12 Boyhood, Early Schooling, and Teaching 



footed and bare handed, and returned proud of his store of golden 

 burs and meaty nuts. He learned the life habits of the field mouse 

 and timid hare, the brown bats which flew about on velvety wings, 

 the tawny foxes which lived among the hills. He found shells, 

 bones, and other fossiliferous evidences of ancient life in rocks of 

 the region, and prized them "more than gems." Of nights he 

 read on the region's natural history, examining his "treasure 

 trove" of corals, crinoid stems, and broken reefs from glacial 

 drift, and learned of the far past epochs and eras of the geological 

 calendar, from the period of Devonian seas and shores through 

 the Carboniferous and Cretaceous ages to the coming of man on 

 the earth. His imagination must have dwelt especially on the 

 " Strange herbs, and forests of the weirdest trees; Low shores that 

 swarm with life" where were no flowers or bees, and before the 

 coal was massed. Because, later in life, in 1925, he wrote a group 

 of poems on these subjects, and in each the reactions of an " eager 

 boy," obviously himself, were presented. Of " Evolution " he was 



to say: 



Out of the Earth itself came man and beast, 

 What's anchor'd, swims, or flits on painted wings, 

 The endless multitude of creeping things. 

 Tall trees, green herbs, gray lichen, fungus, yeast, 

 All eager to partake of Life's great feast — 

 What runs and leaps and soars, or merely clings. 

 What rusdes, murmurs, hisses, roars or sings, 

 Yea, whatsoever living thing is least ! 



Earth swarms! So be it, there is room for all! 

 And still they come! As on creation's day, 

 Triumphant rise new forms while old ones fall. 

 But the God in sentient things, the urge divine 

 That vivifies — That too must be in the clay: 

 Each atom of it throbs, a living mine ! ^^ 



Even before he knew much of Charles Darwin's Origin of 

 species by means of natural selection (1859), or Darwin's or 

 Alfred Russell Wallace's theories on evolution as presented July 

 1 1858, before the Linnean Society of London, he had observed 

 evidences of the relentless struggles for survival among natural 

 forms. One day he watched a large hornet battle with three flies, 

 take the juice of one and at the same time try to catch another; 



" February 26, 1923. 



