We are quite prepared to hear from many that all this is throwing away time and energy; and that children would be much better occupied in writing their copies or learning their pence-tables, and so fitting themselves for the business of life.  We regret that such crude ideas of what constitutes education, and such a narrow conception of utility, should still be prevalent.  Saying nothing on the need for a systematic culture of the perceptions and the value of the practices above inculcated as subserving that need, we are prepared to defend them even on the score of the knowledge gained.  If men are to be mere cits, mere porers over ledgers, with no ideas beyond their trades—­if it is well that they should be as the cockney whose conception of rural pleasures extends no further than sitting in a tea-garden smoking pipes and drinking porter; or as the squire who thinks of woods as places for shooting in, of uncultivated plants as nothing but weeds, and who classifies animals into game, vermin, and stock—­then indeed it is needless to learn anything that does not directly help to replenish the till and fill the larder.  But if there is a more worthy aim for us than to be drudges—­if there are other uses in the things around than their power to bring money—­if there are higher faculties to be exercised than acquisitive and sensual ones—­if the pleasures which poetry and art and science and philosophy can bring are of any moment; then is it desirable that the instinctive inclination which every child shows to observe natural beauties and investigate natural phenomena, should be encouraged.  But this gross utilitarianism which is content to come into the world and quit it again without knowing what kind of a world it is or what it contains, may be met on its own ground.  It will by and by be found that a knowledge of the laws of life is more important than any other knowledge whatever—­that the laws of life underlie not only all bodily and mental processes, but by implication all the transactions of the house and the street, all commerce, all politics, all morals—­and that therefore without a comprehension of them, neither personal nor social conduct can be rightly regulated.  It will eventually be seen too, that the laws of life are essentially the same throughout the whole organic creation; and further, that they cannot be properly understood in their complex manifestations until they have been studied in their simpler ones.  And when this is seen, it will be also seen that in aiding the child to acquire the out-of-door information for which it shows so great an avidity, and in encouraging the acquisition of such information throughout youth, we are simply inducing it to store up the raw material for future organisation—­the facts that will one day bring home to it with due force, those great generalisations of science by which actions may be rightly guided.