"Do the duty nearest, Cling to truth the clearest, Doing this, we shall discover with the Laureate that "The path of duty is the way to glory, He that walks it, only thirsting For the right, and learns to deaden Frances le Villam THE EDUCATION OF BRAIN AND MUSCLE BY THOMAS LAWRENCE, D. D. DUCATION means a draw. That which is drawn out must in some sense be within. "You can not draw blood out of a stone." "Ex nihilo nihil fit,"-out of nothing comes nothing. Education does not create, it only develops. A pebble will not grow into a tree. You must plant an acorn if you want an oak. The tiny cup contains the germ of a massive tree, nay, of a thousand oak forests. But for every acorn that germinates, a million perish, crushed 'neath the foot, rotting in the earth, or devoured by the beasts. That there may be a tree, or plant life, there must not only be a germ, but that germ must be placed under circumstances favorable to its development. Were you to suspend an acorn in the air, cast it into the water, or drop it into a hollow stone, it were in vain to look for a tree. The germ must be lodged in suitable soil, the dews and rains of heaven must moisten it, the genial heat of the sun must visit it. It must have room to thrust its roots downward into the earth, and spread its branches outward and upward into the light and air of heaven. The tree as it stands in its strength and beauty is nothing more than the living germ which was in the acorn and the organism which, in connection with the process of nature, it has wrought for itself out of the earth, air, water and sunshine. These are the materials out of which, with unerring plant instinct, it has built its massy trunk, moulded its gigantic limbs, twisted the fibre of its pliant branches, and woven the green velvet of its leaves. The storms and calms, the sunshine and showers of a thousand years have had to do with it, have entered into and have become a part of it. It is the product of them all. The influence of these several agents in its development might not inaptly be designated the education or drawing out of the tree. As the oak is in the acorn, so is the man in the boy. "The boy is the father of the man." But man's nature is more complex than that of plant or even animal, and his education is more complex still, nay, is rather the result of a number of distinct and widely differing processes carried forward at one and the same time. The immaterial soul inhabits, animates, dominates, acts through the material body. The body is not only the house in which the mind or soul lives, but the instrument through which it acts, or, rather, it is a number of instruments or organs combined into one complex machine, which is not so much me as mine. The soul does not wake suddenly to the consciousness of its full-orbed powers, as Minerva is said to have leaped full-armed from the brain of Jupiter. The mind is developed by the exercise of its faculties, not only mediately through the senses in contact with things external, but immediately, as when the mental act has its origin within and terminates upon the mind itself, as in reflection, memory, imagination and the judgments of |