the face of the friends of scientific education as a final refutation of their case. It was a victory of the classicists simply because it gave them every thing they asked. If they could have classical studies assured on such a scale as Mr. Mill proposed, there was no longer any fear of scientific encroachment. Already in possession of the appliances of education in existing institutions, if his programme is accepted, they will always remain in possession. Mr. Mill said, "Why not both?" But his argument was a practical surrender to one side, because, on his scale of study there is not time for both, and the party that comes first gets all.
The question now arises, Was this exalted estimate of classical studies the result of an impartial survey of the field of knowledge and an equal appreciation of science, or of an overwhelming bias produced by a one-sided training, of which Mr. Mill had been the victim in his youth? The Autobiography here comes to our assistance, and we learn from it the following extraordinary facts:
Mr. Mill's father was a man of great intellectual vigor, and a disciplined scholar, and he determined to make his son an example of the most thorough and perfect form of education. Critical, vigilant, and exacting, he took entire charge of the boy's studies. Fortunately, the lad had great native capacity, and a fine, tenacious organization, and his proficiency equaled his father's efforts and expectations. At three years old he commenced the study of Greek, and only faintly remembers going through Esop's "Fables" in that language. He then read the "Anabasis," and, before he was eight years old, he had read all the nine books of Herodotus, the first six "Dialogues" of Plato, all Xenophon's "Cyropædia," the "Memorabilia" of Socrates, and portions of Diogenes Laertius, Lucian, and Isocrates. During this time he also learned arithmetic, and read the histories of Robertson, Hume, Gibbon, Watson, Hooke, Rollin, Burnet, Langhorne's Plutarch, Millar's "Historical View of the English Government," Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, and various other ponderous books; nor were these merely cursory or desultory readings. His father required every day a full account of what he had read. Notes, abridgments, and synoptical statements, had to be made, and in their daily walks the father enforced the lessons, and gave him explanations and ideas on various questions of civilization, government, mental philosophy, and morality; and all this the son was required afterward to reproduce in his own words.
Amazing as was the work done up to his eighth year, it increased, in a most oppressive ratio, in the next four years. English and Greek being not sufficient, he now went into Latin, and, as he acquired it, taught it to his brothers and sisters. Between his eighth and twelfth year, he read Virgil, Horace, part of Livy, the whole of Sallust, parts of Ovid, Terence, Lucretius, Cicero, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," one or two Greek plays, the whole of Thucydides, Aristotle's "Rhetoric," Tacitus, Juvenal, Quintilian, and the principal "Dialogues" of Plato. From ten to eleven he wrote a "History of Rome" that would have filled an octavo volume. He also learned elementary geometry, algebra, the differential calculus, and other parts of the higher mathematics. Logic, and the "Organon" of Aristotle, had not been neglected; and, at thirteen, he corrected the proof-sheets of his father's "History of India," and went through with him a complete course of political economy, being required to correct "the more superficial views of Adam Smith by the superior lights of Ricardo." Of course, the boy was kept to the inexorable drill, upon subjects selected by his father; but, in his spontaneous reading,
