insist upon the importance of the concentrated edu cation being preceded by a liberal education; and they would apply to the training of the mind, a discipline analagous to that which common-sense suggests in what relates to bodily exercise.

When in ancient times a father was ambitious for his son, that he might win the prize "at the Olympian games or Pythean fields," his attention was directed, not to the technicalities of the game, but to the general condition and morals of the youth; for the success of the athlete depended upon the fact of his first becoming a healthy man. And precisely so, we say,-Educate the man before you educate the professional man; before you send your grain to the mill, look to the raw material. Or, reverting to an illustration already employed-before the eye is narrowed to the microscope, be sure that the eye is itself it in a healthy condition. Expand the mind before you contract it; educate the mind, as such, before you bend it to the professional point. It is not what we eat that supports the body, but what we digest; and instead of seeking to cram the mind with facts before it has power to digest its food, send it to a school where the mind itself shall be educated; where the object will be, not to impart professional knowledge or miscellaneous knowledge of any kind, but to give strength and activity to the mind itself; not to accumulate information in the memory, but to invigorate the powers which sum up the scientific capabilities of our nature by habituating the mind to exactness of thought; where the mind is regarded, not as an animal to be fatted for the market, but as an instrument to be tuned, a metal to be refined, a weapon to be sharpened; where the object is, not to form the divine, or the physician, or the lawyer, or the statesman, or the man of business, or the botanist, or the chemist, or the geologist, nor even the scholar, -but the thinker; where the soil is ploughed, and barrowed, and drained, that when afterwards the pro

fessional seed is sown, it may produce not twentyfold, or thirty-fold, but a hundred-fold.

How often we see the mere professional man (the man who has not received a liberal education early in life), fail when he is called unexpectedly, or in the ordinary course of affairs, to some entirely new situation and a different order of circumstances. We often hear of men who are eminent in their profession as lawyers, failing when they enter the House of Commons; but we seldom hear of these failures in those who have had the advantage of more than a professional education. And commercial men also, when, without having had the advantage of a liberal education, they have entered the House of Commons, are seldom prepared to take part in public affairs. Endowed with high faculties of mind, they are most useful in all the details of business, but they have seldom succeeded in debate. Compare, for example, the founder of the Peel family, a man of the highest rank in his profession as a manufacturer,-with the illustrious statesman his son. But perhaps the most striking instance we can produce, is that of Lord Castlereagh. Of Lord Castlereagh's natural powers of mind there can be but one opinion. Yet there was just wanting in him that which a liberal education would have imparted or sustained. His father regarded a liberal education as a mere waste of time, and he entered thus unprepared into his profession that of a statesman. Lord Castlereagh's natural abilities, in conjunction with his position in society, notwithstanding his blunders of speech, which were occasionally ludicrous, enabled him to take a lead in party warfare; but he never occupied and never will occupy the high position which is assigned in public estimation to Canning, or to Peel, or to Lyndhurst, or to him, the first among the foremost, to whom the mind must instinctively advert whenever the subject of education comes before us-Henry Brougham.

We may also refer to the result of those competitive examinations for certain public appointments which have been instituted by government. After making the necessary deduction for the success of intellectual powers of unusual magnitude, to which no rule can apply, it has been admitted that those who succeeded best were those who had been most thoroughly grounded, as it is called-that is to say, whose minda have been disciplined before they had been employed in mastering details,-who had possessed more or less the advantages of a liberal education. And here we may remark that where this principle is conceded, we must cease to be in the number of those who declaim against the discipline in Latin, Greek, and mathematics, to which the mind of youth is subjected in all the Universities of Europe, on the ground that an acquaintance with these subjects is not likely to be of service to them in after life. If your physician were to prescribe a daily walk to the Calton Hill and back, his object would be simply to make you a healthy man; and he could only have respect to the walk as one near at hand, and with reference to the salubrity of the air. You might or you might not gather the wild flower on your way, in order that it might be of service in your future botanical studies; you might or you might not collect geological specimens for future use; you might or you might not encourage the spirit of poetry within you,

When looking forth

You view the Empress of the North
Set on her hilly throne;

Her Palace's imperial bowers,
Her Castle proof to hostile powers,
Her stately halls and holy towers.

This, and more than this, he could feel that you could do if you were wise; but the one end he would have in view would be to secure your health by air and exercise. And so in prescribing classical or

mathematical studies to the young: they may or they may not be useful hereafter-this is not the end they were designed to answer if they have made him a man of thought. It is not to make them mathematicians that young men are taught mathematics; it is not to make them critics, historians, or poets that they are disciplined in the niceties of grammar, that they are instructed to make verbal distinctions, to learn a rule and to mark the exceptions to it. These studies are recommended and enforced, because we have found no better means than those provided by philology, logic, and mathematics, for that discipline of the mind which is the end and object of liberal education-for enabling it in all phenomena to recognise the idea, to state a question with clearness, and to argue upon it with perspicuity. We find these instincts at hand, and we comply with them, for none better have ever been devised, if our object be kept in view.

But at the same time the fact is forced upon our notice, that, under the circumstances of the age, there are subjects of the very first importance for the investigation of which is required a previous intellectual discipline of which our ancestors had no conception, and for which the arena is not prepared by philology or mathematics. An educated man must not in these days remain ignorant of those discoveries in the field of human knowledge which have rendered our age remarkable, and these can be only comprehended by a mind which has been disciplined by mechanical studies. These studies are required to educe those powers of the mind which will enable it hereafter to appreciate the intellectual wealth which lies within its reach. Hence the University of Cambridge for the degree of B.A. requires an examination in elementary mechanics→→→ not, on the principle already laid down, to make her students men of science, but to enable them to become 90. The principle is the same; the educing mental

power as the end, certain exact instruction as the Reans. The object of our physician is not attained, if he direct the pedestrian occasionally to mount his horse.

A notion has sometimes prevailed that the primary object of a university is to act as the medium of a professed education, confining the word "professor" within much narrower limits than we are disposed to allow. That faculties relating to professional education have been established in all the universities of Europe, and that some of our universities have owed their celebrity to the professional schools established within them, and conducted by men of renown, is most true: nevertheless these professional schools have been the adjuncts of a university, and not the primary purpose of its institution.

The

principle, says Huber, has never been attacked that the university has its foundation in art. Never has a university, rightly constituted, permitted its members to advance to the higher departments of study, until they have first graduated in arts. When we are called upon to reform a university, this is the first point upon which we insist; for not to insist upon this would be to give up the principle of a liberal education. Every student, by graduating in arts, gives proof that he has first received a liberal education-and then he is permitted to proceed to the higher departments of knowledge. There may be a university in which the higher departments of literature and science are uncultivated, and this is a very serious defect requiring reform; but still if the liberal education of its younger members be conducted with vigour, it has not forfeited the character of a university: but if this, the primary object of the institution, be lost sight of,-if professional degrees are granted without a previous graduation in philoBophy or arts, then the retention of the title of a university will be a misnomer, until a reformation in this particular has taken place.