Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/73

 and find him charming. His little legs are slender as broomsticks, but they are in thick black hose, and the red kilt attracts the eye. We look at that and are satisfied. He is active and noisy. We take it for granted that he is getting on finely. Were he in the bath-tub, we should think otherwise. Later, Jack goes to college. He breaks down. His mother says it is overwork. But this is not the truth. The truth is that he has not the brain power to cope with normal intellectual tasks. The fault is elsewhere than with the curriculum. In all this, the image cast by prudery makes us horribly unscientific. Worse still, it makes us hopelessly vulgar.

These are but two out of a large and bad company of images which to-day obscure the reflection of science in education. They make difficult the recognition of the simple fact that the child is an organic unity; and they make practically impossible the development of any system of education based upon this truth. So long as we allow this obscurity, and persist in this blindness, we shall have no science of education, however many schoolhouses we may build, for we shall be steadily doing violence to a principle which may not be violated—the sequence of cause and effect.



EW people are aware of the important uses to which nonedible fishes can be put, and fewer-still have any idea of the thousands of millions of such fishes that are to be found along the coast of the United States. What some of these uses are will be learned from the following statement of Prof. G. Brown Goode, in his article on American Menhaden in Part V of the Report of the United States Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries for 1887. He says: "Millions of pounds of fish not fit for human food are allowed every year to escape from nets into the sea, which, if saved and rightly utilized, would be worth untold sums for fertilizers and feeding purposes. Of the fish saved and used for fertilizers, a large portion is ill prepared." And he continues, "A large part of that which is well made is exported to Europe, where its value is better understood and its use is more rational and profitable." Following these statements Prof. Goode says that "the total loss to our agriculture from all these sources is not capable of accurate computation, but certainly amounts to hundreds of thousands and doubtless to millions of dollars annually." But there are other uses to which these millions of fishes can be profitably applied; so that the value of our available