A Marvelous Background 



By Editha Campbell, Erie, Pa. 



An artist in composing his picture gives as much attention 

 to the background as to the figures that are to stand out from it. 

 It must give the "depth" his picture needs. So in our love for 

 nature we study the birds, flowers and insects and their uses to 

 man, forgetting they are, after all, but the figures upon the marvel- 

 ous background of our earth's life history. A background giving 

 depths of millions of years to the exquisite designs painted upon it. 



A friend of mine once said "Palaeontology can't be made 

 interesting to children, it is too dead." I thought otherwise 

 judging from the interest one little girl I knew, displayed in 

 hammering the rocks to find a whole trilobite and hunting the 

 different fossil corals, — and the pride she took in the fact that 

 "her summer cottage was on a glacial moraine." The result 

 was, a little class in a private school was formed of children from 

 eight to eleven and tried on the subject, then the entire number 

 of fifty-five children ranging from nine to fourteen in a rural 

 school, making two distinct types of children. 



First we had a few mythological stories of some of the stars 

 with their distances from us. Then the relation of our sun, 

 moon and earth to each other together with the story of our 

 earth when a star, its gradual cooling, its formation of an envelope 

 of atmosphere, and how at last through chemical action the 

 particles from the cooling mass were formed that at last raised 

 to view our first glimpse of land over in the Laurentian Hills. 

 Next came lantern slides first showing the scenery of the cooled 

 off moon. And when the children realized the "Man-in-the- 

 Moon" was made up of wonderful burned out volcanoes with 

 craters miles in diameter, and vast lava seas, their "Ohs!" came 

 from all parts of the room. Our earth we had learned had cooled 

 and is still cooling, but how do we know? The slides took us 

 through the "Yellowstone Park and Old Faithful, the Beehive and 

 the hissing, down in the Devil's Kitchen and all the marvels of 

 that Park that makes any thinking person who goes through 

 feel the Unseen power that has brought all this to pass, told us 

 plainly our earth had not cooled entirely. 



A part of our background was painted but not all. While 

 our earth was cooling, away back in the dim dawning of its history, 



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