ident in showing that it was absurd to
try to divorce work from play.

The two years as forester's apprentice, from fifteen to seventeen, were
really better for him than any university could have been. His
stepmother's instructions had mostly been in the line of prohibition.
From earliest babyhood he had been warned to "look out." When he went on
the street it was with a prophecy that he would get run over by a cart,
or stolen by the gypsies, or fall off the bridge and be drowned. The
idea of danger had been dinged into his ears so that fear had become a
part of the fabric of his nature. Even at fifteen, he took pains to get
out of the woods before sundown to avoid the bears. At the same time his
intellect told him there were no bears there. But the shudder habit was
upon him.

Yet by degrees the work in the woods built up his body and he grew to be
at home in the forest, both day and night. His duties taught him to
observe, to describe, to draw, to investigate, to decide. Then it was
transplantation, and perhaps the best of college life consists in taking
the youth out of the home environment and supplying him new
surroundings.

Forestry in America is a brand-new science. To clear the ground has been
our desire, and so to strip, burn and destroy, saving only such logs as
appealed to us for "lumber," was the desideratum. But now we are
seriously considering the matter of tree-planting and tree-preservation,
and perhaps it would be well to ask ourselves if two years at forestry,
right out of doors, in contact with Nature, wrestling with the world of
wood, rock, plant and living things, wouldn't be better for the boy than
double the time in stuffy dormitories and still more stuffy
recitation-rooms--listening to stuffy lectures about things that are
foreign to life.

I would say that a boy is a savage, but I do not care to give offense to
fond mammas. To educate him in the line of his likes, as the race has
been educated, seems sensible and right. How would Yellowstone Park
answer for a National University, with Captain Jack Crawford, William
Muldoon, John Burroughs, John Dewey, Stanley Hall and a mixture of men
of these types, for a faculty?

Froebel thought his two years in the forest saved him from consumption,
and perhaps from insanity, for it taught him to look out, not in, and to
lend a hand. At times he was a little too sentimental, as it was, and a
trifle more of morbidity and sensitiveness would have ruined