speaks of the theory of types "as not open to investigation since it lies beyond the realm of human knowledge," and again he alludes to it as a supernatural rather than a natural explanation. Knowing as we do that the existence of God is within the scope of human reason, we need no extended argument to prove that in the great act of creation He is not without a purpose. He has certain ideas in the sense expounded by St. Thomas. Nothing more is needed to establish the doctrine of types. Dr. Conn finds a difficulty in our ignorance of the number of types and in the fact that what he takes to be types apparently run into one another. Here the difficulty truly enough is in the inadequacy of human reason, which from its very nature cannot know all that is in the Divine Mind; but we can know the grand fact without knowing the details. For example, we know that God created heaven and earth but we do not know to what extent He made use of what we call evolution, and our ignorance of this in no way impairs our knowledge of the fact of creation. Dr. Conn recognizes the possibility of a combination of the theory of types with evolution, but he seems to be haunted by a fear from which he cannot escape that a so-called supernatural explanation is not "scientific."

Although, as has been said, the archetypal idea is in God, its effect is in the creatures themselves, much as the law of attraction is in It determines the action of their substantial forms. All vertebrate species having a common plan, it is not in the least more wonderful that a variation should occur through homology than through heredity. Nay, if the variation be one that by the latter theory could come only from an ancestor who existed, if at all, ages ago, the former is infinitely more probable. To explain a bird-like peculiarity in man by heredity is absurd, by homology is not. True, we cannot tell by what mechanism it acts, neither can we tell how heredity acts in those cases in which its influence is undoubted. If to defend a theory it were necessary to demonstrate the details of its modus operandi, what would become of physical science?

The doctrine of types is particularly offensive to ultra-evolutionists, because it necessitates the recognition both of a Creator and of a God-given tendency in the created. It contradicts flatly the teaching, so dear to certain minds, that organized beings with man at their head started from low beginnings and, without definite tendency, somehow blundered into their present perfection.

We have now to meet the question whether the occurrence of anomalies is consistent with the view of the immediate creation of

author evidently endeavors to be fair and shows no signs of anti-religious bias, but he is influenced and his intelligence hampered by agnostic ideas.

1 Summa, Pl. Quæst. XV., Art. 2.

man's body, and of the stability of species. Showing, as these phenomena do, an undoubted tendency to variation, at first it seems that there is a contradiction, but it is very doubtful whether they can be quoted on either side. It is no new observation that nature presents a series of gradations; it is no new statement that man is an animal distinguished from other animals only by his soul. True, the soul, his substantial form, removes him, as Professor Mivart has remarked, further from the nearest brute than that brute is from a stone; none the less his body has the structure of an animal and the lower part of his nature is animal. Why, then, should not man's body, as well as other animals' bodies, be liable to vary? Why it should vary can be only guessed at, probably it is in consequence of an imperfection of animal (and vegetable) nature. But, be that as it may, the point of our contention is, that the assumption that anomalies of structure give evidence of descent, is entirely unjustified; and that if every animal had been created precisely as it is, still their common nature might, under certain (quite unknown) conditions, permit variations within certain limits defined by the laws of symmetry and homology. We have no desire to discuss the origin of man's body, and would not be understood to be arguing against the possibility of its derivation from an animal, which, it seems to us, may, in the want of a decision from Rome, be held as an hypothesis, provided always that reasonable probability should be discovered in its favor.

EDUCATION IN LOUISIANA IN FRENCH COLONIAL

DAYS.

I.

AST winter the Louisiana Education Society asked for original

LA essays on educational matters, wishing to obtain "the most

practical thought and careful thinking in this line."

The desire to receive practical information on this vitally important subject is a hopeful sign. For as soon as people say there is no more for them to learn, progress is at an end; or should any avenues of progress remain open to them, it will be of that species which a humorous native of a certain island, not unknown in song and story, graphically described as "progress to the rear."

Ignorance has been called the foundation of knowledge. An ignorant man has one advantage over an ill-educated man: he has nothing to unlearn. In a similar sense repentance may be the foundation of virtue; there is hope for the evil-doer who admits he has done wrong; while little good is expected of one who argues himself into the belief that wrong is right, and that there is nothing in him susceptible of improvement.

A philosopher of the Middle Ages reproached a conceited brother of the same craft with being unable to say "nescio." The reproach of St. Bernard to Abelard can scarcely be made to the above body, for if its members had seen no room for improvement in the methods employed with their sanction, they would not have sought to obtain "more practical thought in this line."

But none of our contemporary educators appear to have sought any light on early education in Louisiana. Perhaps they deem history a blank as to its educational aspect in Colonial and early American times. The itinerant lecturer, like the schoolmaster, has been "abroad" during the pleasant winters of Louisiana, and the business of this functionary seems to be to tell the rising generation that, despite the statemanship, military renown, and philanthropy of the past, the light that was in these regions was darkness. Why? Because there were no godless schools. The South was slow to introduce a system which came when Colonial days were over, and which experience has proved to be subversive of religion and morality, as indeed its originators intended it should be. (See Brownson's "Convert," chapters 7 and 8.)

We will endeavor to show some deeds of our predecessors "in this line," which perhaps may awaken in a few a desire to know more

of what was undertaken in the distant past, in the face of tremendous obstacles, that in this respect a tardy justice may be done to the "brave days of old." And some who imagine that nothing which they cannot remember was ever done for popular education in this State, may be glad to have brought under their notice the earliest efforts made to educate the youth of " Notre Chère Louisiane."

To elucidate this theme thoroughly, it would be well to give a synopsis of the history of Louisiana, the dynasties that took, but would not keep, for their crowns so fair a jewel, the men of renown who sojourned within her borders, the feats of arms done in her defence by loyal citizens and reclaimed privateers, the Indian wars raging almost without truce, the foreign and civil wars, the stockjobbing of Law, who was to create wealth, so to say, by the wand of a magician. These remarkable men, and deeds of valor, and banking bubbles, had their influence on education, and it would be a pleasing task to trace it in its various phases through administrative, municipal, religious, and domestic life. But all this will appear sufficiently for our purpose in the tenor of these pages.

II.

La Salle reached the Mississippi on April 6th, 1682. On the 9th, he baptized the country which he had explored by the sweetsounding name Louisiana, and his chaplain, in presence of twentythree French, eighteen Abnaki, ten Indian women, and three children, blessed Louisiana and dedicated it to God amid the roaring of cannon, the singing of hymns, and the recital of appropriate prayers. Five years later, La Salle was assassinated. Nothing was done to colonize the immense territory of which he had been viceroy. His grand discovery was almost forgotten, and the Father of Waters disappeared from the navigators' charts. When another famous mariner, Iberville, entered the great river by the gulf, March 2d, 1699, not a hut was to be seen. Sea-marsh and virgin forests greeted his eyes; but, as time wore on, mementos of the earlier sailors appeared. A letter, or speaking bark, from Tonti, and a breviary in which was written the name of a companion of La Salle, were given to Iberville by an Indian, and Tonti himself came, like a ghost from the past, to tell the mighty deeds of his brave but unfortunate master to the mariners now following up his discoveries.

Chevalier Tonti, La Salle's trusted friend, was known as "the Man of the Copper Hand." The loss of a hand in the wars in Sicily he had repaired by one made of copper.

The premature death of Sauvolle in Biloxi, and of Iberville in the West Indies, left the sole care of Louisiana to their brother Bienville, who became the founder of New Orleans and Mobile.

When Bienville, with unerring sagacity, selected on a bend of the great river the best site for a commercial emporium, he set fifty men (1718) to clear the soil of its rank vegetation and build huts of moss and wattles, roofed with bark and palmetto. In 1722, just as the capital had been transferred to Nouvelle-Orleans from the lonely beach of Biloxi, there were one hundred cabins scattered over the highest patches of the morass, and Charlevoix, who visited the embryo city, was touched by the spiritual destitution of the white settlers and the Indians whose camp-fires lit up the riverbanks and sparkled in the dense forests beyond the flimsy palisade. There was no need of schools. Few children, if any, had come to bless the dismal kraal in which the keen-eyed Charlevoix saw the nucleus of a populous and opulent city. In 1723 the Bishop of Quebec sent Franciscans to the white settlers, and in 1724 Jesuits came to evangelize the Indians. By 1726 many women had joined their husbands, and children were frolicking in the jungle and staring with terror in their wide eyes at the alligators that wriggled in the moat and the frogs that croaked forever in the slime. At that early date the sagacious Bienville was devising ways and means to furnish the Colony with good schools. He was too acute not to perceive that families would not establish permanent homes in the Colony unless educational facilities were provided for their children. A boys' school arose at once beside the warehouse that did duty for a church, and the first teacher that ever instructed the youth of Louisiana was Father Cecil, a Capuchin monk.

So far as I can learn, no picture or memorial of this pioneer of literary and scientific education exists in any college of Louisiana. In the university endowed by Mr. Tulane I saw pictures of several persons supposed to be connected with education in this State, but not one of them wore the friar's frock. And none of the wandering lecturers who so frequently come to enlighten Louisiana on her history and educational progress has begun at the beginning and told his audience of Father Cecil. And yet in giving a history of what rivermen call steamboating, any lecturer would tell of Robert Fulton, and search into his parentage, rightly believing that those who gave him being were glorified by his genius. They might say, like one of his biographers, that, though born of Irish parents, "his remote ancestors were probably of Scottish origin." Had the educationalists heard of Father Cecil, they might deem it "probable" that his "remote ancestors" were of New England, and himself a priest like Wyclif. But that they completely ignore Father Cecil, shows that they have never heard of him.

Bienville, anxious to root families to the soil, and knowing that 1 Mr. Rennick, who perhaps did not know that the remote Scotch were all Irish.