(_b_) The lecture, commonly gathered from various books in rapid notes by the teacher; and issuing in hasty notes, afterwards written out, and finally crammed up by the pupils. The lecture is often careful, thorough, and well-illustrated; but is it ever equal in educational value to direct contact with the original mind of one able thinker who has written his book on the subject? Arnold, Thring, Bowen, we know, lectured with great effect, but then each of them lectured on only a few subjects, and each lecture was as the breaking out of a spring of slowly gathered knowledge. We are not all Arnolds or even Bowens. (_c_) The text-book, compressed and re-compressed from one or many big books. These handbooks are of two kinds—the frankly dry and uninteresting, which enumerate facts and details; and the easy and beguiling. I think we are safe in saying that there is _no educational value_ in either sort of text-book. (_d_) The debauchery of the mind which comes of exciting other desires to do the work of the inherent and fully adequate desire of knowledge. (_e_) In elementary schools, the dependence upon apparatus and illustrative appliances which have a paralysing effect on the mind. (_f_) Again in elementary schools, the use of ‘Readers,’ which, however well selected, cannot have the value of consecutive works. =Education by Books.=—For the last twelve years we have tried the plan of bringing children up on _Books_ and _Things_, and, on the whole, the results are pleasing. The _average_ child studies with ‘delight.’ We do not say he will remember all he knows, but, to use a phrase of Jane Austen’s, he will have had his ‘imagination warmed’ in many regions of knowledge. =Blind Alleys.=—May I digress for a moment to raise a warning note against the following of blind alleys, whether in our educational thought or our methods. We do not, in the sphere of education, find hidden treasure by casual digging in the common roadways. Believing in evolution, we perceive that ideas also have their pedigree and their progeny and follow their own laws of generation. A learned and thoughtful Chinese will abstract himself from the outer world, separate himself from the ideas of others, and, when he has arrived at a due state of vacuity, take his writing-brushes and produce out of his inner consciousness—not anything that he has ever seen or heard of, or even imagined—but some hieroglyph of curves, rather pleasing and presentable if he happen to be an artist. This disconnected production he arbitrarily invests with the character of a symbol, and his fellows are willing to receive it as such, and it is duly hung in his Hall of Tablets.[23] Some of us perhaps know the flowing curves which stand for ‘happiness’ in this language of symbols.