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Second only to the good effect of this study on the logical faculty, seems to me to be its effect on the imagination. Not merely in such objects as the pebble, whose history I have so hastily, but I must add faithfully, sketched; but in the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land. And I beg my elder hearers not to look on this as light praise. Imagination is a valuable thing; and even if it were not, it is a thing, a real thing, a faculty which every one has, and with which you must do something. You cannot ignore it; it will assert its own existence. You will be wise not to neglect it in young children; for if you do not provide wholesome food for it, it will find unwholesome food for itself. I know that many, especially men of business, are inclined to sneer at it, and ask what is the use of it? The simple answer is, God has made it; and He has made nothing in vain. But you will find that in practice, in action, in business, imagination is a most useful faculty, and is so much mental capital, whensoever it is properly trained. Consider but this one thing, that without imagination no man can possibly invent even the pettiest object; that it is one of the faculties which essentially raises man above the brutes, by enabling him to create for himself; that the first savage who ever made a hatchet must have imagined that hatchet to himself ere he began it; that every new article of commerce, every new opening for trade, must be arrived at by acts of imagination; by the very same faculty which the poet or the painter employs, only on a different class of objects; remember that this faculty is present in some strength in every mind of any power, in every mind which can do more than follow helplessly in the beaten track, and do nothing but what it has seen others do already: and then see whether it be not worth while to give the young a study which above all others is fitted to keep this important and universal faculty in health. Now, from fifty to five-and-twenty years ago, under the influence of the Franklin and Edgeworth school of education, imagination was at a discount. That school was a good school enough: but here was one of its faults. It taught people to look on imagination as quite a useless, dangerous, unpractical, bad thing, a sort of mental disease. And now, as is usual after an unfair depreciation of anything, has come a revolution; and an equally unfair glorifying of the imagination; the present generation have found out suddenly that the despised faculty is worth something, and therefore are ready to believe it worth everything; so that nowadays, to judge from the praise heaped on some poets, the mere possession of imagination, however ill regulated, will atone for every error of false taste, bad English, carelessness for truth; and even for coarseness, blasphemy, and want of common morality; and it is no longer charity, but fancy, which is to cover the multitude of sins.

The fact is, that youth will always be the period of imagination; and the business of a good education will always be to prevent that imagination from being thrown inward, and producing a mental fever, diseasing itself and the whole character by feeding on its own fancies, its own day dreams, its own morbid feelings, its likes and dislikes; even if it do not take at last to viler food, to French novels, and lawless thoughts, which are but too common, alas! though we will not speak of them here.

To turn the imagination not inwards, but outwards; to give it a class of objects which may excite wonder, reverence, the love of novelty and of discovering, without heating the brain or exciting the passions–this is one of the great problems of education; and I believe from experience that the study of natural history supplies in great part what we want. The earnest naturalist is pretty sure to have obtained that great need of all men, to get rid of self. He who, after the hours of business, finds himself with a mind relaxed and wearied, will not be tempted to sit at home dreaming over impossible scenes of pleasure, or to go for amusement to haunts of coarse excitement, if he have in every hedge-bank, and wood land, and running stream, in every bird among the boughs, and every cloud above his head, stores of interest which will enable him to forget awhile himself, and man, and all the cares, even all the hopes of life, and to be alone with the inexhaustible beauty and glory of Nature, and of God who made her. An hour or two every day spent after business-hours in botany, geology, entomology, at the telescope or the microscope, is so much refreshment gained for the mind for to-morrow’s labour, so much rest for irritated or anxious feelings, often so much saved from frivolity or sin. And how easy this pursuit. How abundant the subjects of it! Look round you here. Within the reach of every one of you are wonders beyond all poets’ dreams. Not a hedge-bank but has its hundred species of plants, each different and each beautiful; and when you tire of them–if you ever can tire–a trip into the meadows by the Thames, with the rich vegetation of their dikes, floating flower-beds of every hue, will bring you as it were into a new world, new forms, new colours, new delight. You ask why this is? And you find yourself at once involved in questions of soil and climate, which lead you onward, step by step, into the deepest problems of geology and chemistry. In entomology, too, if you have any taste for the beauties of form and colour, any fondness for mechanical and dynamical science, the insects, even to the smallest, will supply endless food for such likings; while their instincts and their transformations, as well as the equally wondrous chemical transformation of salts and gases into living plants, which agricultural chemistry teaches you, will tempt you to echo every day Mephistopheles’s magic song, when he draws wine out of the table in Auersbach’s cellar: