“What a salvage! The long holidays, which are apt to hang on hand, would be more fully and usefully employed than schooldays, and in ways full of out-of-door delights. I see how it would work. Think of the dales of Yorkshire, where the vivid green of the mountain limestone forms a distinct line of junction with the dim tints of the heather on the millstone grit of the moors, of the innumerable rocky nests where the ferns of the limestone--hartstongue, limestone polypody, beech fern, and the rest--grow delicately green and perfect as if conserved under glass. Think of the endless ferns and mosses and the picturesque outlines of the slate, both in the Lake Country and in Wales. What collections the children might form, always having the geological formation of the district as the leading idea.” “You are getting excited, Mrs. Tremlow. For my part, I cannot rise to the occasion. It is dull to have ‘delicious!’ ‘delightful!’ ‘lovely!’ hailing about one’s ears, and to be out of it. Pray, do not turn me out for the admission, but my own feeling is strongly against this sort of dabbling in science. In this bird’s-eye view of geology, for instance, why in the world did you begin with the chalk? At least you might have started with, say, Cornwall.” “That is just one of the points where the line is to be drawn; you specialists do one thing thoroughly--begin at the beginning, if a beginning there is, and go on to the end, if life is long enough. Now, we contend that the specialist’s work should be laid on a wide basis of common information, which differs from science in this amongst other things--you take it as it occurs. A fact comes under your notice; you want to know why it is, and what it is; but its relations to other facts must settle themselves as time goes on, and the other facts turn up. For instance, a child of mine should know the ‘blackcap’ by its rich note and black upstanding headgear, and take his chance of ever knowing even the name of the family to which his friend belongs.” “And surely, Mr. Morris, you would teach history in the same way; while you are doing a county, or a ‘formation’--isn’t it?--you get fine opportunities for making history a real thing. For instance, supposing you are doing the--what is it?--of Dorsetshire? You come across Corfe Castle standing in a dip of the hills, like the trough between two waves, and how real you can make the story of the bleeding prince dragged over the downs at the heels of his horse.”