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We come now to the third great division of human activities—­a division for which no preparation whatever is made.  If by some strange chance not a vestige of us descended to the remote future save a pile of our school-books or some college examination papers, we may imagine how puzzled an antiquary of the period would be on finding in them no sign that the learners were ever likely to be parents.  “This must have been the curriculum for their celibates,” we may fancy him concluding.  “I perceive here an elaborate preparation for many things; especially for reading the books of extinct nations and of co-existing nations (from which indeed it seems clear that these people had very little worth reading in their own tongue); but I find no reference whatever to the bringing up of children.  They could not have been so absurd as to omit all training for this gravest of responsibilities.  Evidently then, this was the school-course of one of their monastic orders.”

Seriously, is it not an astonishing fact, that though on the treatment of offspring depend their lives or deaths, and their moral welfare or ruin; yet not one word of instruction on the treatment of offspring is ever given to those who will by and by be parents?  Is it not monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to the chances of unreasoning custom, impulse, fancy—­joined with the suggestions of ignorant nurses and the prejudiced counsel of grandmothers?  If a merchant commenced business without any knowledge of arithmetic and book-keeping, we should exclaim at his folly, and look for disastrous consequences.  Or if, before studying anatomy, a man set up as a surgical operator, we should wonder at his audacity and pity his patients.  But that parents should begin the difficult task of rearing children, without ever having given a thought to the principles—­physical, moral, or intellectual—­which ought to guide them, excites neither surprise at the actors nor pity for their victims.

To tens of thousands that are killed, add hundreds of thousand that survive with feeble constitutions, and millions that grow up with constitutions not so strong as they should be; and you will have some idea of the curse inflicted on their offspring by parents ignorant of the laws of life.  Do but consider for a moment that the regimen to which children are subject, is hourly telling upon them to their life-long injury or benefit; and that there are twenty ways of going wrong to one way of going right; and you will get some idea of the enormous mischief that is almost everywhere inflicted by the thoughtless, haphazard system in common use.  Is it decided that a boy shall be clothed in some flimsy short dress, and be allowed to go playing about with limbs reddened by cold?  The decision will tell on his whole future existence—­either in illnesses; or in stunted growth; or in deficient energy; or in a maturity less vigorous than it ought to have been, and in consequent