If we follow education, upward from the primary school we find the same defect throughout the whole course. In the books which are used in teaching natural science it is especially prominent. Even in the elementary books, or compendiums, so called, formal propositions and technical terms render the study uninviting, and to a great extent unintelligible. The pupil is apt to be disgusted and discouraged, as Webster was with Coke on Littleton, and for the same reason. Another defect intimately connected with that of which I have spoken is the very sparing and late introduction of the physical sciences. They are generally postponed to the latter part of the course of education, and then but little time is devoted to them. Generally, when a pupil designs to go through college, the study of these sciences is wholly neglected in his preparation, because a knowledge of them is not required for admission. Then in the college they are not attended to till the latter part of the course, and in the short time allotted to them there is so much to be learned that the teaching of them is a failure. Especially is this true of Chemistry and Geology. This defect is a _radical_ one. A thorough change should be effected in this respect in the whole course of education. The natural sciences should be made prominent from the beginning to the end, not only because they are of practical value, but also because they are as useful in their way for mental discipline as the study of mathematics and of language. They can be taught to some little extent to the youngest pupils. There are facts about air, water, and the various objects that they see around them, which they can understand if they be presented in the right manner. And the busy inquiries which they make after the reasons of the facts, and their appreciation of them if stated simply and without technical terms, show the appropriateness of such teaching. Children are really very good philosophers in their way. They have great activity not only of their perceptive but of their reasoning faculties also, to which due range should be given in their education. Beginning thus, not a year should pass during the whole course when the pupil shall not be engaged in studying some one of the physical sciences to some extent. This continued attention to such studies in a reasonable amount, so far from interfering with the due prosecution of the other studies deemed so essential, _will so promote the pupil's advance in them as to more than make up for the time that is taken from them_. It will do this not only by the genial influence which such studies exert upon the mind, but by the contributions which they make to the knowledge of language and mathematics; for language is largely built up from natural objects and from the acquisitions of science, and there is an abundance of interesting applications of portions of the mathematics in the facts which the physical sciences develop to us.