and sublimated. A boy must be either dull or heedless who can look at a
bird sailing in the air for five minutes and not become surcharged with
curiosity to know how it can do it. His curiosity must lead him to an
examination of the wing of a bird, and his scrutiny will reveal it as a
marvelous bit of mechanism. The adjustment and overlapping of the feathers
will convince him that it presents a wonderful design and a no less
wonderful adaptation of means to ends. He sees that when the bird is
poised in the air the wing is essentially air-tight and that when the bird
elects to ascend or descend the feathers open a free passage for the air.
Even a cursory examination of the bird's wing must persuade the boy that,
with any skill he might attain, he could never fabricate anything so
wonderful. This knowledge must, in the nature of things, beget a feeling
of respect, and thereafter, whenever the boy sees a bird, he will
experience a resurgence of this feeling.

Some one has said, "Everything is infinitely high that we can't see over,"
and because the boy comes to know that he cannot duplicate the bird's wing
it becomes infinitely high or great to him and so wins his respect. To the
boy who has been taught to think seriously, the mode of locomotion of a
worm or a snake is likewise a marvel, and he observes it with awe. The boy
who treads a worm underfoot gives indisputable evidence that he has never
given serious thought to its mode of travel. Had he done so, he would
never commit so ruthless an act. The worm would have won his respect by
its ability to do a thing at which he himself would certainly fail. He
sees the worm scaling the trunk of a tree with the greatest ease, but when
he essays the same task he finds it a very difficult matter. So he tips
his cap figuratively to the worm and, in boyish fashion, admits that it is
the better man of the two. And never again, unless inadvertently, will he
crush a worm. Even a snake he will kill only in what he conceives to be
self-defense.