136 With Feet to the Earth 



too. The only poetry in which these 

 screams for help seem at all permissible is 

 that of Greece and Rome, for in those 

 countries they pretended to believe in 

 muses. 



And I sometimes become so rabid an 

 anarchist that I doubt the value of mathe- 

 matics. I take the basely practical ground 

 that I never knew a man clever at figures 

 who was brighter in any other way or had 

 quicker instincts and perceptions than his 

 neighbors. If the pressure in our schools 

 is increased, the children must be allowed 

 to choose their studies. Algebra and ge- 

 ometry have been crowded from the high 

 school into lower grades, and it has become 

 a practice to rank scholars more by mathe- 

 matics than by all other studies together. 

 A lad may be stupid in grammar, his com- 

 positions may be ridiculous, he may not 

 know the purpose of the Declaration of 

 Independence or the Constitution, he may 

 believe that the Lena River is in Patagonia, 

 he may not know the difference between a 

 vertebrate and a mollusk, an endogen and 

 an exogen, yet if he is quick at his exam- 



