The Strange Adventures of a Pebble

by Hallam Hawksworth

PREFACE

The purpose of this little book is to present the chief features in the strange story of the pebbles; and so of the larger pebble we call the earth. It is hoped that readers of various ages will be entertained, without suspecting that they are being taught.

Several things led the author to believe that such a book might be wanted.

(a) The circumstances under which it was written.

(b) The fact that there seemed to be an opportunity for improvement not only in the popular presentation of scientific topics but in the character and method of review questions and suggestions following such topics in school texts.

(c) Experience has shown that pictures may be made to perform a much more vital function in teaching than is usually assigned to them in the text-books.[1]

[1] On this subject I cannot do better, perhaps, than quote from an article on "The Picture Book in Education," contributed to the New York Evening Post:

"We learn more easily by looking at things than by memorizing words about them. The principle, of course, holds whether the image which the eye receives comes from the object itself or only from the picture of the object. Therefore we should learn to read pictures as well as books.

"New York has long recognized the added efficiency in the teaching process to be obtained from the use of pictures. The Division of Visual Instruction, established thirty years ago, has an international reputation for the extent of its equipment, the simplicity of its methods, and the excellence of its results."

(d) In the particular field to which this story relates comparatively little has been written either for reading in the family circle or for use in the school; although the relation of physiography, not only to human history and political and commercial geography but to the whole immense realm of natural science, is so basic and its great principles and processes so striking in their appeal to curiosity and our sense of the grand and the dramatic.[2]

[2] Commenting on the need of popular literature dealing with earth science, Doctor Shaler says:

"In no other fields are large and important truths so distinctly related to human interests so readily traced; yet the treatises dealing with these truths are few in number and generally recondite."

What here appear as chapters were originally little talks for the evening entertainment of the juvenile members of a certain family and the neighboring children, who were attracted by what came to be known as the "pebble parties," during the season at Mount Desert Island. They are here given in substantially the form in which they first saw the light. While they proved entirely intelligible to boys and girls of eight and ten they seemed equally interesting to the older members of the audience, including a youth of eighteen in his last year of high school, whose comments, in the language of his caste, deserve to share the credit for whatever of whimsical humor and colloquial style the author may have succeeded in incorporating into the narrative.

The familiar tone, the number and variety of the chapters, the sub-heads and marginal captions and the character and treatment of the illustrations have a similar origin. They represent the variety of aspects under which it was found necessary to present the facts in order to hold a capricious audience whose attendance and attention were wholly voluntary.

The use of unfamiliar words and scientific terms has been avoided as much as possible, consistent with the educational purpose of the book. It is to be remembered that educators do not consider it good practice to omit all words which children cannot understand at sight; the theory being that it is by the judicious introduction of words not current on the playground that the intellectual interests and capacities of children are enlarged. With regard to scientific topics (it is further argued) a large proportion of the classics of science written for the general reader and which boys and girls of fourteen and upward should be able to read easily and with pleasure—Shaler, Darwin, and Wallace, for example—contain quite a few scientific terms; and these it would be well that young people learn from context or definition in their previous reading in works of a more elementary nature.

Moreover, while younger children will read a book the general character of which interests them, even though they do not understand every word or get all the thoughts in it, sophisticated youths of the high-school age will have none of it, if they suspect that they are being talked down to. In the story of the pebble the aim, accordingly, has been not only to make a book that young people will not outgrow but one that will be of some interest to adults, particularly to travellers.

Not only in the text is special emphasis laid on the interpretation of landscape, but the character, treatment, and arrangement of the illustrations is intended to train the eye to read the story of the earth drama as recorded in the forms of valley, mountain, field, and shore. And—since the earth is not, after all, a mere geological specimen—these illustrations include reproductions of paintings, scenery as interpreted by the poet and the artist.

To create an appropriate atmosphere and so add to the vividness of conception, the twelve chapters each deal with a seasonable subject.

Relation to the Text-Book

The relation of this book to the formal study of physiography or geology in the schools will be apparent. The classified and exhaustive treatment of the text-book, while so admirably adapted to organize knowledge already acquired, or reward an appetite already aroused, is not at all adapted for creating this appetite in the first place; a thing so essential to true progress in education. For example, in a text-book, the many aspects of glaciers and their work, which are here distributed in a number of sections (as the discovery of these aspects was distributed in time), are usually dealt with in a single chapter or series of chapters, whose nature the reader at once gathers from the title, "The Work of the Glaciers."

The young reader or school pupil is thus deprived of the element of surprise, of the pleasure of following an unfolding mystery, which was at once the inspiration and reward of men of science to whom we owe these discoveries.

If left to the text-book alone, the student acquires his facts too rapidly and too easily. The result is a loss of both pleasure and profit. The movements of the glaciers and the nature of the movement, which gave Agassiz seven years of keen delight to ascertain, the pupil acquires through his text-book in something like seven minutes, and without either the pleasure or the profit of Agassiz' gradual and inductive acquirement of this knowledge.

In other words, to begin the study of a given science by means of a text-book, without previously arousing interest in the subject, is to assume a greater zeal on the part of school pupils and college students than, it is reasonable to assume, was possessed by the scientists themselves. It was the attraction of the unknown rather than the rapid acquirement of the known that drew them on to their grand discoveries, their illuminating generalizations.

In recording the pebble's story the endeavor has been to cause the reader to come upon the data on which these generalizations were based, piece by piece, here a little and there a little—as did the scientists themselves.

Interesting as the mere facts of physiographic science finally become to the trained scientist they make little appeal either to the average boy or the average adult, if he must first come in contact with them as they are presented in the text-book; classified, catalogued, labelled in scientific terms and laid away (as it seems to him) in chapter, section, and paragraph, like specimens in a museum.

Since this book is concerned mainly with landscapes and the story of the forces that helped to shape them it does not undertake to deal with mineralogy. Within the fields thus defined it is believed that the larger facts, the great moving causes of things, have been covered as thoroughly as they are in the average elementary text-book. In addition, subjects in great variety are touched upon which do not come within the province of the text-book, but are such as naturally suggest themselves in the broader and richer discussion of such topics in the conversation of cultivated people.

Hide and Seek in the Library

Since the whole purpose of the school is to prepare for the larger world of life and books outside the school, special attention is invited to the department of questions and suggestions following each chapter. As indicated in the introduction to the first of the series, an effort has been made to capitalize the fact that young people enjoy conundrums and curious quests in the field of books quite as well as mere passive reading.

The treatment is somewhat discursive, and in this and other respects is intended to be more like the conversation of cultivated parents with their children than like the review questions of a text-book; the review element being incidental, in recalling the topics out of which these questions and suggestions grow. The correlations in the most modern texts lead into equally wide and varied fields.

If he has succeeded in the aim thus indicated, the author believes this department may easily prove one of the most interesting as well as educatively useful features of the work.

H. H.