CHAPTER IX 



SPONGES 



Aristotle took sponge baths. He also knew 

 that sponges were animals, and when, in the Iliad, 

 Homer described a sponge as "full of holes," he 

 expressed about all the knowledge which mankind 

 has possessed until comparatively recent times. 



When a human being, especially a product of 

 intensive civilization, steps out of his life rut, the 

 narrowness of his knowledge becomes terribly 

 apparent: what seemed ultra -sophistication turns 

 into provincialism, and instead of a man-of-the- 

 world we have a puzzled child often striving to 

 conceal its ignorance in facetiousness. When the 

 glory of coral reef sponges first comes to the eye of 

 such a person, he exclaims, "Sponges! Bathroom 

 sponges!" He visualizes a dish of cabbage when 

 a royal palm stretches its majestic bole up and up 

 into the sky, he misses the beauty of castor-oil 

 foliage and ignores the deep wine-hued grace of 

 banana blossoms. If we should go into a great 

 gallery, slit up its priceless canvases, cleanse them 

 of paint and put them to some drab, prosaic use, 

 vandalism would be a quite inadequate term. Yet 

 (permitting ourselves to wallow in sentimentality 



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