n supplement experience, and give the information that makes man
ready against his day of battle.

It has been said, "For a thousand men who can speak, there is only one
who can think; for a thousand men who can think, there is only one who
can see." Since, then, the greatest thing in life is to have an open
vision, we need to ask the authors to teach us how to see. Each
Kingsley approaches a stone as a jeweler approaches a casket to unlock
the hidden gems. Geikie causes the bit of hard coal to unroll the
juicy bud, the thick odorous leaves, the pungent boughs, until the bit
of carbon enlarges into the beauty of a tropic forest. That little
book of Grant Allen's called "How Plants Grow" exhibits trees and
shrubs as eating, drinking and marrying. We see certain date groves in
Palestine, and other date groves in the desert a hundred miles away,
and the pollen of the one carried upon the trade winds to the branches
of the other. We see the tree with its strange system of water-works,
pumping the sap up through pipes and mains; we see the chemical
laboratory in the branches mixing flavor for the orange in one bough,
mixing the juices of the pineapple in another; we behold the tree as
a mother, making each infant acorn ready against the long winter,
rolling it in swaths soft and warm as wool blankets, wrapping it
around with garments impervious to the rain, and finally slipping the
infant acorn into a sleeping bag, like those the Esquimos gave Dr.
Kane.

At length we come to feel that the Greeks were not far wrong in
thinking each tree had a Dryad in it, animating it, protecting it
against destruction, dying when the tree withered. Some Faraday shows
us that each drop of water is a sheath for electric forces sufficient
to charge 800,000 Leyden jars, or drive an engine from Liverpool to
London. Some Sir William Thomson tells us how hydrogen gas will chew
up a large iron spike as a child's molars will chew off the end of a
stick of candy. Thus each new book opens up some new and hitherto
unexplored realm of nature. Thus books fulfill for us the legend of
the wondrous glass that showed its owner all things distant and all
things hidden. Through books our world becomes as "a bud from the
bower of God's beauty; the sun as a spark from the light of His
wisdom; the sky as a bubble on the sea of His Power." Therefore Mrs.
Browning's words, "No child can be called fatherless who has God and
his mother; no youth can be called friend