From the substitution of principles for rules, and the necessarily co-ordinate practice of leaving abstractions untaught till the mind has been familiarised with the facts from which they are abstracted, has resulted the postponement of some once early studies to a late period.  This is exemplified in the abandonment of that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children.  As M. Marcel says:—­“It may without hesitation be affirmed that grammar is not the stepping-stone, but the finishing instrument.”  As Mr. Wyse argues:—­“Grammar and Syntax are a collection of laws and rules.  Rules are gathered from practice; they are the results of induction to which we come by long observation and comparison of facts.  It is, in fine, the science, the philosophy of language.  In following the process of nature, neither individuals nor nations ever arrive at the science first.  A language is spoken, and poetry written, many years before either a grammar or prosody is even thought of.  Men did not wait till Aristotle had constructed his logic, to reason.”  In short, as grammar was made after language, so ought it to be taught after language:  an inference which all who recognise the relationship between the evolution of the race and that of the individual, will see to be unavoidable.

Of new practices that have grown up during the decline of these old ones, the most important is the systematic culture of the powers of observation.  After long ages of blindness, men are at last seeing that the spontaneous activity of the observing faculties in children has a meaning and a use.  What was once thought mere purposeless action, or play, or mischief, as the case might be, is now recognised as the process of acquiring a knowledge on which all after-knowledge is based.  Hence the well-conceived but ill-conducted system of object-lessons.  The saying of Bacon, that physics is the mother of the sciences, has come to have a meaning in education.  Without an accurate acquaintance with the visible and tangible properties of things, our conceptions must be erroneous, our inferences fallacious, and our operations unsuccessful.  “The education of the senses neglected, all after education partakes of a drowsiness, a haziness, an insufficiency, which it is impossible to cure.”  Indeed, if we consider it, we shall find that exhaustive observation is an element in all great success.  It is not to artists, naturalists, and men of science only, that it is needful; it is not only that the physician depends on it for the correctness of his diagnosis, and that to the engineer it is so important that some years in the workshop are prescribed for him; but we may see that the philosopher, also, is fundamentally one who observes relationships of things which others had overlooked, and that the poet, too, is one who sees the fine facts in nature which all recognise when pointed out, but did not before remark.  Nothing requires more to be insisted on than that vivid and complete impressions are all-essential.  No sound fabric of wisdom can be woven out of a rotten raw-material.