I should be sorry if, in after life, you should wake up and say to yourself, “How much more good my lessons would have done me if some one had shown me the real use of them and made me think, so that I might have learnt all I could, instead of just slipping through them day by day.”  No one can do the thinking for you.  Unless you work with me by trying to think, I cannot really do much for you.  I can bring you to the water, but I cannot make you drink.  Yes, after all, I can make you drink, i.e. do your lessons day by day as a matter of obedience.  So a better illustration would be that I can make you eat, but I cannot make you digest your food.  You can prevent its doing you any good.  If you simply learn your lessons by rote and do not use your thinking powers, education is very little good,—­the obedience will have done you good, but, as far as mental growth is concerned, you will not gain much, for that sort of education drops off, like water off a duck’s back, when you leave school.  They say “a fool and his money are soon parted,” but that is nothing to the speed with which a fool and his education are parted!

Now, I am going to take the chief subjects you learn, and show the higher things which I want you to gain when you are doing those lessons, and you must want it too, or my wanting it will not do much good.  You do not learn Mathematics simply that you may know so many books of Euclid, and so many pages of Algebra; it is to give you power over your minds, to enable you to follow a chain of reasoning, to teach you to keep up continuous attention, and not to jump at conclusions.  I do not say you cannot learn these things except by Mathematics; you might do it by Logic, and I know many people who have done it by mother-wit and the teaching of life; but when a person is inclined to trust to his mother-wit, and to neglect educational advantages because he can do without them, I for one feel inclined to doubt whether his share of mother-wit can be very large, after all.  The people I have known who are clever, without having had the careful school-training you enjoy, used all the advantages that came in their way (though, when they were young, advantages were fewer), and unless you do the same, you cannot expect to be like them.  Also, clever untrained people often feel very much hampered by their want of training; you see the cleverness, but they feel how much more they could have done if they had been trained.  Therefore, do not allow yourselves to think “Euclid is no good, because ‘Aunt So-and-so’ is quite clever enough, and she never did it;” depend upon it, that is not going the right road to be like her.  I feel quite sure that if this “not impossible aunt” had had opportunities of learning Euclid when she was young, she would have done it, and very well too!  Of course, if you mean to read Mathematics from choice by-and-by, you will work hard at the subject now, but I can quite understand that those who are not going