Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 April 1887 — Powers of the Coming Brain. [ARTICLE]

Powers of the Coming 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 ns, we should have an illustrated history of a mind. During long successions of icons the brains have been developing from the simplest convolution of nerves to tha best brain yet evolved. All this, we believe, has been “worked np” under the guidance of a supreme power, whose guiding hand has been active throngh 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 h gh a place, whether we regard its quality or quantity, and at no time in the future will it qccupy so low a place as „ : ow. The powers of the coming brain will far exceed anything the world has yet known.— School Jou.nal.