manly way.  But if we think more justly, we shall find that they are engaged in the most serious and important study; and if they had all the reason of a philosopher, they could not be more properly employed.  For it is this childish employment that enables them to make the proper use of their eyes.  They are thereby every day acquiring habits of perception, which are of greater importance than any thing we can teach them.  The original perceptions which nature gave them are few, and insufficient for the purposes of life; and, therefore, she made them capable of many more perceptions by habit.  And to complete her work, she has given them an unwearied assiduity in applying to the exercise by which those perceptions are acquired.”

Such is the education which nature gives her children, and we may add that another part of her discipline is, that by the course of things, children must exert all their muscular force, and employ all their ingenuity, in order to gratify their curiosity and satisfy their little appetites.  What they desire is only to be obtained at the cost of labour, patience, and many disappointments.  By the exercise of the body and mind necessary for satisfying their desires, they acquire agility, strength, and dexterity in their motions, as well as constitutional health and vigour; they learn to bear pain without dejection, and disappointment without despondency.  The education of nature is most perfect in savages, who have no other tutor; and we see that in the quickness of all their senses, in the agility of their motions, in the hardiness of their constitutions, and in their ability to bear hunger, thirst, pain, and disappointment, they commonly far exceed civilized nations.  On this account, a most ingenious writer seems to prefer savage to social life.  But it is the intention of nature, that human education should assist to form the man, and she has fitted us for it, by the natural principles of imitation and belief, which discover themselves almost in infancy, as well as by others which are of later growth.

When the education which we receive from men does not give scope to that of nature, it is erroneous in its means and its tendency, and enervates both the body and the mind.  Nature has her way of rearing men, as she has of healing their maladies.  The art of education is to follow her dictates, and the art of education is equally to obey her laws.  The ancient inhabitants of the Baleares followed nature in their manner of teaching their children to be good archers, when they hung their dinner aloft by a thread, and left them to bring it down:  by their skill in the use of the bow.

The education of nature, without any more human care than is necessary to preserve life, makes a savage.  Human education joined to that of nature, may make a good citizen, a skilful artizan, or a well-bred man; but a higher power is wanting in order to produce a Bacon or a Newton.