uld be an ungracious thing for us to go on
living here without taking the trouble to look upon this earth's
floor, so firm and solid, or study the beauteous ceiling lighted with
star lamps by night. And the evenings of one week with Geikie or Dana
will tell us by what furnaces of fire the granite was melted, by what
teeth of glaciers and weight of sea-waves the earth's surface was
smoothed for the plow and the trowel. How long it has been since the
glacier was a mile thick upon the very spot where we stand, how long
since the waters of Lake Michigan, now flowing over Niagara, ceased
flowing into the Mississippi.

The evenings of another week with Professor Gray or Grant Allen will
tell us how all the trees and plants live and breathe and wax great;
how the lily sucks whiteness out of the slough, and how the red rose
untwists the sunbeam and pulls out the scarlet threads. The evenings
of another week with Ball or Proctor or Langley will exhibit the sun
pulling the harvests out of our planet, even as the blazing log pulls
the juices out of the apples roasting before the hot coals; how large
a house on the moon must be in order to be seen by the new telescope
at Lake Geneva; whether or not the spots on the sun represent great
chunks of unburned material, some of which are a full thousand miles
across, materials thrown up by gaseous explosions. While Maury will
take us during another week, in a glass boat that is water-tight,
upon a long cruise more than three thousand leagues under the sea,
showing us those graveyards called sea shells, those cities called
coral reefs, those strange animals that have roots instead of feet,
called sponges.

Having journeyed around the earth house, each should study himself;
his body as an engine of mental thought, an instrument of conduct and
character; the number and nature and uses of the forty and more
faculties of mind and heart with which he is endowed. From the study
of the soul the mind moves easily to the upward movement of the race,
as man journeys from hut to house, from tent to temple, from force to
self-government and education and literature, from his flaming altar
to the rising hymn and aspiring prayer. This tells us what
contribution each race, Hebrew and Greek, Roman and Teuton, has made
to civilization. Then come the books of life, wherein the qualities to
be emulated are capitalized in the lives of the great, for biography
is one of man's best teachers. Therein we see ho