The FACTS of LIFE
by P. SCHUYLER MILLER
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Comet May 41.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"The ability to profit by past experience and to use this knowledge as a guide to future action may, ladies and gentlemen, be taken as the primary differentiation between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms."
Thus Professor Melchizedek Hobbs, principal of the Springville Free Academy, on the day long-gone when I began my higher education. I can see him yet, the apotheosis of the Victorian schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, come to life: the sparse, sandy hair brushed carefully across his bony skull, his long nose trembling with the vehemence of his argument, his artist's fingers stained with the chemicals which he had lately been preparing in the school's laboratory, fumbling nervously with his mauve cravat and peering worriedly over the tops of his steel-bowed spectacles at our bright and shining faces.
To Mr. Melchizedek Hobbs every moment of every day was precious. Those of us who came to know him a little more intimately in the four years that followed realized that he was not like other teachers. His teaching was the driving purpose of his life, second only to the keen and insatiable curiosity which sent his vulturine nose prying into the intimacies of Nature and ferreting out improbable facts to the greater glory of botanical science. Now, on our first day at the Academy, he paced the rostrum like a moulting crane, wholly intent on the seriousness of his peroration.
Honeyed persuasion was in his voice, and a note of steel when it was needed, for by any standards Mr. Melchizedek Hobbs was no mean orator. Now he made an appeal to our young emotions:
"How often in one's journeyings is the heart warmed and the spirit moved by the solicitude shown by even the lowliest of God's thinking creatures in the care and upbringing of its young! How appalling is the contrasting lethargy which characterizes the race of the cabbage and the vegetable marrow! With what wanton abandon does the profligate thistle scatter its plumed seeds to the four winds, yet with what loving patience does the gentle hind nurture her fawn and bring it to maturity.
"Education, ladies and gentlemen, is not the prerogative of Mankind! The kitten learns from the wise mouser, its mother, to stalk its wary prey. The sparrow in its nest is taught to spread its trembling wings. Even the field mouse learns to know its natural enemies and to recognize them from afar. It is God's will on Earth that in every thinking race the parent should instruct its young, the adult impart the accumulated wisdom of its kind to the immature. Education, ladies and gentlemen, is the heritage of the animal kingdom—the privilege which divides us from the leek and the asparagus! I trust that you will not deny that heritage!"