"He listened attentively to my brief rehearsal of the structure of parts whose names were still unknown to me.... When I had finished he waited, as if expecting more, and then, with an air of disappointment, 'You have not looked very carefully; why,' he continued most earnestly, 'you haven't even seen one of the most conspicuous features of the animal, which is as plainly before your eyes as the animal itself. Look again! Look again!' and he left me to my misery.
"I ventured to ask what I should do next.
"'Oh, look at your fish,' he said, and left me again to my own devices. In a little more than an hour he returned and heard my new catalogue.
"'That is good, that is good,' he repeated: 'but that is not all; go on.' And so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else or use any artificial aid. 'Look, look, look,' was his repeated injunction."
Doctor Scudder says that this was the best entomological lesson he ever had, and a lesson of which the influence extended to the details of every subsequent study.
It is the duty of the college student to look at his fish, to thumb his lexicon, to read his textbook, to study his notes, to think, and think hard, upon the truth therein presented. Of all the students in the world the Scotch represent this simple duty the best. The men at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen toil mightily.
The duty of learning one's lessons is, in these times, opposed by at least two elements of college life. One is self-indulgence and the other is athletics. Self-indulgence is a general cause and constant. Athletics have in the last thirty years come to be a force more or less dominant. Athletics represent a mighty force for collegiate and human betterment. Football, which is par excellence the college game, is an admirable method of training the man physical, the man intellectual and the man ethical. But football is not a college purpose; it is a college means. It is a means for the promotion of scholarship, for the formation of manhood. When football or other forms of college sport are turned from being a method and a means into being ends in themselves the misfortune is lamentable.
At a recent Harvard commencement, Professor Shaler, than whom no man in Harvard was more vitally in touch with all undergraduate interests, spoke of the harm wrought upon many students through their absorption in athletics. It cannot be denied for an instant that many men are hurt by giving undue attention to sports. Of course many men are benefited, and, are benefited vastly, by athletics, but men who are harmed should at once be obliged to learn the lesson of learning their lessons. That is the chief lesson which they ought to learn.