It is true that education can seem to accomplish miracles; that in a single generation the results of an ideal education would be amazing. It is true, also, that in certain epochs of history, when wise counsels have prevailed, great results have been attained. It is true that at present scarcely a man or woman amongst us, if any, has reached the full stature which would have been attained under an ideal system of education. It is true, finally, that no system of race-culture can ignore education or be effective without it. Though the general question of education is not the specific question of the present volume, yet there is only too good reason for some brief allusion to the subject here, especially since it bears on the question of the measure of importance which we ascribe to heredity. =Modern education--the destruction of mind.=--When we observe in such contrasted cases as those of Herbert Spencer and Wordsworth, for instance, that absence of early education, especially in the first septennium, has co-existed with the subsequent efflorescence of the mightiest genius, we may almost be inclined to enquire whether genius could not in effect be made to order even in the very next generation by the simple device of suspending the process which we are pleased to call education. Doubtless that is scarcely so, though every one who has any knowledge of the subject is well assured that mere suspension of the present destructive process might suffice to produce a population that would wonder at its ancestors. A simple analogy will show the disastrous character of the present process, which may be briefly described as “education” by cram and emetic. It is as if you filled a child's stomach to repletion with marbles, pieces of coal and similar material incapable of digestion--the more worthless the material the more accurate the analogy: then applied an emetic and estimated your success by the completeness with which everything was returned, more especially if it was returned “unchanged,” as the doctors say. Just so do we cram the child's mental stomach, its memory, with a selection of dead facts of history and the like (at least when they are not fictions) and then apply a violent emetic called an examination (which like most other emetics causes much depression) and estimate our success by the number of statements which the child vomits on to the examination paper--if the reader will excuse me. Further, if we are what we usually are, we prefer that the statements shall come back “unchanged”--showing no signs of mental digestion. We call this “training the memory.”