THE SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS 



when they were children. If you will take up a lan- 

 guage, for example, you will find that you can learn it as 

 fast as your child can, if you give it the same effort that 

 the child is obliged to give. Do not say " I am too old " ; 

 but begin to-day to acquire any knowledge you may 

 think it desirable to have, and persist in the effort. 

 Herschel, the greatest of observing astronomers, never 

 so much as saw a telescope till he was thirty-five, and 

 he continued to earn his living as a musician for some 

 years after he became the most expert of star-gazers. 

 Schliemann did not take up Greek till he was thirty-five ; 

 a few years later he could use that language with the 

 facility of his mother tongue. Elizabeth Cady Stanton 

 began the study of music at three score and ten. Queen 

 Victoria began Hindustani at the age of eighty. It is 

 never too late to mend our frayed mental habits or to 

 develop seemingly new capacities. 



The keys to such development, let me say again 

 in conclusion, are Interest and Repetition interest in 

 the things of your physical and mental environment to 

 make you a good observer, and repetition to fix your 

 observations in memory. Every teacher knows that the 

 great difficulty with children is to gain their interested 

 attention. If the average child could be made to be- 

 lieve that its school lessons are of real value and really 

 worth its while to learn, it would learn them twice as 

 well in half the time. The difficulty is that the child 

 mind is opinionated. The youth regards grammar, 

 algebra, Latin, and the rest as studies that can be of no 

 possible use to him in after life, and therefore he is con- 

 tent to give them just enough thought to "pass" 



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