=The scholar’s concept of the sea.=—­The six-year-old can give the correct spelling of the word sea as readily as the sage, but the sage has spent a lifetime in putting content into the word.  For him, the word epitomizes his life history.  Through its magic leading he retraces his journeys through physiography and geology, watching the sea wear away two thousand feet of the Appalachian Mountains and spread the detritus over vast areas, making the great fertile corn and wheat belt of our country.  He knows that this section produces, annually, such a quantity of corn as would require for transportation a procession of teams that would encircle the earth nine times, at the equator, and he interprets all this as sea.  The word leads him, also, through the mazes and mysteries of meteorology, revealing to him the origin of the rain, the snow, the dew, and the frost, with all the wonders of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

=Further illustration.=—­He can discern the sea in every blade of grass, in every leaf, and in every flower.  In the composition of his own body, he finds that ninety per cent of it is sea.  He finds his heart pumping the sea through his veins and arteries as a vital part of the life process; and through the power of capillary attraction, the sea is coursing through every hair of his head.  In the food upon his table, the meat, the bread, the milk, the vegetables, and the fruits, he finds the sea.  Not his poetry, but his science follows the raindrop from the roof to the rivulet, on to the river, then to the ocean, then into vapor and on into rain down into the earth, then up into the tree, out into the orange, until it finally reappears as a drop of juice upon the rosy lip of his little six-year-old.

=The child’s conception.=—­Whether the child ever wins the large conception of the sea that her father has depends, in part, upon the father himself, but, in a still larger degree, upon her teacher.  If the teacher thinks of the sea merely as a word to be spelled, or defined, or parsed, that she may inscribe marks in a grade book or on report cards, then the child will never know the sea as her father knows it, unless this knowledge comes to her from sources outside the school.  Instead of becoming a living thing and the source of life, her sea will be a desert without oasis, or grass, or tree, or bird, or bubbling spring to refresh and inspire.  It would seem a sad commentary upon our teaching if the child is compelled to gain a right conception of the sea outside the school and in spite of the school, rather than through and by means of the school.