Animal life can do much for us if we will but study it, take notice of it daily in our homes, in the streets, wherever we are.
III
MASTERING NATURAL FORCES
It has been demonstrated by science that the mentality and disposition of all kinds of animal life are greatly affected by what they eat. Professor Virchow, of Germany, took two little kittens and fed them on different foods, but kept them in the same environment. After three months he went in and put out his finger at one of those little kittens, and it stuck up its back and spit and scratched and drew the blood. It was savage. He put out his finger to the other kitten, fed on the other food, and it rubbed against his finger and purred with all the loveliness of domestic peace. What was the difference between the kittens? Nothing in the world but what they ate.
Now I can understand why some men swear and some women scratch. It is what they eat.
The universities of the world are now establishing schools of domestic science for the purpose of training people to understand the chemistry of digestion and the chemistry of cooking. Oh, there is an awful need of better cooks! Yet the fashionable aristocratic American lady thinks it is altogether beneath her dignity to cook a pie or pudding, or boil potatoes. How short sighted that is! The need of better cooks is great. How many a man fails in business because his wife is a poor cook. How many a student is marked down because of the bad biscuit in the boarding-house. Oh yes, and how many a grave in yonder cemetery would be empty still if there had been a good cook in that house.
I have grappled with an awful subject now—the need of better cooks. A man can't even be pious with the dyspepsia. The American lady, so called, who sits in the parlor amid the lace curtains and there plies her needle upon some delicate piece of embroidery, and commits the wonderful chemistry of the kitchen to the care of some girl who doesn't know the difference between a frying-pan and a horse-rake, is not fit to be called an American lady. Any fool could sit amid the curtains, but it takes a giant mind to handle the chemistry of the kitchen. If women forsake that throne of power, men must take it, or our civilization must cease.
But I will not follow this thought into the thousands of discoveries animals suggest, because, in this wonderful tradition, the real king was not only followed by animals, but "the sun served him, and the waters obeyed him." Now I can combine those two thoughts for illustration, using the wonderful locomotive which draws our railway trains. The locomotive has within it the coal, which is the carbon of the sun. Thus the sun serves man by heating the water; and there is the water changing to steam and driving the piston-rods over the land, obeying man.