Various

“ Are we not hampered at every turn by false schemes of education, the object of which is to turn out certain conventional products? How many of us can rise up in effective rebellion against the very fashions that in our hearts we most condemn? Before there can be anything like a perfect education for the young there must be a much more fully developed sense of duty than we see as yet in the older generation. The doctrine of evolution is putting the key to a true system into our hands; but to use that key aright requires courage and high purpose—qualities that are not of everyday occurrence. ”

“ The school yard was a barren inclosure within a high board fence, but a joyful place to that young company. To what purpose are teachers urged to study psychology? The children in their seats are emptied of everything that pertains to their souls. Not to study, because the teacher will explain everything, and to behave just well enough to get safe out of school, is the simple code which covers the conduct of average children. To extend this code to ideas of social duty—the highest—is not possible while they do not form a society. Cultivation of friendship is just as much out of the case ”

“ Again, it is hardly to be supposed that the Scotchmen who listened to Sir William Crookes admitted in their minds that wheat flour possessed any greater potential energy in the development either of muscle or of mind than the oatmeal to which they have been habituated for so many generations. I doubt if any New England Yankee who had been brought up on the diet of corn (maize) bread and baked beans, the latter supplying the protein element in abundance, would admit any greater development of the muscle or brain by exclusive dependence on wheat for the bread of life. ”

“ What we are thinking of is the leafless trees, the ice and snow, the green grass in spring, the flowers and warm days in summer, not the abstract astronomical fact of the earth's revolution round the sun, or the due succession of the signs of the zodiac. It is that visible organic year that must have counted most with man from the first; though no doubt its meaning and reality are much more vividly present since the coming on of the Glacial epoch, and the more so in proportion as we live nearer to the north or south pole ”

“ Why do not trees and shrubs of each kind flower up and down throughout the year irregularly—now one individual and now another? Why are there seasons for things at all in the tropics?
The answer is, because the same causes which produce summer [233] and winter in temperate climate produce other changes of other sorts in the tropical region. The temperature, it is true, remains the same, or approximately the same; but the meteorological conditions vary. Even with ourselves, summer is not only hotter but also drier than winter; winter is marked by rain and snow as well as by lowered temperature. ”

“ After a quarter of an hour of unrestrained sport, several hundreds were gathered in lines at the tap of the drum, facing the cheerful schoolhouse in the mild bright sun, their faces radiating contentment and good will while they straightened up at the mere hint of the teachers on duty. In San Francisco I once found a certain primary school keeping doll's day, when every girl brought her doll to school and exhibited her at recess. ”

“ No penitentiary drill could be more perfunctory, spiritless, dead. It must be said of the public schools that the thing they most seem to dread is the sound of a child's voice. The rude, untrained intonations, the slovenly speech, the slouching attitude remain rude, slovenly, and slouching, for all the school attempts to do for their improvement is infinitely little. Even the blessed relief of shaking the arm and hand to attract the teacher's attention has been reduced in some schools to lifting two fingers. ”

“ In the school yard, the bully, who comes to the front in about every tenth child, needs to be repressed; the foul mouth must be cleansed; against these prevailing evils the playground has a protection the street can not possess. The boy's world is a peculiar world, certainly, making laws for itself as rigorous and about as barbarous as those of a gang of pirates; but it is through his esprit du corps he can be uplifted and educated; the individual may be a selfish animal; as one of a body he is capable of heroism and devotion to a noble idea. He can be a friend ”

“ At the present time there exists a deficit in the wheat area of thirty-one thousand square miles.... When provision shall have been made if possible to feed 230,000,000 units likely to be added to the bread-eating populations by 1931, by the complete occupancy of the arable areas of the temperate zone now partially occupied, where can be grown the additional 330,000,000 bushels of wheat required ten years later by a hungry world? If bread fails—not only us, but all the bread-eaters of the world—what are we to do? We are born wheat-eaters. ”

“ The year, for organic beings, means essentially the seasons; and the seasons may mean and have meant many separate things, as time and place vary—heat and cold, food and scarcity, foliage and leaflessness, drought and wet; longer or shorter days, the midnight sun and the winter darkness; hibernation and wakefulness; the egg, the cocoon, the seed, the plant, the flower, the fruit; dormancy or vitality. According as human life started at the poles or the equator, for instance, it would view in the beginning many things differently. ”

“ The sheep has a much larger brain than the beaver, with numerous and complete convolutions, yet it is one of the most stupid of domestic animals. Again, though birds have convolutions in the cerebellum, they have none in the cerebrum, and yet they are more capable of education than any living beings except the human race. The eagle is complete master of the lamb; the magpie, the hawk, the raven, and the parrot with his talking powers, are not excelled in sagacity by the dog, the horse, or the elephant, notwithstanding the latter animals have brains of superior size and elaborate convolutions. ”

“ In many minds the historical antiquity of Egypt, the almost fabulous ages to which its civilization ascends, seem to challenge the history of other countries, and the land of the Pharaohs, rejecting all chronological comparison, to have appeared in the midst of the world as a single example of a land which savage life had never trodden. ”

“ Again, dealing with the modern scientific view that, in the development of the human individual all antecedent stages of human development are, in a manner, passed through, he says: "Let us discard the primitive-man theory. You do not believe it. Rather shall we not hold with Emerson that every child born into the world is a new Messiah given into the arms of fallen humanity to lead them back to paradise?"
It is no part of our purpose to defend Mr. Spencer against the attacks of so negligible an assailant as Mr. Smith, of Minnesota. ”

“ In many schools they do not leave the room for any kind of exercise. If they were capable of demanding their rights they would call for both the abolition of the school lawn and calisthenic basement, and the restoration of their playground and recess.
From the cruelty of this repression nature finds a little way out; the children require of the neighbors what they have been deprived of by the school committee. All around the precincts of the temple of learning the trodden borders of the sidewalk, churned to mire in winter and trampled to rock in summer, speak of the victory of the boys. ”

“ Having been for thirty years a lecturer on man and his character as evinced by his form, features, head, and gestures, and having made observations on the subject in all parts of North America, in continental Europe and Great Britain, and parts of Asia, Africa, and Australia, I should not be deemed presumptuous when I present a few facts regarding the relations of mind and the size and forms of heads and weights of brains. It has been observed by many persons versed in the branches relating to the subject that men with the largest brains are not those of most talent, power, or intellect ”

“ There are a pair of lovers, one of whom is discovered at a critical period in the courtship to have negro blood in his veins, and a philosopher who comes forward to satisfy the parties (who hardly need it) that this is no serious matter, but is all according to human evolution and the destiny of the race. "You must be impressed," he says, "by the fact that there are a great many people here and there, of mixed blood, and that the number is increasing; ... it is well that not a few are indeed truly admirable specimens of the human race. ”

“ We can not accept Emerson's doctrine of infant Messiahs, and yet we can recognize very fully the mission of the child in the home, the demand it makes for tenderness, for patience, for thoughtfulness on the part of parents, the hopes and fears and heart-searchings that it calls into play, the aspirations that it promotes toward the realization, if for its sake only, of a higher life. ”

“ Practically there remains no uncultivated prairie land in the United States suitable for wheat-growing. The virgin land has been rapidly absorbed, until at present there is no land left for wheat without reducing the area for maize, hay, and other necessary crops. It is almost certain that within a generation the ever-increasing population of the United States will consume all the wheat grown within its borders, and will be driven to import, and, like ourselves, will scramble for a lion's share of the wheat crop of the world. ”

“ Those who object to the prevalence of technical names in other sciences seldom reflect that they have them in their own art. Yet if a man of science should desire to familiarize himself with the artisan's work, "he would be, after five minutes' talk with a machinist or electrician, [286] confronted by so many unfamiliar terms—technical terms of everyday use—that he would at once cry out for greater simplicity of language." In the geological sciences the technicalities play the same part they do in the arts and in business. ”

“ No region in the world presents a clearer and more distinct individual character than Egypt. Each village is a special world, each valley a universe that has developed its own life; and man has felt the special local impressions; and even in modern times, while all the Egyptian villages present a similar aspect, and although the fellah appears to be the same sort of a man everywhere, each locality has its special individual characteristics. One who knows how to observe men and things critically will find considerable differences. These dissimilarities are as old as Egypt itself. ”

“ So far away from the volcanic source, the wind can not have laid down a layer of this dust several feet in thickness without scattering it far and wide all around. It must have covered tens of thousands of square miles. Just imagine, if you can, a whole State, clad in the verdure of summer, suddenly, in two or three days, covered over by a blanket of white volcanic ash! Many species of plants must have found it impossible to grow in such a soil. ”