Compared with science, education is so slight a thing that it scarcely merits a name. What are elementary notions of chemistry worth, when we think of the chemist who handles bodies, composing and decomposing them, who counts the molecules and weighs the atoms? And what difference does it make whether a hundred thousand bachelors know the elements of the air? But already they know it no longer. Had they been taught to breathe, they would, perhaps, have escaped two or three diseases, a predisposition to which, or whose germs, they transmit joyfully to their children. It is necessary (despite a celebrated irony) to have a chemistry and chemical industries, but not to teach the man in the street the obscure principles of a vain science. This is only an example, but it could be extended to almost all the elements of general culture. An average brain to-day resembles those experimental gardens in which flourish specimens of all the flora. Yet this garden has its special utility, whereas brains rich in little of everything are good for nothing. The ground has not even been turned into a parterre, but into a herbarium, and the dried plants are so commonplace, so defective, that they can be put to no decent use. The majority of the flower-beds, at least, should have been reserved for a profound and passionate culture. When this is done, the dead corners of the garden acquire once more a certain importance. They furnish manure and mould to warm the heart of the living garden. We do not, then, pretend to say that general culture is useless. It is indispensable as an auxiliary and a reserve, but as such only, and on condition that the general, superficial culture is accompanied by one or more sections of intensive culture. Alone, it has no value. If from the average level, we descend to the little gardens of the people, we now see, replacing rank but luxuriant grass, mere sickly growths already frozen by life. All the natural flora has been weeded out, and what was sown instead, in a soil poorly cleared and prepared, has been unable to come up because there was neither sun nor water. The sole interest of these ridiculous little kitchen-gardens is a tree, which is often tall and stately--some chestnut or linden. This is the trade in which the man has resolutely perfected himself. One of these trees alone is worth all the general cultures which have relegated it to a stony corner. It dominates them by its utility and by its beauty.