N the days of the schoolmen, when no question went without its fair showing, it seems incredible that the proposition hereto as a title provoked no reasoning from any of those musty and hair-splitting philosophers. Aristotle himself overlooked it; Duns Scotus and the Aureolus Philip Theophrastus de Hohenheim Paracelsus were content to repeat his sin of . Even that seventeenth-century English essayist and scholar, "whose understanding was wide as the terrene firmament," neither the origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way to uphold or it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an Oriental , and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in , and where their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.  
It is reserved, therefore, for some modern inquirer to fix it, for certain, whether the strange in mind was at any time, in any nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, Pythonesses, Sibyls, and such secretive and oracular folk; whether the lessons were theoretical merely, and at what age the grandams (for the condition of hypermaternity was at least imperative) were allowed to matriculate themselves in the precincts of this lost art.
 
It is a partial argument against the of the custom, and against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's tribes, that several of these are accused by historians of having destroyed their so soon as the latter became idle and enfeebled; whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would have kept the fireside peopled with happy and centenarians. After the of their long lives, this new, , immeasurably mild and genteel trade could be acquired with imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo leading hosts when past his nonage, are kittenish and irreverend figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother learning, with energy, to suck eggs.
 
We know not why the privilege of education, if granted to them without question, should have been from their gray , who certainly would have preferred so an industry to the knives of the hunters, or tending watch-fires by night. But no one of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. The gentle art was sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld from the shaggy lords-77- of creation, until the fierce creatures, ignorant of the innutritious properties of the shell, took to them whole.
 
By what means was the race of hens, for instance, preserved? Statistics might be concerning the ante-natal consumption of fledglings, which would students of natural history. One bitterly disputed point the noble under consideration settles; a quibble which ought to have
 
——"staggered that Stagyrite,"
 
and which has come even to the notice of grave, inductive theologians: videlicet, that the bird, and not the egg, may claim the priority of existence. For had it been otherwise, one's grandmother would have been early acquainted with the very article which her recommended to her as a novelty, and which, with respectful care, they taught her to after a fashion best adapted to her time of life.
 
Fallen into is this and salutary custom. There must have been a time when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted an age, a , a limitation, effectually as the bulla of the youth, the maiden's girdle, "the marshal's truncheon, or the judge's robe," or any of the distinctions now crushed out of the social code. Let a cynic add, who does not fear to chase a trope beyond bounds, that though certain misguided ancient ladies may , contemporaneously, into the and of suction, and draw towards themselves some yet fooleries, compliments, gallantries,—alas! anachronisms both; yet the orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent, , pastime, is no more, and that the glory of grandams is extinguished forever.
 
The dreadful civility of our Western woodsmen, the popular dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political meeting: the casting of eggs wherefrom the elements of youth and jucundity are wholly eliminated, affords a on heredity, and appears as a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the world, among disagreeing kinswomen, the very Battle of Eggs! where reloading was , where every shell told; whose blackest spite was spent in a golden rain and hail! What over the face of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant butterflies! What amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts unwelcome moisture! terror not unshared even in the of the coast:—
 
"Intus aquae dulcis, vivoque sedilia saxo,
Nympharum domus!"
 
One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success of whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated, marking the and flow of , like the spirits of Richelieu and of the superb fourteenth Louis eying the great Revolution. What if, struck with at the senile of them whom old Fuller would name "she-citizens," they never, never, to teach another grandmother to suck eggs. So was it, maybe, that the abused art was lost from the earth.
 
 
, more, its remembrance is into a more than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. "Teach your grandmother to suck eggs!" Is not the phrase the "scorn of scorn," the catchword of insubordination, the blazing of tongues unbroken as a two-years' colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We grieved over the of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and conveying a educational suggestion. We came to admit that the Academe where the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated into the most of professions, was nothing better in memory than an impertinence. And we sadly , in the underground of our private heart, that, as for worldly , it would be fairly suicidal, all things considered, to to the chair of that professorship.
 
Let some reformer who cherishes his ancestress, and who is not to break his fast on an omelet, either object of his regard from longer lending name and to a vulgar . Shall such be thy mission, reader? We would wish thee extended acquaintance with that mysterious small which suggests to the liberal palate wing and giblets in posse; and joy for many a year of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and means of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active life; but, prithee, apart their sorry association in our English speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.