whom science teaches nothing; they reap its material advantages, but repudiate all its higher lessons. Practically they hold to the unalterable uniformities of nature. They ply the arts of industry, telegraph around the world, trust their lives on the flying train, and in a thousand exposures, practically certain that there will never be a hair's breadth of failure in the adamantine order of natural laws; and then they formulate a belief in ghosts who can kick holes through the rotten contexture of nature anywhere! Such beliefs are pernicious, not only because they are intrinsically false and absurd, but because they are in vicious hostility to science, and are a fatal obstruction to the advance of rational education. That science, as the most perfect form of knowledge, and therefore the true basis of education, has never had even decent consideration in the New York schools, is sufficiently well known; nor is the explanation far to seek, when their head turns out to be a spiritualist, and opens his book of revelations by the virtual announcement that he is miraculously called of God to arrest the course of modern scientific thought! If it be said that this is only the private eccentricity of a single person, the reply is, that we have yet to learn that it is not representative of the power that controls education in this city. The President of the Board of Education is reported to have said, when interviewed with reference to the removal of the Superintendent, "The strong feeling against him in the minds of the Commissioners who are opposed to Mr. Kiddle, arises not so much from any desire to interfere with his private opinions about spiritualism, as practically to show their disapprobation of the vapid trash to which he lends his sanction as communications from the spirits of the departed." From which we are to infer that, if the aforesaid "communications from the spirits of the departed" had been a little less vapid or trashy in their form, the board of officers who have in charge the formation of the minds of the young in this metropolis would have no objection to them. Our objection is not merely or mainly to the worthless character of Mr. Kiddle's book, but that it is an official insult to science; and we say that the mind which could dally with such vagaries is not fit to guide and shape the education of the young. We do not suppose that the New York Board of Education is constituted of men who either know or care much about science, or sound principles of education; but, as a new question is forced upon them which they can not escape, we respectfully commend to their consideration the instructive article of Professor Wundt.
HARRIS ON SOCIAL SCIENCE.
Superintendent Harris, of St. Louis, has put forth an address on the "Method of Study in Social Science." The subject treated is important, and we took up his pamphlet hoping that, as an advanced educational leader, he had addressed himself to it with the practical view of determining the form and place it should take as a popular study in our American school system. We have long felt that it was desirable to have this done. Surely a State system of education, upon which millions are spent under the pretext that popular intelligence is necessary to the maintenance of free government, can not go on for ever ignoring all serious study of the natural laws of society, or the science of social relations. But we were disappointed. Mr. Harris gives us no help of the kind expected. On the contrary, his mode of dealing with the subject would seem to leave us no social science at all. He, however, speaks with an authority that is sure to give weight to his utterances, and it therefore becomes desirable to point out in what respect his views are misleading.
