In nothing is this more the case than in the very class of works in which of all others accuracy and truth are most requisite--are, indeed, indispensable--we mean what are now called juvenile books, school-books for the use of the young. These works are, unfortunately, rarely or never composed by men of science, men of historical knowledge, men of high general information, or literary standing, although--embracing, as they pretend to do, the whole range of human knowledge from astronomy and the direct sciences, through universal history to political economy, physical and moral philosophy, and philology--they, above all beside, should be the work of men of unerring accuracy in the statement of facts. Since it is easier to teach three new ideas to a mind unimpressed, than to eradicate from it one preconceived opinion, false or true. It is enough to say in this connection, that out of all the modern “histories for the young” we have ever seen--and we have seen scores, if not hundreds--we never read six successive pages which did not contain either a disgraceful blunder as to fact, or a more disgraceful perversion of facts to meet popular prejudices or popular passions. In the pseudoscientific text-books, sheer stupidity and ignorance produce the same effects. All this class of books, as a rule, are worse than worthless; and we had far rather see the rising generation return to “Mother Goose,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Cinderella,” and thence to “Sandford and Merton,” Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, and works and writers of the like calibre, until fit to commence the real study of real history and real science, than have them stuffed with such farragoes of imbecility, reckless assertion, and plausible falsehood--under the plea of knowledge made popular--as, for instance, most of “The Histories for the Young,” which afford a perfect type of the class of works, to which we have just alluded. To this train of thought we have been led, by observing the pertinacious and absurd folly, on the part of all the writers on the subject before us, of ascribing the art of wood-engraving and printing, to every nation which never possessed it, and the invention of it to none knows who. It really seems that to these worthies it is quite argument enough to say, because the Chinese, Egyptians, Phœnicians, Greeks, or Romans did _not_ possess such an art, but _did_ possess such another, therefore they _must_ have possessed that which they did not possess. Thus--because the Egyptians made wooden moulds with reversed characters or figures, wherein to make fictile bricks, jars, or other implements--they possessed the art of wood-engraving and printing.