inflated. This comparison enables one to realize that education enlarges
as a sphere rather than as a circle.

=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.