We find her about us everywhere, as a wild, incongruous, heterogeneous, restless mass of objects and activities. The most natural things in the world, probably, are a swamp and barbarism, for they are "fresh from the hand of Nature. The most natural road across the swamp is a corduroy road. The most natural action of a boy is to kick another boy when he dislikes him. The most natural way to occupy land is to tent upon it, and by force keep others away from it, as the nomadic peoples do. The most natural of plows is the Asiatic-the fork of a tree. The most natural apple is that which grows from the natural seed, not the welcome fruit of the graft. We also say that these works of art, all high art, are natural. What, then, is Nature? Nature is not simply the fact that is presented to man-she is not alone an object formed without the help of man-she is not a single objective thing by itself. Nature is a term for Capacities and Possibilities, whether of matter or of mind. We speak of capacities of the human mind, all of which are natural;

and the developments of them are all natural. Nothing can be produced which is outside of the range of possibilities, and, hence, that is outside of Nature. But by way of distinction, those things which man himself has been instrumental in directing and controlling are called Artificial. If the swamp and the barbarian are very natural, drained meadows and civilization are very artificial. Yet in all these

cases man never can go beyond what his own natural powers can naturally do. No man ever constructs a bridge or paints a madonna that his natural powers do not naturally accomplish. It is all of Nature, and all natural-just as natural as it was for Demosthenes to stammer or, subsequently, to move all Greece by his eloquence. One man uses his right hand familiarly, another his left, and still another both with equal facility —which is the natural one? An Icelander naturally resists cold-an African naturally resists heat an American resists both heat and cold. Which is the natural case? A honey bee gathers honey in temperate zones, but, moved southward, ceases-what is the naturalness in the case ? In these cases one is just as natural as another they all are so because of native endowments, capacities, or possibilities. What is the most natural language to speak, for a child, English, French, or Italian? Man, by nature, is formed to suffer with patience, and die in peace. It is the physicians with their prescriptions, the philosophers with their precepts, and the clergy with their prayers and exhortations,

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that have debased the heart of man, and made him ignorant how to die." (Rousseau, Emilius, vol. 1, p. 47.) In the following, which is the natural stage of relationship, compared to that now established by law and custom in the United States at the present time? "We shall endeavour to establish the following propositions:-1. That the most ancient system in which the idea of blood-relationship was embodied, was the system of kinship through females only. 2. That the primitive groups were, or were assumed to be, homogeneous. 3. That the system of kinship through females only tended to render the exogamous groups heterogeneous, and thus to supersede the system of capturing wives. 4. That in the advance from savagery the system of kinship through females only was succeeded by a system which acknowledged kinship through males also; and which, in most cases, passed into a system which acknowledged kinship through males only. 5. That the system of kinship through males tended to rear up homogeneous groups, and thus to restore the original condition of affairs-where the exogamous prejudice survived as regards both the practice of capturing wives and the evolution of the form of capture. 6. That a local tribe, under the combined influence of exogamy and the system of female kinship, might attain a balance of persons of different sexes regarded as being of different descent, and that thus its members might be able to intermarry with one another, and wholly within the tribe, consistently with the

—as

principle of exogamy. 7. That a local tribe, having reached this stage and grown proud through success in war, might decline intermarriage with other local tribes and become a caste. 8. That on kinship becoming agnatic, the members of such a tribe might yield to the universal tendency of rude races to eponomy, and feign themselves to be all derived from a common ancestor, and so become endogamous. And 9. That there is reason to think that some endogamous tribes became endogamous in this same . . The earliest human groups can have

manner.

The idea must be re

Individuals had been

had no idea of kinship. garded as a growth. affiliated not to persons, but to some group. As distinguished from men of other groups, they would be the group-stock, and named after the group." (McLennan, Primitive Marriage, pp. 118-123, ed. 1876, London.)

135. The question is really, not what is natural? but what is artificial? If the word has any proper signification and scope, they must be something like this:-Artificial things include all those products and results which have been developed from the capacities and possibilities of Nature by the direct agency of man. Under

this definition come all that man has ever done in civilization and in history-i.e., in civilization. "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief" (religious and otherwise), art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a mem

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