THE FOUR LAWS OF AGE 243 



but really working chiefly by himself. How wonder- 

 ful it all is ! Is any one of us capable of beginning at 

 the moment we wake to carry on a new line of thought, 

 a new series of studies, and to keep it up full swing, 

 with unabated pace, all day long till we drop asleep ? 

 Every baby does that every day. 



When we turn to the child who goes to school, be- 

 hold how much that child has lost. It has difficulties 

 with learning the alphabet. It struggles slowly through 

 the Latin grammar, painfully with the subject of 

 geometry, and the older it gets the more difficult 

 becomes the achievement of its study. The power 

 of rapid learning, which the baby has, is clearly 

 already lessened. 



The introduction of athletics affords a striking illus- 

 tration of the decline of the learning power with the 

 progressing years. When golf first came in it was con- 

 sidered an excellent game for the middle-aged; and you 

 have all watched the middle-aged man play. He was 

 so awkward, he could not do it. Day after day the 

 man of forty, fifty, or even older, would go to the golf 

 field, hoping each time to acquire a sure stroke, but 

 never really acquiring it. The young man learned 

 better, but the good golf players are those who begin 

 as children, twelve and fourteen years of age, and in 

 a few months become as expert and sure as their 

 fathers wished to become, but could not. In bicycling 

 it was the same. Eight lessons was considered the 

 number necessary to teach the intelligent adult to ride 

 a wheel. Three for a child of eight. And an indefinite 



