It is curious that the like relations hold with the mind.  Among mental as among bodily acquisitions, the ornamental comes before the useful.  Not only in times past, but almost as much in our own era, that knowledge which conduces to personal well-being has been postponed to that which brings applause.  In the Greek schools, music, poetry, rhetoric, and a philosophy which, until Socrates taught, had but little bearing upon action, were the dominant subjects; while knowledge aiding the arts of life had a very subordinate place.  And in our own universities and schools at the present moment, the like antithesis holds.  We are guilty of something like a platitude when we say that throughout his after-career, a boy, in nine cases out of ten, applies his Latin and Greek to no practical purposes.  The remark is trite that in his shop, or his office, in managing his estate or his family, in playing his part as director of a bank or a railway, he is very little aided by this knowledge he took so many years to acquire—­so little, that generally the greater part of it drops out of his memory; and if he occasionally vents a Latin quotation, or alludes to some Greek myth, it is less to throw light on the topic in hand than for the sake of effect.  If we inquire what is the real motive for giving boys a classical education, we find it to be simply conformity to public opinion.  Men dress their children’s minds as they do their bodies, in the prevailing fashion.  As the Orinoco Indian puts on paint before leaving his hut, not with a view to any direct benefit, but because he would be ashamed to be seen without it; so, a boy’s drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted on, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them—­that he may have “the education of a gentleman”—­the badge marking a certain social position, and bringing a consequent respect.

This parallel is still more clearly displayed in the case of the other sex.  In the treatment of both mind and body, the decorative element has continued to predominate in a greater degree among women than among men.  Originally, personal adornment occupied the attention of both sexes equally.  In these latter days of civilisation, however, we see that in the dress of men the regard for appearance has in a considerable degree yielded to the regard for comfort; while in their education the useful has of late been trenching on the ornamental.  In neither direction has this change gone so far with women.  The wearing of earrings, finger-rings, bracelets; the elaborate dressings of the hair; the still occasional use of paint; the immense labour bestowed in making habiliments sufficiently attractive; and the great discomfort that will be submitted to for the sake of conformity; show how greatly, in the attiring of women, the desire of approbation overrides the desire for warmth and convenience.  And similarly in their education, the immense preponderance of “accomplishments”