ON SUPERIOR AND POPULAR EDUCATION.*

GENTLEMEN OF THE ADELPHIC UNION,-I feel scarcely warranted, at this late hour, in taking up much of your time. The day belongs properly to those, who, having completed their academic course, have presented themselves upon the public stage, in the presence of kindred, friends, and a gratified audience, to be dismissed with collegiate honors, to the active duties of life, or to the more immediate preparation for its professional pursuits. I have scarce a right to take to myself any portion of the precious time, to which they have the first claim. Besides, I feel too deeply interested in the scene, as a spectator, to desire a more active part in the duties of the day. It recalls to me, fresh as yesterday, the time, now more than a quarter of a century past, when, like you, young gentlemen, who are about to take your degrees, I also stood upon the threshold of life, full of the hopes, the visions, the enthusiasm, of youth. These scholastic exercises, these learned tongues, these academic forms, touch a chord of sympathy in my bosom. Personally a stranger to most of those whom I have the honor to address, I feel as if, on literary ground, (and I am sure that no one, on this occasion, can expect me to occupy any other,) I may come as an acquaintance, as a friend; that I may

even

"Claim kindred there, and have the claim allowed."

Nature seems to breathe peace, in concert with the character of the day; and, within these quiet valleys, shut out, by the perpetual hills, from the struggling world, she invites us, with her most soothing voice, to kind feeling, to cheerful discourse, and to calm thought.

* An Address delivered before the Adelphic Union Society of Williams College, on Commencement Day, August 16, 1837.

Nor are the historical recollections around us less animating and joyous. The pleasant village, where we are assembled, contains, within view of the spot where we stand, the site of Fort Hoosac, and, a mile or two east of us, stood Fort Massachusetts. The plough has passed over its rude lines; but what scenes of humble heroism and almost forgotten valor are associated with its name! It was the bulwark of the frontier, in the days of its infancy. The trembling mother, on the banks of the Connecticut, and in the heart of Worcester, clasped her babes closer, at an idle rumor, that Fort Massachusetts had given way. A hundred villages reposed in the strength of this stout guardian of New England's Thermopyla, through which, for two generations, the French and Canadian foe strove to burst into the colonies. These are recollections of an early day. A few miles to the north of us lies that famous field of Bennington, to which, sixty years ago, this day and this hour, your fathers poured, from every village in the neighborhood, at the summons of Stark. While we meet together, to enjoy, in peace, the blessings for which they shed their blood, let us pour out upon the academic altar, one libation of grateful feeling to their memory.

But, though I would most willingly have continued a gratified listener, my engagements to you, gentlemen of the Adelphic Union, require, that I should trespass, for a short time, upon the patience of the audience, even at this late hour, with the utterance of some thoughts on that subject, which, upon an anniversary like this, may be regarded as the only peculiarly appropriate topic of discourse. I mean the subject of education. I know, it is a worn theme; as old as the first dawnings of imparted knowledge in the infancy of the world, and familiar to the contemplation of every succeeding age, even to the present time. But it still remains, for us, a topic of unabated and ever urgent interest. Although it is a subject on which philosophers, of every age, have largely discoursed, so far from being exhausted, it prob

ably never presented itself to the human mind under so many new and important aspects, as at the present day, and, I may add, in these United States. I may safely appeal to every person who hears me, and who is in the habit of reflecting at all on the character of the age in which we live, whether, next to what directly concerns the eternal welfare of man, there is any subject, which he deems of more vital importance, than the great problem, how the whole people can be best educated. If the answer of the patriot and statesman, to this appeal, were doubtful, I might still more safely inquire of every considerate parent who hears me, whether the education of his children, their education for time and eternity, (for, as far as human means are concerned, these objects are intimately connected,) is not among the things which are first, last, and most anxiously, upon his mind.

It is not, however, my purpose, to engage in a general discussion of the subject. I could not do so, without repeating what I have advanced, on former similar occasions, and what I cannot deem of sufficient importance, to be said over again. Indeed, if I wished to express, most forcibly, the importance, the dignity, and the obligation of the great work of education, I believe it might best be done, by taking our stand, at once, on the simple enunciation of the spiritual and immortal nature of the thing to be educated, the mind of man. Then, if we wished to give life and distinctness to the ideas of the importance of education, which result from this contemplation, we might do so by a single glance at the number and importance of the branches of knowledge, to which education furnishes the key. I might allude to the admirable properties of language, which it is the first business of education to impart; the wonders of the written and spoken tongue, as the instrument of thought, wonders, which daily use scarcely divests of their almost miraculous character. I might glance at that which is usually next taught to the unfolding mind, the astonishing power of the science of numbers, with

which, on the one hand, we regulate the humblest details of domestic economy, and, on the other, compute the swiftness of the solar beam, and survey and as it were stake out, from constellation to constellation, the great rail-road of the heavens, on which the comet comes blazing upward from the depths of the universe. I might proceed with the branches of knowledge to which education introduces us, and ask of geography, to marshal before us the living nations; and of history, to rouse the generations of the elder world, from their pompous mausoleums or humble graves, to rehearse their fortunes. I might call on natural science, to open the volumes in which she has not merely written down the names, the forms, and the qualities, of the various subjects of the animal, vegetable, and mineral, world, now in existence, the vast census, if I may so express it, of the three kingdoms of Nature; but where she has also recorded the catalogues of her perished children, races of the animal and vegetable world, buried beneath the everlasting rocks. The discoveries recently made in the science of geology are of a truly wonderful character. Winged creatures, twenty feet in height, whose footsteps have lately been discovered, imprinted in sandstone, on the banks of Connecticut River; enormous mammoths and mastodons, of which no living type has existed since the flood, brought to light from blocks of Siberian ice, or dug up in the morasses of our own continent; petrified skeletons of crocodiles and megatheria, seventy feet in length, covered with scales like the armadillo, and which for ages on ages have been extinct; have, by the creative power of educated mind, been made to start, as it were, out of the solid rock. Sandstone and gypsum have oped their ponderous and marble jaws, and a host of monstrous forms have risen into day, the recovered monuments of a world of lost giants.

The description which Professor Buckland has given us of the fossil plants, found in the coal strata at Swina, near Prague, in Bohemia, is one of the most instruc

tive and beautiful, to be found in the whole range of science. He speaks as an eyewitness. "The most elaborate imitations of living foliage, upon the painted ceilings of Italian palaces, bear no comparison with the beauteous profusion of extinct vegetable forms, with which the galleries of these instructive coal-mines are overhung. The roof is covered, as with a canopy of gorgeous tapestry, enriched with festoons of most graceful foliage, flung, in wild, irregular profusion, over every portion of its surface. The effect is heightened by the contrast of the coal-black color of these vegetables with the light groundwork of the rock to which they are attached. The spectator feels himself transported, as if by enchantment, into the forests of another world; he beholds trees, of forms and characters now unknown upon the surface of the earth, presented to his senses, almost in the beauty and vigor of their primeval life; their scaly stems and bending branches, with their delicate apparatus of foliage, are all spread forth before him; little impaired by the lapse of countless ages, and bearing faithful records of extinct systems of vegetation, which began and terminated in times, of which these relics are the infallible historians."*

Nor is the account given by Cuvier, of his discoveries of fossil remains of animals, less striking. It is owing more, perhaps, to the sagacity of this philosopher, than to that of any other individual, that our views of a primitive world have assumed the form of a science. The gypsum quarries, in the neighborhood of Paris, abound with fossil bones. The museums and cabinets in that city were filled with them; but no attempt had been made to arrange them into forms, or give them the names of the particular animals to which they belonged. A cursory survey satisfied Cuvier, that many of them belonged to races no longer in existence. "I at length found myself," says he, "as if placed in a charnel-house, surrounded by mutilated fragments of