Nature that makes those
chickens? You and I can't make them. Nature puts a shell around the egg
with the express purpose that we are to keep our fingers out and let her
alone. She says: "I am on very important business now and I am going to do
some strange things; if you could watch me you would interfere with me, and
if you interfere with me, you will ruin me or ruin the chicken, so I want
you to stand to one side and leave me entirely alone; and while I might do
a good many things that you don't like, I shall bring a chicken out of that
egg;" and she does; she has been making them for thousands of years in that
same old stupid way, but she brings the chicken out all right.

Sometimes she seems to blunder still worse. She takes an egg which we
suppose is going to turn into a frog, and she brings out of it a
tadpole--neither fish, flesh nor fowl nor anything else. After a while the
tadpole gets legs and has a long tail; it must lose that tail in order to
become a frog. A benevolent zoologist one day started in to help the
tadpole by snipping off the tadpole's tail; he made a frog of him in a
hurry, but the strange thing was that that frog never was able to leap
properly. Nature had been relying on the material that was in the tail. She
was going to shift it forward and put it in the hind legs, but when the
zoologist cut it off, she couldn't build the hind legs right after that.

A good deal of our education seems to me like trying to make frogs in a
hurry by cutting off their tails. Nature can make chickens; she can make
frogs. She can make bugs that will eat up everything which human ingenuity
ever tried to raise. She will make weeds which you and I can't possibly
kill even though we fight against them all summer long. We can trust Nature
to form these things; isn't it fair to trust her with the children for a
little while at least? Wouldn't it be well--I never heard of this
experiment being tried, but I should like to see it tried very much
indeed--I do wish that sometime somebody would leave a baby alone for
twenty minutes and see what it would do if it were left to itself.

What is the great characteristic of all living things? It is that they
grow; we cannot make them grow, but they grow of themselves. The farmer
plants his crop of corn. He doesn't get a jackscrew and put under every
hill of corn, and go around every morning and give the screw a turn and a
twist and hoist the hill up in the air. He prepares the so