Every Man His Own University. Russell Conwell
and sought somebody to kill it by shooting at it through the window. A neighbor observed the dog carefully and told them it was poisoned. He advised the family to loose it in order that it might get some antidote for itself in field or forest. He told them that cats, cattle, and horses are often compelled to find an antidote for some poisonous herb they have eaten, and that the animals know more about such things than any teacher in the medical schools. As soon as the dog was unfastened he hastened across the field to a brook, and ate a weed that was growing beside the water. The dog soon returned to the house, and ate heartily after a two weeks' fast.
The clergyman had followed the dog and observed the plant which it had eaten. After the dog had returned to the house he uprooted the plant and took some of its leaves to a Philadelphia firm of chemists. Acting upon the firm's advice, he sent the leaves to the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, and they were found to be a valuable antidote for poison. Not only was humanity given a better medicine from this discovery, but the clergyman also derived a competency from it. This remedy for poisoning is often used in prescriptions; so even doctors sometimes "go to the dogs" for instructions.
Like Professor Agassiz and Sir Oliver Lodge, many find their best instructors in domestic animals. The fowls around the house and the barn may be whole universities for developing the sciences. Through her dependence on nature the hen is a more efficient instructor than the majority of college professors. She knows by instinct so much of the laws of nature that wise men may sit at her feet or her bill and learn. Perhaps she may seem a little foolish in proclaiming her achievements in egg-laying by a cackle, but her knowledge of the necessities of life, her careful oversight of her brood, the way she uses her feet and her wings, her foreknowledge of approaching storms, her means of defending herself when attacked by hawks, her knowledge of the formation of the egg and of the proper time to break the shell for the release of her chick—all these are worthy of the attention of even the greatest scientists.
In an address at a poultry-men's convention, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that chickens seem to have in them much more to study than did Darwin's doves. While Holmes was once summering at Kennebunkport, Maine, he trained five chickens to come at his call, to fly upon his head, and to leap with open bills to catch a kernel of corn. Before the season closed the chickens would come to his bedroom even after he had retired—making it necessary, as Doctor Holmes said, for the landlord to serve them up for dinner. Doctor Holmes's parody on Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life" shows what a careful observer he was. While some of Longfellow's admirers resented the parody as a slight, Longfellow himself always treated it as complimentary. He once told James T. Fields that, in one couplet of the parody, Holmes had excelled the entire original poem:
Not like muffled drums be beating
On the inside of the shell.
Longfellow told Fields that there are always millions of men standing like chickens in the shell, with wings they know not how to use, having calls to a larger life outside of which they can see nothing; that some peck away until dead on the inside of the shell, while others, assisted by a friend on the outside, step out into a life beautiful and complete.
In the egg or molecule we get nearer to God than we do through the telescope or by encircling the earth. He who lived nearest the first cause gets the best inspiration for visions of all greater sights or events; so the cottage is a happier place than the palace for him who wishes to get better acquainted with what shall arouse finer thought and feeling. The cottage is the best preparatory school for the mansion, provided always that the cottage course has been thorough. He who has worn his cottage life with manly dignity shall be the man to wear his mansion life with composure. Emerson said "the entire system of things gets represented in every particle."
Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, and unfortunate is the man who gets a smattering of many things yet does not know even one small thing thoroughly. The power of little things to give instruction and happiness should be the first lesson in life, and it should be inculcated deeply. The chief need of this discontented and sinful world is to comprehend that in one blade of grass or the shading of an evening cloud there is sufficient reverence to fill the largest heart, and sufficient science to occupy the greatest passion.
We saw a delicate blue flower in the grass this morning which I had never noticed before. It seemed a different flower from each angle and, when put under a magnifying-glass, had colors I had never noticed before in flower or art. The field where it was growing had been familiar to me for threescore years and ten, yet the flower was entirely new to me. It was so dainty and attractive and inspiring that I felt I had lost something important to my spiritual growth all these years—something like the experience of Virgil, Guizot, Carlyle, Grotius, or like Tennyson in the "Holy Grail," who declares that he had left a real and wonderful life behind to follow the unknown. This little flower in the morning sunlight awakes thoughts of years long past—of the faces of marshaled hosts of battle, of eyes deep and calm with the smile of a loving mother's welcome, of the great forgiveness in a father's affection.
Had I found that flower seventy years before, I believe my appreciation of the Divine Power would have been greater, my heart would have been more satisfied, my soul more fully illuminated and pervaded by a holier peace. We lose ourselves in all attempts to grasp the cause of which this small flower is the result. It is impossible to find words to convey the strange emotions which this newly found flower aroused, and to tell of the distant realms my imagination visited while I meditated there. If we would free ourselves from the perplexing cares which our daily duties demand; if we would forget the worries of each day; if the losses and disappointments and the wrongs of many years did not press themselves upon us; if the demands of many duties and the demands upon our attention and the calls of friends did not interrupt—we could find in contemplating this wee flower of the field a fund of happiness which years of sorrow and misfortune could not destroy.
Bacon and Burke and Niebuhr discovered how much of grandeur can come into a life from the little things about us, but they all discovered it when it was too late to go back and live the ideal life of simplicity and individuality which was suggested to them by a drop of water and a humming-bird. The smallest things are the largest in importance, if they bring into our lives the largest thoughts and feelings and an incentive to largest actions for self and humanity. Why are we forever looking upon the horizon for what upon closer view lies at our feet? These little beauties of the field rebuke the wanderer and the eminent man when it says to all the world, with a sweet smile and a dainty pout, "You could have found more in my life than has ever been learned from the sages."
While Zinzendorf was stranded nearly a year upon a tiny island, his vigorous mind was forced to occupy itself in observing the objects upon the shore; his examinations of the colors in the clam-shell led him to say later in life, at a meeting of philosophers, that a lifetime study of these colors should develop more of the beautiful than all the manufactured color combinations then known.
Art has not yet been able to combine the shades shown in the shell of an oyster, and the wings of the June bug have been enlarged and copied by colored photography, and will greatly influence all art hereafter. Man's needs shall be best supplied by beginning at the source and following the Creator in developing them into things of beauty and service.
Although the Agricultural Department at Washington spent eight million dollars in the study of seeds and their growth by sending experts to roam over the world for investigations, yet the observations of Luther Burbank and many like investigators in the agricultural colleges throughout the country have made many more important discoveries. Their observations have brought about a greater increase of production to the acre than all the results of those who roamed the earth for the Government, and no one would say that their work was not a fair investment for the nation.
Observation convinces us that the sooner we get down to the simplicities of life, the longer and healthier and nobler shall life become. The healthiest are those with one loaf and a natural hunger along with it. The noblest lives are those who are anxious to become as divine as it is possible for them to be, are ever alert for little deeds of kindness. How much richer life the poet lives who can sympathize with the field-mouse, like Burns! Who is lifted heavenward by the fringed gentian, like Bryant? Who gets the messages of peace from the frosted pumpkin, like Riley? Like Shakespeare, we too may "find tongues in trees, books in running brooks,