Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 April 1887 — Powers of the Coining Brain. [ARTICLE]

Powers of the Coining Brain.

We say that education is a process of training and furnishing the mind; but what is the mind? That its ultimate essence is an ethereal something, without weight or dimension, we believe; but this is beyond the province of practical education. The brain, for all practical purposes, is what we are called upon to educate. By studying this organ we find that it is composed of fibers, curiously and orderly arranged, and that the quality of mind in the lower animals and man is determined by the number of its convolutions and the fineness of its texture. Could the brains of all the orders of animals, from a single nerve-center to the highest type of a human brain, be arranged in order before us, we should have an illustrated history of a mind. During long successions of aons the brains have been developing from the simplest convolution of nerves to the best brain yet evolved. All this, we believe, has been “worked up” under the guidance of a supreme power, whose guiding hand has been active through all the ages in the multitudinous forms of progressive animal and vegetable life, until'we hold to-day the advanced position we now occupy. But creation is on an onward march, and education hastens it forward. At no time in the history of the physical universe has mind occupied so high a place, whether we regard its quality or quantity, and at no time in the future will it occupy so low a place as now. The powers of the coming brain will far exceed anything the world has yet known. —School Journal.

Charlemagne, at a very advanced age, acquired the art of writing, an unusual accomplishment, except among churchmen, in those days.