THE FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE^ 
C. JuDSON Herrick 
In my childhood days I used to hear about Johnnie Apple-seed, 
a quaint old character who went about visiting village schools 
and seeking opportunity to talk to the children. He took his 
name from a habit of collecting apple seeds and dropping them into 
the ground as he went along, to raise fruit trees for future genera- 
tions. His dry humor and homely precepts unquestionably 
helped many a school child on his way, and doubtless many of 
these children in later life tasted of the fruit from trees planted 
by the wayside by Johnnie Apple-seed. But he left no lasting 
impress upon the educational institutions of his time, and of the 
few trees of his planting which struggled through neglect to 
frowzy maturity, probably very few ever bore really good apples. 
Johnnie Apple-seed’s method was not very efficient, when 
measured by the standards of modern horticulture. The scien- 
tific culture of fruit trees and other farm products has long since 
passed the haphazard stage. Not only do we preserve and 
improve the physical value of the land by fertilizers, rotation of 
crops, etc., but the character of the vital stock itself is improved 
by prolonged systematic experimentation and by constant atten- 
tion to selective breeding. Our government agencies in America 
are annually expending millions of dollars in experimental farm- 
ing. But in some respects our educational system seems scarcely 
to have passed beyond the stage of haphazard planting. 
The problems of education resolve themselves into two chief 
factors: first, the native endowments with which the child comes 
into the world; and second, the process of cultural modification 
by which these endowments are brought to the highest attain- 
able efficiency — or briefly, nature and nurture. From the cir- 
cumstance that the latter factor is obviously more directly under 
the teacher’s control than the former, it has naturally followed that 
^ An address delivered at Granville, O., April 16, 1912, at the special exercises 
in celebration of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the founding of the Denison 
Scientific Association. 
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