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my stay I met one youth who told me that for fourteen years the hypothetical language had been almost the only thing that he had been taught, although he had never (to his credit, as it seemed to me) shown the slightest aptitude towards it, while he had been endowed with not inconsiderable abilities for several other branches of human learning. He assured me that he would never open another hypothetical book after he had taken his degree, but would follow out the bent of his own inclinations. This was well enough, but who could give him his fourteen years back again?

The Erewhonians must reap harm from such a system; but they cannot see it. They are like a man who has had an income of a hundred a year all his life when he might as easily have had double, only he does not know it. He never has had double, therefore he does not feel his loss.

I sometimes wondered how it was that the mischief done was so little apparent as it was, and that the young men and women grew up as sensible and goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Many doubtless received irreparable damage, from which they suffered to their life's end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost the better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what the teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it. The consequence was the boys only lost their time, and not so much of this as might have been expected, for in their hours of leisure they were actively engaged in exercises and sports which de-