Edwin Tenney Brewster

“ After the egg has made itself into a grown animal, consider how well fitted out that animal is. It has, usually, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, sense of touch, of heat and cold, of taste, and the rest. It has born in it the instincts to find its proper food, to find or build its shelter, to take care of its young, to escape its enemies, and in general to like the things which it is best for it to do. Yet if it doesn’t happen to have these sense organs and instincts and the rest, still it always has something nearly as good, and manages somehow to get its living in the world. ”

“ The trouble is not with the eyes, because we get dizzy with our eyes shut. We really have a sense of up and down, which is neither sight, hearing, touch, taste nor smell; but a sixth sense. Its organ is a portion of the inner ear, the so-called labyrinth; and it tells us, not how things look or sound or taste or smell or feel, but whether we ourselves are right side up. Too much whirling upsets this sense of equilibrium, just as too bright a light dazzles the eyes, or too loud a sound stuns the ears. A shark will swim with his head cut off ”

“ You will learn the man’s game now along with the boy’s, or else you won’t learn it at all. You will be too old to learn, and go gameless to your grave.
Or suppose a girl is fond of music, and learns to play, very nicely, the banjo. It will be charming enough, summer evenings on the porch—so long as one is young and has only a girl’s soul to express in music. But by and by she will grow up to be a woman, and have little children of her own. Will she get out her banjo Sunday evenings and play for them hymns and solemn songs, or tinkle coon melodies for them when they are sick? ”

“ Then too, to be eye-minded is a great source of happiness. One sees in the course of his lifetime, all sorts of beautiful and interesting things. If he can, whenever he wishes, recall these as mental pictures, almost as vivid as the reality, it is like seeing the reality all over again. He always has with him a collection of pictures, which though he cannot show to another, he can at any time enjoy for himself. ”

“ We learned how animals of various sorts, and plants as well, see and feel and act; and we learned also something about how we ourselves do our thinking, which is so very different, and so very much better done, than that of any animal or plant.
Now we turn to a different matter. We have taken up being, and doing, and thinking. Now we shall consider living. We shall learn about how the body of the plant or animal feeds itself and keeps alive, and how the different parts of it, the bones and skin and leaves and bark, manage to get on with one another, and work together like a well-made machine. ”

“ The little caterpillar knows no more about buds and food and the way to them than the tree itself does. It is simply built like a tree, so that when it first leaves its nest, it always turns its head up, and when it has a choice between light and darkness, turns toward the light. ”

“ Any of you who keep pets could, I have no doubt, tell me many wonderful tales of the extraordinary intelligence of these horses, dogs, cats, pigeons, cavies, mice, parrots, rabbits, squirrels, and what not, which, according to their nature, share our hearth rugs or our back yards. You who do not, have only to ask the man next door who keeps a horse or a dog, or the woman on the other side who has a cat or a parrot, to learn that animals are only just a little short of human, and if they could only talk, would soon prove, as we say, to “know more than most men.” ”

“ Some eye-minded people can see a picture on a blank sheet of paper so clearly that they can mark over it with a pencil, and in this way make most accurate and effective drawings. Some can picture to themselves all four sides of a room at once, and imagine what is behind them as easily as what is in front. Some do not even hear directly what is said to them; but as each word is uttered, see the same word printed before their mind’s eye, and then read it off. There are those who say that they cannot wake up in the night and think of the bright sun, without having their eyes dazzled! ”

“ I mean all living things, trees and grass and dogs and cats and boys and girls. For as you, my reader, have I hope already discovered, we who have the breath of life in us are a good deal alike, whether we are oaks or men. We don’t look much alike, to be sure. But when we consider the things that are not alive—the stones and stoves and bats and balls and such—and see how very different we are from these, then we get some idea of what being alive is, and understand how being alive makes us blood-brothers with everything else that is alive also. ”

“ It does seem a long time that we sit on a piano stool doing our daily practicing, and mighty little fun. Let us then remember that all the while, we are making a time, tune, and harmony remembering place just back of the left temple, and tying it up with the spot farther up on the side of head from which we manage our hands and fingers. It is slow work; but when once we get the job done, we shall be able to enjoy and remember music with it for the rest of our lives—forty, fifty, sixty years. Surely, this is cheap enough at the price of a little daily practicing. ”

“ Musicians are apt to be ear-minded. Mozart, for example, could listen to a long piece of music, then go home and hear it over again as many times as he liked in his mind’s ear, and so write it down at his leisure. Beethoven, after he became stone deaf, used still to write his magnificent symphonies, that took hours to perform, making them up in his head and hearing them in his soul’s ear—violins, and trumpets and cymbals and drums, each in its proper place, long after his bodily ears had ceased to hear any noise. ”

“ Instead they hear in their mind’s ear the sound of dishes, the murmur of conversation, and the clatter of knives and forks. When they have learned their lessons, and stand up to recite, they hear an inner voice telling them what to say. ”

“ Of course, the puppy and the kitten do not know that they are playing at hunting when they chase spools and bark at carriages, any more than a boy knows why he likes to climb trees or hit a ball with a bat. But you can see for yourselves that the difference between the play of puppies and the play of kittens is just the difference between the work of a grown cat who hunts small creatures alone, and the work of a grown up dog who hunts large creatures in company. ”

“ Many animals, then, and many plants are just one single cell and no more. Many others, like pond scums and sea-lettuces,—which are plants,—and sponges and jelly-fishes,—which are animals,—are composed of many cells, but all pretty much alike. But the animals and plants which we know best, kittens and oak trees and horses and grass, and the creatures we know best of all which are ourselves, are made up of many cells, and many different sorts—skin and bark and wood, flesh and fat and leaves and hair and all the rest, so many that it would take half an hour merely to write them all down. ”

“ Then the white corpuscles that are in our blood, and the growing life-stuff or protoplasm which is in our flesh and bones, and all this wonderful and mysterious life that is in us, take us in hand to mend us up. The same power that made us, and that keeps us alive, heals also our hurts. By and by, if we take care of ourselves, we are once more as good as new. ”

“ Still on the whole, our senses are pretty reliable. The eleven different sorts of feeling spots in eye, tongue, and skin, that tell us about red, green, blue, heat, pressure, cold, pain, sweet, sour, bitter, or salt, and the ears and nose which we don’t know so much about, all these tell us, on the whole, the truth. Yet we never can be quite sure; so that wise people, and especially wise boys and girls, will beware of contradicting other people who chance to see, hear, taste, smell, feel or believe, a little differently from themselves. ”

“ Some of the best chess players have played ten, fifteen, and even twenty different games, all at the same time, blindfolded, and won them all against as many separate players, each playing one game and looking at the board. Such a champion player has to carry in his head the picture of ten, fifteen, or twenty different boards, each with sixteen men, scattered about over sixty-four squares, and all continually changing. Yet they do this without ever making a mistake; just by these inner pictures in the mind’s eye. ”

“ Not the shell, for that is mostly just chalk. Not the white, for that is merely the little chicken’s pantry shelf where it keeps the food on which it is to grow. The living part of the egg is the yolk—unless somebody boils the egg and so kills it. Sometimes, too, the egg dies, as any living thing may; then we usually find it out.
Even we ourselves are not all alive. I have already pointed out that our hair and nails are not alive at all, and that our outer skin, the thin skin, that is, which we tear off when we bark our shins, is fully alive only on the inside. ”

“ If you think that a watch or a battleship is a complicated affair, think what goes on in the brain of a tiny ant.
Think, too, how resourceful an egg is. It tries its best to grow into a proper animal; but if somebody interferes, to prevent that, then the egg goes pluckily ahead and makes the best it can of a bad matter. If it gets jarred apart so that it cannot make one animal, why then it makes two, or four, or eight. When it can make neither one animal nor two proper and separate twins, it doesn’t give up, but makes some sort of double monster, that at least manages to keep alive. ”

“ This growing up is so common an affair, so many of us do it, puppies and calves and kittens and little rabbits and baby birds, that we usually forget how wonderful a matter it is. Wonderful indeed it is; yet hardly less strange is it that after we have grown a while, then we stop. Yet our hair, as we know, doesn’t stop, nor the skin, nor the nails. Sometimes parts of the body which have hardly grown at all in youth, start up and grow in middle life. But the parts of the body which count, the parts which if they did grow would make us larger, these somehow know enough to stop. ”

“ Even the sense of touch, in general the most reliable of the senses, can be deceived. When you are fishing and get a bite, where do you feel it? Most fisherman feel the bite at the end of the line, as if their nerves actually ran the length of the rod and down the string to the hook! And when a ball player cracks out a long hit, I leave it to all boys, if he doesn’t feel the place in the bat where it hits the ball. ”

“ In general, the part of the body to form earliest is the brain. Next after that come the eyes. These begin as two buds which grow out one on each side of the brain where the head is going to be. Each is a hollow, bubble-like affair on a short stalk; as much as anything, except for size, like a hollow rubber ball stuck on a pencil stub. One would think that this hollow ball would simply change into an eyeball; but it doesn’t, for Nature rarely does things simply. Instead, one side of the eye-bud folds in, as you might push in a hollow rubber ball with your finger, until it forms a cup. ”

“ Just as soon as you can, you must get hold of the books of Fabre, M’Cook, Sir John Lubbock, or Professor Wheeler, and read these strange things for yourselves—how the ants live in cities underground, have workmen and soldiers, carry on wars against their neighbors, raid their enemies’ nests and make slaves of the captives, have plant-lice for cows, and milk them of their sweet juice, and in return for this, feed and care for the plant-lice and their young, pasturing them on the roots of plants, and making no end of trouble for the farmers whose plants they are. ”

“ For growing old is simply growing hard. We begin life as squashy little babies. Our bones are like green sticks. Our flesh is like dough, only the softest cloth must touch our skins, and Nurse has to hold her hand under our poor backs to keep our heads from dropping off. ”

“ Did you ever notice that a kitten is ticklish in just the same places that you are? You stroke the kitten’s back or head or legs, and it is as pleased as can be. But you touch it along the front of the body, or around the front of the neck, and at once it begins to bite and scratch and protest its best. All creatures that can be tickled at all are ticklish in the same places; and all these places happen to be precisely the spots where the great blood vessels and other important vital organs are close to the surface, and where, therefore, a wound would be most deadly. ”