Hanging the Pictures on Memory's Wall 



Rev. Manley Townsend 



The simplest things can often furnish us with the richest pleas- 

 ures. To find the uncommon in the common affords extraor- 

 dinary satisfaction. Such is the power of nature study. It 

 enriches life. It provides a perpetual fount of unalloyed delight. 

 No one who has entered into the treasures of the natural world 

 can ever be dull or filled with ennui. Even a "desert" isle has 

 no terrors for him. Wherever he turns he finds objects of interest, 

 old and new friends to greet him. Here it is a fern, there a flower, 

 and again a bird. No person can be called really educated who 

 is ignorant of the wonderful world in which he lives. No matter 

 how many Greek or Latin roots he may know, or how profoundly 

 versed in mathematics or literature he may be, if he knows not 

 something of the stars in the heavens above his head and the 

 forms of animal and vegetable life on the earth beneath his feet, 

 he is ignorant. His education has been seriously neglected. 

 He has missed a very important realm of knowledge, a realm no 

 himian being can afford to miss. Cf course, education is entirely 

 relative. One may be highly educated in one thing and densely 

 ignorant in another, like the man who owned the first volumne 

 of the encyclopedia and knew a great deal about astromomy, 

 alchemy, architecture and Australia; but who knew nothing of 

 physics, chemistry, mechanics, zebras or New Zealand. 



The day is surely coming when every child will be taught in the 

 schools to know and love the wonder world in which he has been 

 placed. The teachers will be trained for this purpose in our 

 normal schools. A few minutes, rightly used each day, can open 

 the child's eyes to a new world and introduce him to an inexhaust- 

 ible treasure house of perpetual delight. Thereafter, life will 

 take on new and added meaning. We are continually meeting 

 people to whom life grows gray, dull, insipid in middle life. It 

 is because they have so few resources. To one who has entered 

 into a sympathetic understanding of nature, life never because 

 gray or insipid or dull. Everywhere he turns he sees friends that 

 he admires and loves, friends he has been acquiring through the 

 years. He is rich in the best of all treastire, the priceless wealth 

 of the mind and soul. We do indeed "live in deeds, not years; 

 in thoughts, not breaths; in feelings, not in figures on a dial." 



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