138 With Feet to the Earth 



for four years, painfully parsing and ana- 

 lyzing isn't there a waste? So with 

 figures : there are people to whom they 

 are not merely tiresome, but repellent ; 

 indeed, a fondness for them is constitu- 

 tional and cannot be induced. Lincoln, 

 Grant, Emerson, Franklin, Beecher, Steven- 

 son, the line could be spun over pages, 

 were men who had not mathematical minds. 

 They managed to be great Yet custom 

 says that only those children with a born 

 aptitude for figures shall obtain the higher 

 education. The boy or girl who will be- 

 come an engineer or closet astronomer is 

 rare, but thousands of our youth will take 

 to trade, art, the pulpit, law, medicine, 

 soldiering, the stage, music, writing, farm- 

 ing, employments in which it does not 

 matter a rap whether or no one can tell 

 the ratio of the square of one side of a 

 trapezoid to the squares of the other sides, 

 because they don't use trapezoids. Har- 

 vard professors have expressed surprise that 

 so many young men who offer themselves 

 at the entrance examinations write a vile 

 hand and cannot use the mother-tongue 



