166 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



of our so-called education, which makes it well-nigh impossible 

 for our youth of the higher classes to have any intimate con- 

 tacts with men who may teach him what is the real nature of 

 his kind. He sees those only who are so formalized by training 

 and the uses of society that they show him a work of art in 

 human shape. He thus has to deal with his fellows in terms 

 which are not those of real human nature, and thereby much 

 of his own is never awakened. He may live through long fair- 

 appearing years, yet fail to have the experiences necessary to 

 humanize him fully. I have known many an ignorant sailor 

 or backwoodsman who, because he had been brought into sym- 

 pathetic contact with the primitive qualities of his kind, was 

 humanely a better educated man than those who pride them- 

 selves on their culture. The gravest problem of civilization is 

 in my opinion how we are to teach human quality in a system 

 which tends ever more and more to hide it. 

 /"As for the scientific results of the Anticosti expedition, they 

 were to me of much and enduring value. In the first place, I 

 saw then and the impression has stayed with me the great 

 interest which relates to the contact of sea and land. Some- 

 thing of this I had gained in tramping the shores of Massachu- 

 setts, but this journey gave me a sense of its range and scope 

 I could not otherwise have gained. You do not gain this by 

 mere travel; you may sail along thousands of miles of shore 

 without winning more than faint impressions of what is going 

 on there, but if you have to fight with the surf and in-shore 

 currents, study harborages for their value as shelters, and learn 

 by experience what a lee shore means, you become curiously 

 well acquainted with the facts you feel and do not merely 

 see them. With this personal sense of the shores came the 

 perception that each feature not only the details of form, 

 but the large elements of the geography as well not only 

 had a history, but was in some way a record of it. I believe 

 that this sense of the chronicle in things, though in some meas- 

 ure established in my mind as a thesis, first came to me as a 



