we find faculties developed through the performance of those functions which it is their office to perform; not through the performance of artificial exercises devised to fit them for those functions.  The Red Indian acquires the swiftness and agility which make him a successful hunter, by the actual pursuit of animals; and through the miscellaneous activities of his life, he gains a better balance of physical powers than gymnastics ever give.  That skill in tracking enemies and prey which he had reached after long practice, implies a subtlety of perception far exceeding anything produced by artificial training.  And similarly in all cases.  From the Bushman whose eye, habitually employed in identifying distant objects that are to be pursued or fled from, has acquired a telescopic range, to the accountant whose daily practice enables him to add up several columns of figures simultaneously; we find that the highest power of a faculty results from the discharge of those duties which the conditions of life require it to discharge.  And we may be certain, a priori, that the same law holds throughout education.  The education of most value for guidance, must at the same time be the education of most value for discipline.  Let us consider the evidence.

One advantage claimed for that devotion to language-learning which forms so prominent a feature in the ordinary curriculum, is, that the memory is thereby strengthened.  This is assumed to be an advantage peculiar to the study of words.  But the truth is, that the sciences afford far wider fields for the exercise of memory.  It is no slight task to remember everything about our solar system; much more to remember all that is known concerning the structure of our galaxy.  The number of compound substances, to which chemistry daily adds, is so great that few, save professors, can enumerate them; and to recollect the atomic constitutions and affinities of all these compounds, is scarcely possible without making chemistry the occupation of life.  In the enormous mass of phenomena presented by the Earth’s crust, and in the still more enormous mass of phenomena presented by the fossils it contains, there is matter which it takes the geological student years of application to master.  Each leading division of physics—­sound, heat, light, electricity—­includes facts numerous enough to alarm any one proposing to learn them all.  And when we pass to the organic sciences, the effort of memory required becomes still greater.  In human anatomy alone, the quantity of detail is so great, that the young surgeon has commonly to get it up half-a-dozen times before he can permanently retain it.  The number of species of plants which botanists distinguish, amounts to some 320,000; while the varied forms of animal life with which the zoologist deals, are estimated at some 2,000,000.  So vast is the accumulation of facts which men of science have before them, that only by dividing and subdividing their labours can they deal with it.  To a detailed knowledge of his own division, each adds but a general knowledge of the allied ones; joined perhaps to a rudimentary acquaintance with some others.  Surely, then, science, cultivated even to a very moderate extent, affords adequate exercise for memory.  To say the very least, it involves quite as good a discipline for this faculty as language does.