decorations. And when we remember that even among ourselves most think
more about the fineness of the fabric than its warmth, and more about
the cut than the convenience--when we see that the function is still
in great measure subordinated to the appearance, we have further
reason for inferring such an origin.

[Footnote 48: From "Education, Intellectual, Moral and Physical." By
permission of D. Appleton & Co.]

[Footnote 49: John H. Speke, who, in company with Sir Richard Burton,
visited the lakes of Central Africa in 1850, and crossed the
continent, discovering the Victoria Nyanza and the main source of the
Nile in 1860-63.]

It is not a little 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 his 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 educat