[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 asa guide to future action may, ladies and gentlemen, be taken as theprimary differentiation between the animal and the vegetable kingdoms."
Thus Professor Melchizedek Hobbs, principal of the Springville FreeAcademy, on the day long-gone when I began my higher education. I cansee him yet, the apotheosis of the Victorian schoolmaster, IchabodCrane, come to life: the sparse, sandy hair brushed carefully acrosshis bony skull, his long nose trembling with the vehemence of hisargument, his artist's fingers stained with the chemicals which he hadlately been preparing in the school's laboratory, fumbling nervouslywith his mauve cravat and peering worriedly over the tops of hissteel-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 fouryears that followed realized that he was not like other teachers. Histeaching was the driving purpose of his life, second only to the keenand insatiable curiosity which sent his vulturine nose prying into theintimacies of Nature and ferreting out improbable facts to the greaterglory of botanical science. Now, on our first day at the Academy,he paced the rostrum like a moulting crane, wholly intent on theseriousness of his peroration.
Honeyed persuasion was in his voice, and a note of steel when it wasneeded, 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 spiritmoved by the solicitude shown by even the lowliest of God's thinkingcreatures in the care and upbringing of its young! How appalling isthe contrasting lethargy which characterizes the race of the cabbageand the vegetable marrow! With what wanton abandon does the profligatethistle scatter its plumed seeds to the four winds, yet with whatloving patience does the gentle hind nurture her fawn and bring it tomaturity.
"Education, ladies and gentlemen, is not the prerogative of Mankind!The kitten learns from the wise mouser, its mother, to stalk itswary prey. The sparrow in its nest is taught to spread its tremblingwings. Even the field mouse learns to know its natural enemies andto recognize them from afar. It is God's will on Earth that in everythinking race the parent should instruct its young, the adult impartthe accumulated wisdom of its kind to the immature. Education, ladiesand gentlemen, is the heritage of the animal kingdom—the privilegewhich divides us from the leek and the asparagus! I trust that you willnot deny that heritage!"
Thus Mr. Melchizedek Hobbs, in the days when I first knew him. Therewere a few of us who tagged him through the woods and fields, listeningto his painfully erudite disquisitions on matters of botany or zoology,following his kicking heels and flying coat-tails in wholly undignifiedpursuit of some new butterfly or beetle, or laboring home under theweight of collecting boxes stuffed with mosses and rare ferns. Welearned little enough, I suppose, for I find it hard now to distinguisha primrose from a cowslip, but we appreciated the very real enthusiasmwhich was his, and his sincere desire to learn and to impart what hehad learned.
Then, in our turn, we graduated and went our separate ways. I heardthat a maiden aunt in England—some forgotten relative of hismother's—had died and left Professor