it seems to furnish a disproof of them by reductio ad absurdum.  In truth, however, they do not, when rightly understood, commit us to any such untenable position.  A glance at the physical analogies will clearly show this.  It is a general law of life that the more complex the organism to be produced, the longer the period during which it is dependent on a parent organism for food and protection.  The difference between the minute, rapidly-formed, and self-moving spore of a conferva, and the slowly-developed seed of a tree, with its multiplied envelopes and large stock of nutriment laid by to nourish the germ during its first stages of growth, illustrates this law in its application to the vegetal world.  Among animals we may trace it in a series of contrasts from the monad whose spontaneously-divided halves are as self-sufficing the moment after their separation as was the original whole; up to man, whose offspring not only passes through a protracted gestation, and subsequently long depends on the breast for sustenance; but after that must have its food artificially administered; must, when it has learned to feed itself, continue to have bread, clothing, and shelter provided; and does not acquire the power of complete self-support until a time varying from fifteen to twenty years after its birth.  Now this law applies to the mind as to the body.  For mental pabulum also, every higher creature, and especially man, is at first dependent on adult aid.  Lacking the ability to move about, the babe is almost as powerless to get materials on which to exercise its perceptions as it is to get supplies for its stomach.  Unable to prepare its own food, it is in like manner unable to reduce many kinds of knowledge to a fit form for assimilation.  The language through which all higher truths are to be gained, it wholly derives from those surrounding it.  And we see in such an example as the Wild Boy of Aveyron, the arrest of development that results when no help is received from parents and nurses.  Thus, in providing from day to day the right kind of facts, prepared in the right manner, and giving them in due abundance at appropriate intervals, there is as much scope for active ministration to a child’s mind as to its body.  In either case, it is the chief function of parents to see that the conditions requisite to growth are maintained.  And as, in supplying aliment, and clothing, and shelter, they may fulfil this function without at all interfering with the spontaneous development of the limbs and viscera, either in their order or mode; so, they may supply sounds for imitation, objects for examination, books for reading, problems for solution, and, if they use neither direct nor indirect coercion, may do this without in any way disturbing the normal process of mental evolution; or rather, may greatly facilitate that process.  Hence the admission of the doctrines enunciated does not, as some might argue, involve the abandonment of teaching; but leaves ample room for an active and elaborate course of culture.