For the cultivator of the soil, whether farmer, gardener, or fruit grower, botany, of course, is the queen of sciences—though he may not safely remain ignorant of the others mentioned, which form a brilliant court for his queen. In no direction has science lately proved itself so indispensable as in the application of botanical knowledge to the improvement of agricultural operations of all kinds. In France, always one of the richest of lands in this respect, the government has since the war made special provisions for placing instruction in botany and plant physiology, and the results of all advances in the science of the vegetable kingdom, before the pupils of the primary as well as those of the secondary and higher schools. Botanical reading and study are encouraged in every possible way. One of the most significant propositions for the extension of this educational reform consists in the suggestion that the schools in the country districts give much more attention to the various branches of botanical knowledge than the city schools do, for the purpose not only of supplying instruction that will be of fundamental practical use to the young people who grow up on the land and are to make its cultivation their life's occupation, but also of stimulating a love of the country for itself, its scenes, its atmosphere, its society, its amusements, and its simple, beautiful, and healthful ways of life.
As your train, or car, rushes through a rock cut where the roadway has been carried, without change of level or grade, through the round back of a hill, you may happen to see on the side walls of the excavation curious striations, or cross checkings, of the rock surface, or alternate strata, or layers, of varying color and texture; some composed of smooth-faced stone, of a dark, uniform color, and others of coarse granular masses of variegated hue, some of whose particles flash like microscopic mirrors in the glancing sunlight that grazes the top of the cut. Here, then, you are plunged into the wonder world of the geologist and the mineralogist, the subject of one of the most interesting of our volumes. That man must indeed be dull of intellect who does not feel a thrill of interest at the sight of these signs and inscriptions, written by the ancient hand of nature in the rocks, and telling, in language far more easily decipherable than the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the story of the gradual growth of this round planet on whose surface we are confined, like flies or ants, as it rotates and revolves in empty space, circling with us around a star, ninety-three million miles away, called the sun, which saw the birth of our world and has ever since kept it warmed and lighted with its rays.
In those layers of rock in the railway cut you see the leaves of the book of geology, infinitely older than the oldest scripture from man's hands, and relating things that occurred in those far-off nights and mornings of time that flitted over the globe ages before the human stem had set off from the trunk of terrestrial life. These geologic pages speak of occurrences in the building of the world that happened millions of years ago, and millions of years apart, though they have left marks and vestiges that the eye can discern as easily as if they had been the work of yesterday. No observant person can ride twenty miles through the country, especially in a hilly region, without having the fundamental facts of geology continually before him, and all that he needs in order to comprehend these things is a little preparatory reading, accompanied and followed by intelligent thought and observation. Anybody to whom all rocks look alike, and all hills the same, needs a little awakening of the mind. He is one of the persons had in view when this series was conceived and written, and he has no occasion to feel in the slightest degree offended by such a statement, for the simple fact that probably ninety-nine one-hundredths of his fellow citizens, and they among the best in the community, are just as unfamiliar with the plainest facts of geology as he is. Geology is not a difficult science to master in its main outlines, and there are few more fascinating when once its drift is caught. Even the beginner in the reading of the volume on geology, by seizing such chances of observation as every ride or walk affords, may in a very short time acquire the ability to read the history of a landscape from its face, to recognize the work of the glaciers in the great Age of Ice, to see where ancient streams flowed, or where molten rock has gushed up through the surface layers of the earth's crust, and even to recognize on sight some of the fossils, which are under everybody's feet in some parts of the country, and which still retain the forms of animals some of which were among the primal inhabitants of the earth, whose lines have died out, while others, though their individual lives expired tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, bear in their fossilized forms a close resemblance to modern relatives and descendants whose generations still flourish in the living world in this twentieth century of man's latest historic era.
Presently, turning from the attractions of the outdoor world, which seem just as entrancing the hundredth time you look upon them as they did the first time, particularly if you have cultivated the habit not merely of noticing but of thinking and reading about them, you take up the morning newspaper, in which most of your companions of the car are already deeply buried, and amid the political news, the personal gossip, the inevitable exploitation of the deeds of criminals, the foreign intelligence, and the social gossip that falls under your eyes, your attention is caught (this is an actual happening of not long ago) by the headline: "John Daniel, the orang-utan, is dead." This sounds odd. There has been no animal's obituary in the papers since Barnum lost his biggest elephant, and bequeathed its skeleton to science. You read further and find an interview with a professor about the human relationships, or apparent relationships, of the anthropoid apes, of whom "John Daniel" would probably have been the acknowledged king if his relatives of the woods could have understood the regard in which he was held by his white-skinned and clothes-wearing jailers. You will probably cut out that paragraph and put it aside for further consideration, remembering that there are at least three volumes in your Popular Science set at home, that on zoölogy, that on geology, and that on anthropology, in which there will be an abundance of interesting and authoritative matter bearing on this most important subject—for important you will consider it now that the death of a kind of caricature of humanity in the zoölogical garden that had so long amused the children as well as their elders with its humanlike motions, habits, looks, and pranks, has suddenly brought the whole question up among the news of the day, affording you a new light on a matter which you had hitherto thought to belong exclusively to the field of the professors of zoölogy and their students. Hereafter you will disposed to take a broader view of all these things, and will be in a better position to understand and enjoy the discussions of learned scientists when they are interviewed by newspaper men on subjects of this kind. The inquiring spirit of the time requires this concession even if in your private opinion there is no real relationship between men and apes. And, without regard to any such questions, you will find the volume on anthropology immensely interesting and informing.
Finally, as your morning's trip comes to an end, your attention is recalled from the natural to the mechanical sciences. You descend from your car or train, to go to your office. Your now fully awakened mind, alert to all the scientific relations of everything about you, can no longer keep from dwelling upon the underlying meanings of this marvelous display of realized human dreams. With the speed of the wind you are carried deep under the city's pavements, inclosed in a little flying parlor, in the midst of an artificial subterranean daylight, far beyond the reach of the solar rays, emulating the self-luminous creatures of the deep sea bottom; or you go shooting past the window of third, fourth, and fifth stories, or even above the levels of roofs, and you cannot but reflect and marvel that electricity does it all; electricity, that strange imp with blue star eyes no bigger than pin points, and a child's crown of little crinkling, piercing rays, which seemed so amusing when you were at school in the old days of frictional electric machines, when it was a great joke to give the cat a shock and see her flee with a squall, her hair standing on end in spite of herself. But now electricity has become a giant of unrivaled and terrific power, spurning the heavy-limbed Brobdingnag, steam, from its swift path, and fast making the world all its own—except its master, man, who is still, however, half afraid of his new and all-capable servant.
EXHIBITION OF COPIES OF PREHISTORIC PAINTINGS FROM THE CAVERNS AT ALTAMIRA, SPAIN
