Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/834

Now, I do not believe in this. I believe in wholeness, in health, in vitality, in integrity, in goodness, in happiness. And I believe that manual training should lead to these, should lead to them inexorably. The same motive which makes me cherish manual training—the love of power, the love of perfection—makes me deny as its proper outcome any activity which disallows complete manhood. So manual training opens the doors of activity in all directions, only to declare that many of these doors are impossible. It consents only to those activities which, humanly speaking, are worthy; and the test of worthiness is not measured in the economic terms of productiveness; it is measured in the terms of the spirit, in its effect upon the worker. I do not succeed in impressing this view of life upon all of our graduates. I do not succeed in impressing it even upon a majority. But each year it does claim a small company, a company who believe with me that the most sacred thing about life is life, and who decline to violate this sacredness by any petty spoliation of the days. It does seem to us a tragedy that any young man, and particularly any young man in America, where the opportunities for rational living are so abundant, should deliberately elect a suicidal scheme of life, some dull routine which is to curtail experience and limit the universe to a daily round of sordid cares. Perhaps I should not have said deliberately. They do not do it deliberately; they do it because they do not see. They do it because culture and the ideal of life for which it stands have not taken hold of them; because we who represent this view of life have not been sufficiently active, insistent, loving, to win them over to our side. In any case it is a tragedy, and one that I much deplore. When education shall have done its perfect work, our boys and our men will declare with Walt Whitman, in his Song of the Open Road:

"Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune."

And it is this to which I would have manual training lead, to the rare good fortune of a rich and full existence.

 

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On account of the absence or loss, in fossilizing, of characteristic features, it has hitlierto not been possible to give trilobites a fixed place in the zoölogical system; they by turns have been classed with isopods, phyllopods, and arachnids. Mr. H. M. Bernard, in his work upon The Apodidæ, placed them in that family; but he confesses that, however weighty the argument in favor of that relationship, the inability actually to demonstrate tbe existence of antennæ was a felt weakness. Recently some sixty specimens of the species Triarthrus Beckii were found by Mr. Valiant in the Hudson River shales, near Rome, N. Y., with antennæ, and have been described by Mr. W. D. Matthews in the American Journal of Science. Mr. Bernard regards the presence, structure, and position of the antennæ as justifying and confirming his classification.