PLUTARCH ON THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN.--In his "Morals," Plutarch gives a dissertation on the training of children, the first portion of which deals with stirpiculture in the limited sense of the term, but is very inadequate. Indeed, the only advice he gives is that a man should not keep company with harlots or concubines, because children by them are "blemished in their birth" by their base extraction; and that no man should "keep company with his wife for issue's sake but when he is sober," lest he beget a drunkard. The main portion of Plutarch's treatise is concerned with the education of children, which is the second part of stirpiculture as a system of complete cultivation. Introductory to the subject of education he speaks of nursing, to which he attaches much importance. Plutarch insists on the necessity of mothers nursing their own children; nature, by providing them with two breasts, showing them that they can nurse even twins. But if they cannot, they are to choose the best nurses they can get, and such as are bred after the Greek fashion. For, "as it is needful that the members of children should be shaped aright as soon as they are born, that they may not afterwards prove crooked and distorted, so it is no less expedient that their manners be well fashioned from the very beginning; for childhood is a tender thing, and easily wrought into any shape." After referring to the importance of the choice of good companions for a child, Plutarch proceeds to consider the question of education, which he speaks of as the matter of most concern. As to education in general, he points out that a concurrence of three things is necessary to the "completing of virtue in practice," which is the aim of that process, that is: Nature, reason or learning, and use or exercise; For, "if nature be not improved by instruction, it is blind; if instruction be not assisted by nature, it is maimed; and if exercise fail of the assistance of both, it is imperfect as to the attainment of its end." There cannot be "instruction"--a term which is here used as equivalent to "education," although the latter has a wider signification than the former, and being equivalent to mental cultivation,--without a teacher, and Plutarch says well, "we are to look after such masters for our children as are blameless in their lives, not justly reprovable for their manners, and of the best experience in teaching. For the very spring and root of honesty and virtue lies in the felicity of lighting on good education." He is, indeed, so much impressed with its value that he affirms: "The one chief thing in this matter--which compriseth the beginning, middle and end of all--is good education and regular instruction." These two "afford great help and assistance towards the attainment of virtue and felicity." He adds: "Learning alone, of all things in our possession, is immortal and divine."