INFANT INDUSTRIES 173 



kicks and screams, quite as much as any ordinary infant. In all of 

 this, the analogy with living people is again complete, for we ourselves 

 are not entirely new, but merely repeat, with all-important modifica- 

 tions — the forms of our ancestors. The old text-book must not be 

 discarded. It is full of information — and information is the food 

 upon which ideas subsist. Many a good child of the intellect has been 

 starved or warped because the fact-food supplied to it was deficient or 

 bad. Adulterated fact is as bad as adulterated butter, sugar or lard; 

 we can not have it chemically pure, I suppose, but woe to him who in- 

 tentionally mixes wrong ingredients. The scientific men is devoted 

 to truth; he is a pure-food man on the intellectual plane, and those 

 who distort the truth for the purpose of warping the public ideas, are 

 to him the worst of living creatures. 



However, just as food, pure or impure, is of no use unless it is con- 

 sumed, so information unapplied to the nourishment of thought is 

 thrown away. I fear there is too much such waste among us, for the 

 reason that we have not yet learned to think. The other day I passed 

 two very little children, a boy and a girl, on their way to the University 

 Hill School. The boy said to the girl, with the air of one communi- 

 cating a most interesting fact, " Do you know, t, h, e, spells the " ! 

 Here was an example of the true spirit of science, the pleasure in the 

 apperception of a new thing in its relation to something else. I must 

 confess that the plane of this conversation was higher than that I 

 usually overhear on the university campus. 



