That which is true of geography applies with still greater force to such subjects as physics and chemistry, since the abstract conceptions which these sciences involve are more abstruse, and the language by which the conceptions are expressed or defined far less plain than is the case with the older and more descriptive branch of knowledge. Hence, as sciences, properly so called, that is, as philosophical systems, they have no place whatever in elementary education. But, underlying these systems, there is a great multitude of phenomena which a child can be led to observe and apprehend as readily as the facts of geography. Take that subject--mechanics--which our ordinary school-books very philosophically but most unpractically place at the beginning of what they call "Natural" Philosophy. How many of the fundamental facts of this difficult subject can be made familiar to a child? Select, as an example, Newton's "First Law of Motion." Suppose you make a boy memorize the ordinary rule, "Every body continues in a state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line until acted upon by some external force," how much will he know about it? Suppose you make him do a lot of problems involving distances, velocities, and times, will he know any more about it? But ask him, "Can you pitch a ball as well as your playmate?" and he answers at once, "No; John is stronger than I am." And then, if again you ask, "Can you catch John's ball?" he will probably reply, "Of course, not! It requires a boy as strong as John to catch his balls." And thus, by a few well-directed questions, you would bring that boy to learn a lesson which he would never forget, and which he would recall every time he played base-ball; namely, that John's swift balls could not be set in motion without an expenditure of a definite amount of muscular effort, and could not be stopped without the exertion of an equal amount of what, after a while, you could get him to call _force_. From the ball you would naturally pass to the railroad train or the steamboat, and I should not wonder if, with a little patience, you could bring even a boy to understand that motion can not be maintained against a resistance, in other words, that work can not be done without a constant expenditure of muscular effort, or of some other source of power; and it is a fond hope of mine that by the time these boys grow into men our intelligent New England community might become so far educated in the elementary principles of mechanics that no self-sustained motors, nor other mechanical nostrums which claim to have superseded the primeval curse--if that law was a curse, which compels man to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow--will receive the sanction of our respectable journals; and then--if they have not previously learned the lesson by dire experience--we may hope to persuade our people of the parallel and equally elementary principle of political economy, that value can not be legislated into rags.