Again and again I have felt like a dummy, if not an idiot, in such a position.  I therefore beg all young persons to determine to speak and write at least one language beside their own.

Tom Hood wrote: 

“Never go to France
Unless you know the lingo
If you do, like me,
You’ll repent by jingo.”

But it’s even worse to be unable in your own country to greet and talk with guests from other countries.

I should like to see the dead languages, as well as Saxon and Sanscrit, made elective studies every where; also the higher mathematics, mystic metaphysics, and studies of the conscious and subconscious, the ego and non-ego, matters of such uncertain study.  When one stops to realize the tragic brevity of life on this earth, and to learn from statistics what proportion of each generation dies in infancy, in childhood, in early maturity, and how few reach the Biblical limit of life, it seems unnecessary to regard a brain-wearying “curriculum” as essential or even sensible.  Taine gives us in his work on English Literature a Saxon description of life:  “A bird flying from the dark, a moment in the light, then swiftly passing out into the darkness beyond.”

And really why do we study as if we were to rival the ante-diluvians in age.  Then wake up to the facts.  I have been assured, by those who know, that but a small proportion of college graduates are successful or even heard of.  They appear at commencement, sure that they are to do great things, make big money, at least marry an heiress; they are turned out like buttons, only to find out how hard it is to get anything to do for good pay.  One multi-millionaire of Boston, whose first wages he told me were but four dollars a month, said there was no one he so dreaded to see coming into his office as a college man who must have help,—­seldom able to write a legible hand, or to add correctly a column of figures.  There is solid food for thought.

* * * * *

Lowell said that “great men come in clusters.”  That is true, but it is equally true that once in a great while, we are vouchsafed a royal guest, a man who mingles freely with the ordinary throng, yet stands far above them; a man who can wrest the primal secrets from nature’s closed hand, who makes astounding discoveries, only to gladly disclose them to others.

Such an unusual genius was Professor Robert Ogden Doremus, whose enthusiasm was only matched by his modesty.  In studying what he accomplished, I wonder whether he was not sent from the central yet universal “powers that be” to give us answers to some of the riddles of life; or had he visited so many planets further advanced than our own—­for as Jean Paul Richter wrote “There is no end”—­that he had learned that the supposedly impossible could be done.  He assisted John W. Draper in taking the first photograph of the human face ever made.  Science with him was never opposed to religion.