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Every Man His Own University

Every Man's University Animals and "The Least Things" The Bottom Rung Thoughtfulness Instincts and Individuality

VOLUME 4

NATIONAL EXTENSION UNIVERSITY

OBSERVATION--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY

EVERY MAN'S UNIVERSITY

Without observation, literature and meditation are shower and sunshine upon unbroken soil. Only those schools and colleges are true schools and colleges which regard it as the chief business of all their teaching to persuade those under their charge to see more perfectly what they are looking at, to find what they should have been unable to observe had it not been for their school instruction. You can't make a good arrow from a pig's tail, and you can seldom get a man worth while out of one who has gone through the early part of his life without having learned to be alert when things are to be seen or heard. John Stuart Blackie says that it is astonishing how much we all go about with our eyes wide open and see nothing, and Doctor Johnson says that some men shall see more while riding ten miles upon the top of an omnibus, than some others shall see in riding over the continent.

A traveler in Athens or Rome, Paris or London, may be shown these cities by a professional guide, and yet gain only a smattering of what these cities hold in store for him, and remember little of what he has seen. Another traveler, unattended by a guide, but observant of everything that comes to his eyes and ears, will carry away stores from his visit to those cities, which shall be of life-long interest and be serviceable to all who shall travel his way. The solitary but observant stranger in a country almost always profits most from his travels. He is compelled to notice boulevards and buildings, parks and people; and every day of his travels is a lesson in observation that accustoms him to remember all he has once seen. The newspaper correspondents of other days had no guide-books or guides, and they were entire strangers in the places they visited. They relied entirely upon themselves to find their way, and to discover everything that was valuable and interesting. They found much that the modern guide either overlooks or disregards, and wrote for the papers at home what would most interest and instruct their readers.

A great foreign correspondent of his day, Henry W. Chambers, remained only six hours at Baalbek, near Damascus; yet he wrote the clearest description that probably ever was written of the magnificent temples at Baalbek--and he wrote these descriptions, too, at Hong-Kong, after many and varied experiences while visiting other places of greater importance. Many archeologists and literary men before him had visited the moat of the great fortress at Baalbek. Still, they had never observed as Chambers observed, and so they missed seeing the arrow-heads and all the other warlike instruments used in those ancient days, which had lain unnoticed among those huge pillars and great foundation-stones.

Millions and millions had seen the lid of a teakettle bobbing up and down over the boiling water before that Scotchman, Watt, observed it while making watches. But he was the first of all those millions whose close observation led him to investigate this force of boiling water in the teakettle. Then he applied this power to the steam-engine, which is still the great propelling force of the world. From the time of the Garden of Eden apples had fallen in the orchards of the world, through all the harvest-days. Of all the billions that had seen apples falling, only Sir Isaac Newton observed the law of gravitation that was involved in their falling.

All the great discoverers began with nearly the same meager powers for observation that the rest of the world has, but early in life came to value above all other mental powers this incalculable power to closely notice; and each made his realm of observation much richer for his discoveries.

Why do the majority of us go through life seeing nothing of the millions of marvelous truths and facts while only a few keep their eyes and ears wide open and every day are busy in piling up what they have observed! The loss of our instincts seems to be the price we pay to-day for the few minor acquisitions we get from school and college; we put out our brains to make room for our learning. The man who assiduously cultivates his powers of observation and thus gains daily from his experiences what helps him to see farther and clearer everything in life that is worth seeing, has given himself a discipline that is much more important than the discipline of all the schools and the colleges without it. The greatest text-books of the greatest universities are only the records of the observations of some close observer whose better powers of seeing things had been acquired mainly while he was taking his courses in that university under his hat.

When we look back over our life and reflect how many things we might have seen and heard had we trained our powers of observation, we seem to have climbed little and to have spent most of our time upon plateaus, while our achievements seem little better than scratches upon black marble. Mankind has a greater esteem for the degrees conferred by the University of Observation and Experience than for all the other degrees of all other Universities in the world. The only thing that seems most to win the respect of real men and women for the degrees conferred by colleges is the fact that the graduates have first gained all that close observation and wide experience can confer.

The lives of the men and the women who have been worth while keep reminding us how vastly more important is this education from ceaseless observation than all the mere learning from school courses. It takes ten pounds of the stuff gotten from observation and experience to carry one pound of school learning wisely. The thinking man will never ask you what college you have gone through, but what college has gone through you; and the ability and habit of observing deeply and broadly is the preparation we all need that the college may go through us. Confucius of China, Kito of Japan, Goethe of Germany, Arnold of England, Lincoln and Edison of America, stand where they stand to-day in thought and action solely because they had in a masterly way educated their power of minute attention. In building up a huge business or in amassing enormous riches, such men as Rothschild, Rockefeller, and Carnegie show us especially how vitally important to all material success is steadfast attendance at the school of attention.

The colleges that to-day are advancing most rapidly in esteem are those which are recognizing more and more the importance of observation. They require their men to spend some portion of their college time in gaining experience in their various lines through observing the practical workings of their calling; medical students are in hospitals; students of law attend courts; theological students engage in mission work; and engineers are found in shops. Neither lectures nor speculations can take the place of these experiences; each is helpful to the other. When only one may be had, the experience from observing actual work is far more important. Opportunities for observation of practical matters, along with theory, is the modern idea toward which all the best modern institutions are tending in their efforts to fit men for the active business of life.

Nor has greatness from careful observation and large experience distinguished men of action alone. Shakespeare, Goethe, Bunyan, Burns, Whittier, Longfellow, James Whitcomb Riley, and a host of the great men of philosophy, science, and literature are where they are to-day in the esteem of their fellow men, and in their service to humanity, because they were the keenest among the men acute in observation.

ANIMALS AND "THE LEAST THINGS"

But what we have learned from animals in the past seems only a trifle in comparison with what they will teach when we go to them with more serious purpose and more carefully observe them. The leaders in all these investigations of animal life have all been distinguished for their power to discover in animals what has escaped other people.

Professor Darwin's close observation of the doves he fed at his door opened up to him important suggestions and laid the foundation for his great treatise, "The Origin of Species." When Professor Niles of the Boston School of Technology was a boy he caught a minnow while returning from school. At his father's suggestion he put the fish into a simple aquarium and studied its movements. When it died he carefully examined its parts under a microscope--and this experience was the beginning of his vast knowledge of the animal realm.

While a Philadelphia clergyman was visiting a farmer in northern New Jersey, the family became perturbed because their dog had "gone mad." They fastened it in the kitchen and sought somebody to kill it by shooting at it through the window. A neighbor observed the dog carefully and told them it was poisoned. He advised the family to loose it in order that it might get some antidote for itself in field or forest. He told them that cats, cattle, and horses are often compelled to find an antidote for some poisonous herb they have eaten, and that the animals know more about such things than any teacher in the medical schools. As soon as the dog was unfastened he hastened across the field to a brook, and ate a weed that was growing beside the water. The dog soon returned to the house, and ate heartily after a two weeks' fast.

The clergyman had followed the dog and observed the plant which it had eaten. After the dog had returned to the house he uprooted the plant and took some of its leaves to a Philadelphia firm of chemists. Acting upon the firm's advice, he sent the leaves to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, and they were found to be a valuable antidote for poison. Not only was humanity given a better medicine from this discovery, but the clergyman also derived a competency from it. This remedy for poisoning is often used in prescriptions; so even doctors sometimes "go to the dogs" for instructions.

Like Professor Agassiz and Sir Oliver Lodge, many find their best instructors in domestic animals. The fowls around the house and the barn may be whole universities for developing the sciences. Through her dependence on nature the hen is a more efficient instructor than the majority of college professors. She knows by instinct so much of the laws of nature that wise men may sit at her feet or her bill and learn. Perhaps she may seem a little foolish in proclaiming her achievements in egg-laying by a cackle, but her knowledge of the necessities of life, her careful oversight of her brood, the way she uses her feet and her wings, her foreknowledge of approaching storms, her means of defending herself when attacked by hawks, her knowledge of the formation of the egg and of the proper time to break the shell for the release of her chick--all these are worthy of the attention of even the greatest scientists.

In an address at a poultry-men's convention, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that chickens seem to have in them much more to study than did Darwin's doves. While Holmes was once summering at Kennebunkport, Maine, he trained five chickens to come at his call, to fly upon his head, and to leap with open bills to catch a kernel of corn. Before the season closed the chickens would come to his bedroom even after he had retired--making it necessary, as Doctor Holmes said, for the landlord to serve them up for dinner. Doctor Holmes's parody on Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" shows what a careful observer he was. While some of Longfellow's admirers resented the parody as a slight, Longfellow himself always treated it as complimentary. He once told James T. Fields that, in one couplet of the parody, Holmes had excelled the entire original poem:

Not like muffled drums be beating On the inside of the shell.

Longfellow told Fields that there are always millions of men standing like chickens in the shell, with wings they know not how to use, having calls to a larger life outside of which they can see nothing; that some peck away until dead on the inside of the shell, while others, assisted by a friend on the outside, step out into a life beautiful and complete.

In the egg or molecule we get nearer to God than we do through the telescope or by encircling the earth. He who lived nearest the first cause gets the best inspiration for visions of all greater sights or events; so the cottage is a happier place than the palace for him who wishes to get better acquainted with what shall arouse finer thought and feeling. The cottage is the best preparatory school for the mansion, provided always that the cottage course has been thorough. He who has worn his cottage life with manly dignity shall be the man to wear his mansion life with composure. Emerson said "the entire system of things gets represented in every particle."

Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, and unfortunate is the man who gets a smattering of many things yet does not know even one small thing thoroughly. The power of little things to give instruction and happiness should be the first lesson in life, and it should be inculcated deeply. The chief need of this discontented and sinful world is to comprehend that in one blade of grass or the shading of an evening cloud there is sufficient reverence to fill the largest heart, and sufficient science to occupy the greatest passion.

We saw a delicate blue flower in the grass this morning which I had never noticed before. It seemed a different flower from each angle and, when put under a magnifying-glass, had colors I had never noticed before in flower or art. The field where it was growing had been familiar to me for threescore years and ten, yet the flower was entirely new to me. It was so dainty and attractive and inspiring that I felt I had lost something important to my spiritual growth all these years--something like the experience of Virgil, Guizot, Carlyle, Grotius, or like Tennyson in the "Holy Grail," who declares that he had left a real and wonderful life behind to follow the unknown. This little flower in the morning sunlight awakes thoughts of years long past--of the faces of marshaled hosts of battle, of eyes deep and calm with the smile of a loving mother's welcome, of the great forgiveness in a father's affection.

Had I found that flower seventy years before, I believe my appreciation of the Divine Power would have been greater, my heart would have been more satisfied, my soul more fully illuminated and pervaded by a holier peace. We lose ourselves in all attempts to grasp the cause of which this small flower is the result. It is impossible to find words to convey the strange emotions which this newly found flower aroused, and to tell of the distant realms my imagination visited while I meditated there. If we would free ourselves from the perplexing cares which our daily duties demand; if we would forget the worries of each day; if the losses and disappointments and the wrongs of many years did not press themselves upon us; if the demands of many duties and the demands upon our attention and the calls of friends did not interrupt--we could find in contemplating this wee flower of the field a fund of happiness which years of sorrow and misfortune could not destroy.

While Zinzendorf was stranded nearly a year upon a tiny island, his vigorous mind was forced to occupy itself in observing the objects upon the shore; his examinations of the colors in the clam-shell led him to say later in life, at a meeting of philosophers, that a lifetime study of these colors should develop more of the beautiful than all the manufactured color combinations then known.

Art has not yet been able to combine the shades shown in the shell of an oyster, and the wings of the June bug have been enlarged and copied by colored photography, and will greatly influence all art hereafter. Man's needs shall be best supplied by beginning at the source and following the Creator in developing them into things of beauty and service.

Although the Agricultural Department at Washington spent eight million dollars in the study of seeds and their growth by sending experts to roam over the world for investigations, yet the observations of Luther Burbank and many like investigators in the agricultural colleges throughout the country have made many more important discoveries. Their observations have brought about a greater increase of production to the acre than all the results of those who roamed the earth for the Government, and no one would say that their work was not a fair investment for the nation.

Observation convinces us that the sooner we get down to the simplicities of life, the longer and healthier and nobler shall life become. The healthiest are those with one loaf and a natural hunger along with it. The noblest lives are those who are anxious to become as divine as it is possible for them to be, are ever alert for little deeds of kindness. How much richer life the poet lives who can sympathize with the field-mouse, like Burns! Who is lifted heavenward by the fringed gentian, like Bryant? Who gets the messages of peace from the frosted pumpkin, like Riley? Like Shakespeare, we too may "find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything," if we will but use our eyes for seeing, our ears for hearing, our heads for understanding, and our hearts for feeling. The Poor Man's University gives its courses everywhere, and no entrance examination is requisite other than a mind willing to concentrate upon the sublime objects which, by the million, lie within our vision.

THE BOTTOM RUNG

Almost every day of his life an American is reminded that "necessity is the mother of invention." It needs only a little reflection and observation to realize how much American youth are blessed in the examples of their countrymen who have come from the humblest stations in life and have risen through sheer pluck and perseverance to honor and helpfulness.

We are indebted mainly to the genius and the observation of poor men for the great inventions which have so much contributed to the comfort, the convenience, the cheerfulness, and the power of life. They have given us steam as a motive power, the locomotive, the telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the automobile, the victrola, the airship. The great advances that have been made in agriculture through mowers, reapers, planters, and special seeds and fruits are entirely the results of their steadfast perseverance. Nobody ever earnestly reaches out for a thing until he feels that he needs it, consequently, the sons and daughters of the rich are seldom the benefactors of humanity in the way so many poor men and women have been through the inventions which have lightened the drudgery of millions of homes, as well as increased marvelously the productions of the soil and of the factory. Had the talents of the rich been put to the test by hunger or cold or the many other incentives to vigorous thought and action which impel the poor, they also might have many inventions to their credit, for the longing of the normal soul furnishes the basis of all the worthy activities of life.

The greatest drawback for rich men's sons and daughters is in having all their wants supplied from the bank-account of indulgent parents. They are taught neither industry, economy, nor self-control, which often makes them a social menace. They lack appreciation for so many of the things in life which help to brighten the path of the poor, solely because they have never needed them. A hungry boy who has stood on the outside of a bakery, clinging to a nickel and fighting a battle with himself whether to invest it in a bit of bread or to take it home to his mother, who has had neither breakfast nor dinner, fully understands the value of a dollar.

The superintendent of the Patent Office at Washington has confirmed the official report of the French Patent Office--that there has been no invention of especial value which has not been either found or improved upon by some poor man. The best life-preserver was invented by a sailor who had fallen overboard and had been nearly drowned. An obscure native of a duchy bordered on three sides by powerful nations invented the quick-firing gun, which can fire six hundred shots while the ordinary gun is being loaded. It was a poor Cambridge machinist, whose family often suffered from lack of food, who invented the sewing-machine, which has changed the condition of home life throughout the world, and relieved women of one of their great household burdens. The ship's chronometer was made practical for navigation by a man who had been lost at sea and despaired of ever again reaching the shore. The locomotive, which has contributed more than any other one thing to the spread of our people over our vast country, was given to the world by an Englishman, Stephenson, who in early life had been so poor that he had little schooling.

More than eight hundred agricultural inventions were patented in 1905 and 1906, and every one of them is the invention of some poor man or woman.

As inventors, women have in recent years become close competitors of men, and from kitchen utensils to floor covering have added much to home comfort and home furnishing. All the household articles exhibited lately in a large shop in Chicago were either invented or improved by women. They have invented many things for agriculture, for manufacturing, and for school furnishings--and not a few of the great patents which have been issued to men should have been issued to their wives. Women have often awaked an idea which men have wrought out for practical purposes. The majority of the benefactors of the world made their discoveries to relieve some necessity which oppressed them personally. This is especially true of stock-breeding, where the improvements of observant men have so greatly increased the value of domestic animals.

The value of any study depends entirely upon what it has done for us and what we are doing with it. Lowell says that mere learning is as insignificant as the collection of old postage-stamps. Professor Virchow was obliged to try various foods in his experiments with his own cats, before he discovered what has ever since been of such benefit to all breeders of animals throughout the world. From the earliest days the bee has offered a store of the most useful information, but it would never have been known had it not been for such patient observers as Huber, who, although blind, discovered more about bees than the world had ever known before his day, through the patient service of his wife and valet. The mouse in the field, the squirrel in the tree, the eagle in her nest, the fish in the brook, all have taught us valuable lessons in conduct. They have doubtless given hints which have enabled observant men to give mankind many a useful invention.

It is said by those who have carefully studied the subject that ninety-one per cent. of all disease is attributable directly or indirectly to the stomach. Our ailments come mainly from our aliments. Nourishing food is an essential of a noble life. The stomach is the master of the house, and must be respected. A proper diet and a sound head are closely allied, and those who will rightly exercise their soul-powers must be watchful of the stomach.

Those who would rule and lead must have chest and stomach as well as head and will.

Nobody else has such opportunities for observing the effects of food, and for studying the happy results of nutritious food, as those have who prepare the meals in the kitchen. Proper nourishment is something which touches humanity on every side, and deserves the closest attention of the greatest minds. We can better afford to dispense with scientific experts in every other line which now engages them than to dispense with those who investigate the food question. The idea among the myriads of American housekeepers, that it is ignoble drudgery to spend some of their time in their kitchens ministering to the health of those who are nearest and dearest to them and removing diseases from them through well-selected and well-cooked food, is being gradually overcome by many schools and colleges. The sciences connected with food are now placed among the most important subjects in the curricula of these schools. It takes a master mind to handle the chemical combinations of the kitchen, which make hale and happy men and women, boys and girls.

Health is symmetry; disease is deformity; both are mainly the result of what we eat.

Food has killed more than the sword in every age, and is perhaps killing more to-day than ever before. Achievement in soul-growth and material-growth is involved in the question of proper food. If women forsake the throne that rightly belongs to the cook, men must assume it or Christian civilization shall cease. To-day nobody can become so supreme a benefactor of humanity as the man or the woman who devotes intellect and all other power to the study of scientific eating. When we come rightly to understand all the vital questions that are involved in nutrition, we shall feel that the kings among men and the queens among women are to be sought in no higher place than in kitchens.

We are forever searching among the stars to discover kings, when they are far oftener found in cottages in the valley.

If universities fail to make the knowledge of the right nutrition practical and fail to bring it down where humble men and women may get it and apply it, the fault is their own. Some day a people grateful for the health they enjoy may elect a man to the Presidency of our nation, or set him upon some throne, because he is the best scientific cook in the land. Doctor Agnew of Philadelphia said that he had gained his most important knowledge of hospital work as an adviser of the dietitians while feeding his dog and his cat.

In speaking of the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, Professor Virchow said that he had often felt that our investigators had not taken sufficient notice of the force of animal electricity. The few experiments already made in applying to machinery electricity generated by the human body has opened up a field for observant scientists.

In many ways both birds and beasts contribute to the welfare of humanity, and the observing thinker will still find many more ways in which he can aid us. All forms of life can be harnessed to the car of civilization, and far more effective work shall be done than is being done to-day. As teachers and as subjects of practical investigation, animals supply a great university which almost every man and woman can attend.

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