734 ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



Her nature should be religious. Who better than she can appre- 

 ciate the beauties of the Bible? When in the quiet of the night, she 

 beholds the vault of heaven with the stars guilding the blue dome, or 

 in the morning when the dew is made to sparkle on grass by the 

 sun, who has a better right to say with the Psalmist, "The heavens 

 declared the glorj' of God and the firmament showeth his handi- 

 work. Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth 

 knowledge." And who better than she can feel the lesson in hu- 

 mility and contentment contained in the Master's words: ''Consider 

 the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon 

 in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." "In the sweat of 

 thy face shalt thou eat bread," is not a mere statement from a 

 prayer-book. Her own life is a living example of the truth theroof. 



She should be a botanist. Not one of our book-made botanists, 

 but every flower, plant, the grass and herb, should teach her a lesson 

 and become her daily friends. What an opportunity for the study 

 of animal life she possesses. Not the pug dog of the lady of fashion, 

 but the pewee, the blackbird, the robins, the thrushes, the plain 

 chickens and pigeons can furnish her objects of study and interest. 

 The cows and sheep and horses, with the young calves, lambs and 

 colts, the bees and ants, the trout, perch and bass in the streams, all 

 these are hers. 



She should be a chemist. Her laboratory should be her kitchen. 

 She should learn how to salt, cure, and preserve meat, how to make 

 jellies, preserves and marmalades. She should learn one thing from 

 her sister of the city; and that is that it is not good form to have pie 

 for breakfast, dinner, and supper. How much better it would be if 

 she enforced this lesson on the household. Men would be less dys- 

 peptic in the family and would not fall asleep so soon after supper if 

 she served him with pie only at the noon day meal. Thus might she 

 hope to have companionship instead of surly, dull indifference re- 

 sulting from a bad stomach which her lack of the chemistry of foods 

 has caused. In this way her own sins are daily visited upon h-er. 



She should be a physician. Not learned in different schools of 

 medicine, but one who knows how to apply the simple home remedies, 

 which now enables the country people to practically dispense with 

 the man of medicine. In early times it was the custom to give the 

 body a regular spring cleaning. Beginning with the flow of sugar 

 water; sassafras was substituted for coffee; then followed an occa- 

 sional drink of an infusion of sarsaparilla, burdock, prickley ash or 

 wild-cucumber. These were often combined in form of bitters, using 

 whiskey to extract their virtues. In addition, white walnut, May 

 apple, catnip, rattle-root, boneset and many others were used to 

 meet special indications such as ginseng for dyspepsia. 



In closing, I want to leave one thought which I have, and that is 

 education is a life-long task. Let us throw away the old idea that 

 farmer's daughters should be educated only in their early teens, and 

 that the country ought to provide free education for children only, 

 and if a girl fails to get her amount of education in childhood remain 

 ignorant. Throw that belief away. Education as I have already 

 said, is a work of a lifetime. The world itself is our schoolroom and 

 nature with her field of facts and science is our books. 



"A good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters." 

 "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world." 



