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PROFESSOR WILLIAM WHITMAN BAILEY, PROVIDENCE, R. I.

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HAT Nature's provision is in some cases vastly in excess of her immediate needs may be exemplified at times in the fruit of the elm. These socalled "seeds" litter our sidewalks and are the distraction of the housekeeper. They blow in at every open window, are tracked into the hallways, parlors and bedrooms, and enter in some way by every chink and cranny.. The long-drawn aisle of the church even does not forbid them. A bushel-basketful could easily be gathered in one's back yard, where the wind drifts them about in heaps. And still they come. As in the case of fish roe, the observer wonders what would happen if, say, but one half of them matured. The resultant grove would not leave standing room for man, in the case of the trees; and as regards the little fishes, he could cross the great ocean dry-shod. One tree, indeed, would colonize the earth, one fish people the everlasting seas. As a matter of fact, these little seeds or fruits are endowed with intense vitality. In ten days or less, if we have the usual amount of rain, they would be seen sprouting on our roofs, in our gutters, in flowerpots designed for other things, on front door mats, in chinks of pavement; in short, everywhere that the thin scale can insinuate itself.

"Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters;
The myriad germs that nature shapes and shatters."

How many of the little creatures are produced that one may survive! What determines the selection of the favored ones? To us it often looks like blind chance, but the scientific mind is apt to exclude accident from a problem, or, at least to subordinate it to a wise design. All seeds have many enemies, for they are rich in food materials, starch, oil, sugar, as the case may be. The thin wafer of the elm appears to contain as little as any, but some of them are palatable even to man. This more so in certain foreign species.

We look with wonder at the sturdy oak as the product of the acorn. Still more marvelous, perhaps, is a giant elm. Says Dr. Holmes, "Nobody knows New England who is not on terms with one of its elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and patient. It has a small flake of a seed, which blows in everywhere and makes arrangements for coming up by and by. So, in spring, one finds a crop of baby elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small compared to those succulent vegetables. The baby elms die, most of them slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as Herod's innocents. One of them gets overlooked, perhaps, until it has established a kind of right to stay. Three generations of carrot and parsnip consumers have passed away, yourself among them, and now let your great grandson look for the baby elm. Twenty-two feet of clear girth, three hundred and sixty feet in the line that bounds its leafy circle, it covers the boy with such a canopy as neither glossy-leaved oak nor insect-haunted linden ever lifted in the summer skies."

The ovary of the elm is from one to two celled, each cell containing a single pendulous ovule. One of the cells aborts with its contents. The surviving ovule then usurps and occupies the remaining space, and the fruit is consequently one celled and one seeded. What we commonly call the 'seeds" are really the fruits-a sort of samara or hay-fruit, much like those possessed by ailantus, ash, box elder and maple. We mean like in function, not shape. The purpose of such winged fruits is in all cases to distribute the offspring outside the circle of immediate home influence. In the case of the elm there is a papery or membranaceous wing all around the seed, and a little notch in the apex. This papery part, especially in the wych-elm, is prettily veined. The fruition of the elm follows very quickly after the blooming of the tiny but charming brown flowers.

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PROFESSOR FRANKLIN B. SAWVEL, GREENVILLE, PA.

F you or I were asked to describe a fertile soil, each would do it in terms of individual observation and inference, as the sandy, shell soil of Lake Erie, the reddish brown limestone soil of the Cumberland Valley, the rich, dark walnut of Western Missouri, or the alluvium of the river valleys. The same would be true in describing uprightness of character; it would be in words. which stand for certain definite qualities and states or conditions. So, in art, taking the well-known picture of Hoffman's "Christ Among the Doctors" to illustrate; the artist shows the physiognomy and the physiological embodiment of the Christ character in terms of the social, historical and religious experiences of mankind. In the midst of surprise, questioning doubt, taunting unbelief, Mosaic legalism and honest, open-minded inquiry, the artist painted a youth as the beginning of all knowledge, truth and virtue. Character is its message. The child-like, obedient, believing Christ character, which is not alone the embodiment of truth, but its reality, because he is the truth as well as the way and the life.

My contention is not for less mathematics, science and history, but for relatively more art; for less diversified, veneering science, focusing the work more on the essential or fundamental processes, and for increasing, by the time gained, the studies that make for beauty and symmetry. It is not all of life to exist, or to be president of a life insurance company, an oil gambling corporation, beef embalming trust or a politely veneered school-book trust.

The education of the conscience, and those nobler impulses that make for character and fidelity, for love of beauty and virtue for their own sakes, for the inner, higher sense of business integrity and honor is not keeping pace with the training of the intellect. And, again, not that the intellect as broadly understood has been exalted too much, but out of proportion to powers that are just as vital and deep seated in the process of mass building, society building and nation building. The

power to appreciate ideals of beauty is better than the goldmuch fine gold-in which the ideal often finds its purest expression. Nature or physical objects are more interesting to the growing mind of childhood and youth, and possibly more instructive than other objects of thought, but spoken language is almost impotent to express or portray them. Pictorial language alone is equal to the task. Form, color, light and shadow only, can portray or express to the child's mind the most interesting, instructive and tangible parts of his environment. I need not comment on the fact that perhaps no other study develops the powers of observation and attention more than drawing and color work, and that particular kind of observation, too, that makes for definiteness and completeness; and definite, complete knowledge, and ideas are worth working for.

The impulse toward art is as mysterious and deep-seated as any of the other impulses are. History shows through what efforts of will the works of art have been produced in the past; and we know that if they carry their effects over through varying forms of civilization they must have for their basis something more substantial and real than the mere fashion of the day, or the necessities of the times in which they were created. The great statues of Phidias and Praxiteles "remain eternally the same in balanced perfection, and it is merely a misfortune not to admire Michelangelo, Beethoven and Mozart with the same appreciation that we bestow upon poetry."

Beauty did not pass away when the Greek Parthenon fell into ruins. As Plato says: "Whatever endures is more lasting than that which passes away. Every beautiful object, be it a man, a statue or a painted poem, is doomed to destruction, but beauty, ideal beauty, in itself, is imperishable." Those Greek teachers have become our teachers in all modern systems of education, both in method and in subject matter; and they believed and taught that moral consiousness and the sense of the beautiful are identical. Art is one means of expressing selfhood. But self-expression is the ideal of education as power. At the same time it strengthens the other two principal ways. of expressing selfhood, science and literature.

We remember well the nature-study onset, and the fresh, wild enthusiasm it brought. But now, shorn of many of its fads and still awaiting further pruning, it is doing the grand work of training the mind to habits of careful, critical observation, and centering educational effort on the essentials in method and matter. Likewise, we are now just passing through the "horse-chestnut" stage of picture study, the onset of the art movement in the public schools; the study of art as one of the essentials both as to its subject matter and its method. The early frost has come, the burr is opening, and the ripening nut ready to fall. What will the new plant be like a shrub, a dwarf oak or a stately tree?

In literature we are now in the midst of the burning fiction fever of the "short story." But meritorious as these productions are, and replete in interest, if we should strip many of them of their art in plan and telling, there would be little left but clever news items, painstaking observations on historic events, or striking and betimes wholesome maxims. The mind does not thrive and grow permanently on unrealities. But the art in combining these unrealities and personages and the underlying truths, are real and so charming and convincing as to captivate the mind with situations true to a life of actual experience, by investing incidents and personages with the reality of beauty. So also in general literature, especially in poetry, it is largely the art that charms and inspires permanent interest.

The purpose of art training in the public schools and colleges is not, or should not be, the making of professional artists, but the completing of the development of the mind. Its aim is to develop the entire circle of necessary ideas and make the mind artistic in its likes and in the exercise of its powers. Omit or neglect art training and you restrict or narrow all lives, and dwarf those minds whose special aptitude or nascent mode of self-expression is form and color-the beautiful.

In its relation to economics and the manufactures art is second to no subject on the school program, as the commercial value of every article of trade depends directly upon it. Student life is not yet enough of the nature of apprenticeship with

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