"What," he said "is the use of trying to write
biography with such mummies for witnesses! They would have seen just
as much if they had had nothing but glass eyes in their heads."
What is education good for that does not teach the mind to observe
accurately and define picturesquely? To get at the essence of an
object and clear away the accompanying rubbish, this is the only
training that fits men and women to live with any profit to themselves
or pleasure to others. What a biographer, for example, or at least
what a witness for some other biographer, was latent in the little boy
who, when told by his teacher to define a bat, said: "He's a nasty
little mouse, with injy-rubber wings and shoe-string tail, and bites
like the devil." There was an eye worth having! Agassiz himself could
not have hit off better the salient characteristics of the little
creature in question. Had that remarkable boy been brought into
contact, for five minutes only, with Julius Caesar, who can doubt that
the telling description he would have given of him would have come
down through all the ages?
I do not mean to urge the adoption of any ultra-utilitarian standpoint
in regard to playthings, or advise you rudely to enter the realm of
early infancy and interfere with the baby's legitimate desires by any
meddlesome pedagogic reasoning.
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