A JOURNAL FOR THE PROGRESSIVE TEACHER. VOL. VII. AUGUST, 1898. No. 1. M ADAPTATION. By D. W. DENNIS. "The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; the rocks for the conies." ISS A. was standing at the window of her school-room on Friday, January 1st, 1898. It was the time of the noon recess. She had been in the habit of having an outing every two weeks with her pupils. This was the day on which one should have occurred. The wind was blowing a gale and the ground was covered with snow. An outing was impossible. She had a musical ear. The alternating crescendo and diminuendo. of the varying gale caught her attention and soon the children were all gathered about her and she found herself interpreting the art of nature to her little listeners. The trees swayed back and forth in curves which were music to the eye not less than the sound was to the ear. The whole tree yielded to the storm and every separate limb yielded also on its own account. "It is thus," Miss A. said, "that the tree is adapted to resist the storm; and it is by resistance that it has come to have the strength it has― 'Strong grows the oak in the driving storm, "And is the storm then a good thing for te oak?" asked Lucy; to which Miss A. reied by asking another question-"Where the trunk strongest?" "At the ground," said James; "I have een many trees that had been blown down and they always break above the ground or blow up by the roots." "And I have tried," said Joseph, "to split a stump, and it is so tough and twisted it won't split at all; I know the tree is strongest just at the ground." "The tree is largest just at the ground, and its roots run out in such a manner as to brace it there on all sides," said Paul. "And is it not true," continued Miss A., "that the strain on the tree is greatest at the ground?" All agreed that it must be so. "And when the tree was small," Miss A. continued, "and could yield to the wind, so that its top could be bent entirely over to the ground without breaking anywhere, the grain stood the greatest strain at the ground and was twisted and gnarled there most, and so it seems the storm strengthened it where the storm is likeliest to break it; the tree is adapted by its strengthened stump to its environment the storm." It happened that the tree in question was a walnut tree; the children all knew this; they had all hulled walnuts under it only last fall; it was growing in a fence-corner quite out in the open country. It had a wide bushy top; the limbs branched out not over eight feet from the ground and extended out to right and left as far as the upward growing branches of the solvent axis extended toward the sky. Miss A. asked if walnut trees are always shaped so. "My father," answered Mary, "hauls saw logs, and I have often seen walnut trees in the woods where he cuts them, and they are not shaped like this at all; they are fifty feet or more to the first limb; they grow large and tall and straight in the woods." race. Even the minister seeking the highest and best for his congregation and town, rises under the spur of his neighbor minister's success when alone, in the country, he would content himself with the same dead level. The merchant who can serve the people better or more cheaply than his neighbor merchant takes the trade, and so each is brought always to his best and becomes in consequence a better man. Competition has been a chief means for the betterment of life from the beginning until now. Struggle for success which seeks to damage an op "Why," asked Miss A., "does the walnut have one form in the woods and another form in the open field?" All sorts of guesses followed: "the open country tree would grow the most walnuts; it would cast the widest shadow; it was by far the most beautiful; it would not blow down and hurt or kill something; it grows in a different soil." Miss A.'s Socratic questioning at last tri-ponent in the contest is wrong; but struggle umphed: "plants require light and air; the potato growing in the cellar shows it; houseplants that turn toward the window show it; plants growing with one half in shadow, as on the edge of a thick forest, have the largest and most vigorous branches on the outside. The tree growing in the country can get light and air in all directions; in the forest these are to be had in only one direction, upward. Trees crowded together begin to struggle upward for that which they most need; as the race goes on they become taller and taller until the monarch of the forest is the result." "Is it better for the trees then to have to compete with each other for light and air as well as to struggle against the storm?" "Undoubtedly it is, Lucy," said Miss A.; "struggle is everywhere a good thing; it not only makes trees tall and strong and valuable, it is struggle that keeps all life healthy." "Is it good for men?" asked Lucy. "Where," asked Miss A., "do our great men live-in the country or the city?" A long discussion followed in which it was concluded that men become great in cities for the same reason that trees do in forests: "the lawyer with his theory of the case is met by another with a counter-theory and the struggle to win lands both on a higher mental plane. The physician who does not work hard, study his cases, and eep up with the times soon falls out of the which seeks to render a better service to man than ever was rendered before is right. There may indeed be some other way for men to grow wiser and better than through struggle to win, but it has not yet been discovered. The common proverb 'necessity is the mother of invention' is a popular half statement of the same thing. The playground is one of the best places to fit one for life, because the generous rivalry which seeks to win by outdoing, instead of obstructing the course of another contestant, is just what the world always has needed and needs to-day." "But is it not selfish, Miss A., for the tree or the man to try to outstrip neighbors?" asked Lucy anxiously. "No," answered Miss A. confidently, "the tall fine tree bears more fruit, casts a longer shadow, yields better lumber, is one of the grandest objects in the landscape because of its competitive growth. And the strong man can be of far more service to his fellows because he has strengthened himself. If every individual in society took care of himself and those naturally dependent on him what need would there be of our board of charities and corrections and our alms-houses? For their sake,' said the Great Teacher, 'I sanctify myself. Some hundreds of thousands of men in the world to-day are spending large sums of money on themselves, preparing to render good service to man later. This is a thing as different from selfishness as day is from night; it is in fact the only way to be really unselfish." "But Miss A.", said James, "it must be that soil and dryness have much to do with the growth of trees: on the bluff west of here there is a deep forest, you know, and get the trees are small. The soil is rocky and does not hold moisture." "Yes," said Miss A., "the entire environment of tree or man must be considered. Struggle is not enough, or the fox jumping after grapes would have grown strong; Oak Bluffs is a summer outing on the east coast of Martha's Vineyard-the only soil is sand blown up from the coast into hills by the east wind: the oaks growing there are small and they always will be, just as they are in some of the Knob Stone regions of Indiana. In 1887 Iwent to the summit of Gray's Peak. As we passed through the prairies of Illinois, prairie sunflowers were on every hand'Ten thousand saw I at a glance Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.' These grew on tall stems ten or fifteen feet high. Persons riding on horse-back could hardly reach to pull one. As we approached Denver, however, where the soil is poor and the altitude is something like a mile above sea level, we had to stoop to gather prairie unflowers. From Denver we passed up Clear Creek cañon, one of the loveliest jourLeys it is possible for any one to make. The high granite hills, the great engineering kill it required to construct a railroad up the cañon, the miners washing the gravel from the gold in long troughs, Georgetown ith its mountain rim, Silverplume with is white mounds and smoking chimneys, the irrigation canals, which mean so much to our western country, here cut in solid rock ad there crossing gorges in huge wooden duits, Idaho Falls with its baths, Green Like which we journeyed to see, with its unrivaled beauty and its lonely but majestic setting almost at the limit of vegetation, new and interesting as they all were, could not keep us from noting that our prairie sunflower was still with us but with a still further shortened stem. At Gray, Montana, we took bronchos and started for the summit of Gray's Peak. Torry, Gray and other peaks shut in a great amphitheatre at their feet carpeted with stemless flowers. The prairie sunflower was there with many of its friends that had accompanied it with their shortening stems from the plains. It was a view never to be forgotten,-a circuit of bare peaks above, passing below into a circuit of snow, and this joined from side to side by a floor of many-colored flowers. The struggle with storm and frost and an unfriendly soil has reduced these flowers to the bare neces-. sities of existence. It is the lesson of life everywhere, that so much struggle as is necessary to bring the powers to their highest development and leave time and freedom to employ them in productive ways, is necessary to the highest attainments of which the individual or the race is capable." The reporter of these school lessons, one day in 1890, missed his connection with a steamer on the east side of Loch Long. The scene can be different from what it is there, it hardly can be more enchanting; the road on the east shore of the lake for miles is lined with holly trees: Cowper incidentally describes the adaptation of this tree to its environment: "Below, a circling fence, its leaves are seen No grazing cattle through their prickly round But above, where nothing is to fear, We gathered and mounted one of these "prickly" leaves from "below," and also one of the " smoothe, unarmed" ones from "above," and brought them to show to our friends. RICHMOND, IND. |