EDITORIAL 



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About this time of the year the spell-binders of the great 

 political parties are beginning to adjure the young voter not 

 to vote the opposition ticket just because his father and grand- 

 father did so, but the politician is not the only person who is 

 bothered by this phase of ancestor-worship. A regard for tra- 

 dition is so deeply ingrained in human nature that it acts as a 

 clog upon progress in all walks of life. In the schools ancient 

 history, the dead languages and others that ought to be dead, 

 still crowd more useful studies largely because these were the 

 studies of a thousand years or more ago. Time was when a 

 liberal education consisted of a knowledge of history, Latin 

 and mathematics. Then it was that people believed in fern- 

 seed that would make one invisible, in the philosopher's stone 

 for the transmutation of metals, in the mandrake which emitted 

 blood curdling shrieks when pulled up, in the barnacle goose 

 which grew upon trees, in devil-fishes that could sink large 

 ships, in witches, demons, cockatrices, phoenixes, were-wolves. 

 unicorns and other equally attractive creations of a supersti- 

 tious age. It is a wonder that it never occurred to some Hodge 

 of that ancient day to start a course of nature-study with "The 

 Arabian Nights" and "Gulliver's Travels" as texts Times 

 have changed, but the established order of things has always 

 been a few laps behind. We still are too prone to consider a 

 knowledge of the classics to be the chief end of man. One by 

 one, however, the sciences have fought their way up to recog- 

 nition. Alchemy, fit subject for those benighted times be- 

 came our modern chemistry, natural philosophy, at first the 

 plaything of the curious became physics, while natural history 

 turned to biology with its two sister sciences zoology and bot- 

 any. But always these have had to fight to maintain their 

 places, and even today a large number of the pupils in the pub- 



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