IN

"LITTLE THINGS THAT PAY."

By W. R. FoWLER, M. D., Pottsville, Texas. Read before the Texas Eclectic State Society. IN THIS day and age of the world, perhaps more than in any other which has preceded it, men are looking for things that pay. Things that bring in large returns upon the investment are the ones that interest us most. Convince a man that you have a paying proposition and you at once enlist his interest.

Also we are very prone to look for big investments, large fees and grave cases, and to only such are we apt to give our best attention. Whether this is as it should be or not I am not going to discuss at this time, but will merely call your attention to some few "little things that pay." Not that you do not already know them, but my purpose is simply "to stir up your pure minds by way of

remembrance."

An hour's reading each day is a small thing, too small to engage the attention of many a doctor, yet, I say to you that for the investment made nothing else I know of will bring as large returns. It keeps up your interest as nothing else will do; it enlarges one's store of useful knowledge; it broadens our view of life's great work, and besides all this it supplies your own brain cell with proper exercise and food and retards your own decay.

A small bill is a very small thing, especially to a doctor when he has so many of them. Still, it pays to collect them-collect them while they are small. The very smallness of the bill is a help in its collection. It pays not only in the amount of dollars and cents involved, but your patrons will learn that you are businesslike and careful in even the little things, and he that is careful and

faithful in the little things is fitting himself for the greater things.

The investment of a few dollars is another very small thing in itself, but when the happiness and comfort of yourself and family in your declining years depend upon it, it does not appear so small, and we can easily see that if properly invested it pays. Doctors by the thousand are losing their hard-earned surplus by investing in propositions of which they know nothing except that they promise large returns.

The doctor is neither by education nor training fitted for such scheming. Keep your earnings near home, invested in good notes and landed securities with fair interest. Here as everywhere else, the safest is always the best. By judicious investments in your own community, as I have suggested, your safe business principles will inspire your patrons with greater confidence in you, and you will not only provide for your declining years, but you will also be a real benefactor.

Next, attend your state society meetings. This is not a big thing, but one that is sadly neglected. Even so little a thing as a straw tells which way the wind is blowing. So, besides the new ideas we get at these meetings by the interchange of thought, the renewal of old friendships and the forming of new ones that go so far towards making life worth living, we show to our fellow soldiers in the great war against disease, and our patrons at home, that we are alive to the best interests of the cause we represent and that wherever duty calls we will there be found.

Another thing that is small within itself, one that is overlooked and neglected most of all, is to write an occasional letter to your president, or at least answer the letters he writes you. There is no more sacred professional duty we owe each other than this. We

are more or less all guilty. Let's renew our pledge of brotherly love and promise each other a more faithful performance of these little duties. It will pay in the consciousness of duty performed, increase our interest in our profession and encourage our president in his unselfish labor for the good of all.

There are many other LITTLE things that pay. In fact, I am constrained to believe that the little things, those classed as such, pay the largest dividends. Two more and then I am done.

Cultivate the acquaintance and friendship of every child you meet. This is seemingly one of the least things of all. To some, however, it will be found very difficult to put into practice. Yet, the more difficult it is for you the more you need both their acquaintance and the training the effort will give. There is at declaration in Holy Writ that "A little child shall lead them." This is true in more ways than one. The majority of our patients are children and their influence for the doctor they love most will bring us many new patrons as well as help us retain the old ones. Not only this, but their influence over our own lives will help to keep us younger, enlarge our sympathies and keep us from losing faith in mankind.

Our next largest class of patients is among the wives and mothers of our communities. We may have the profoundest knowledge, the greatest possible skill, and still fail as a physician. Our knowledge, our skill, our tact and fair speeches all come to naught before her with whom we have so much to do. There are two things, little things in the consideration of many, that count for more with the wife and mother than all else combined. These are honesty and sympathy. Be honest with them always; they expect it; they are entitled to it, and they will never forgive you if you deceive them. Then, be sympathetic. I do not mean that you shall always be running over with a kind of sentimen

talisin that sometimes passes for the genuine article, but with that honest appreciation of their difficulties and needs and a real fervent desire to help. We should never be impatient with them when they come to us for aid. Never make light of any mortal fear they may have. The most of these are real to them and we can neither retain them nor help them unless we seek their confidence upon the high plane of honesty and real sympathy.

These things that I have mentioned are little by themselves, but I have seen men of the profoundest learning, without these little things, failures. On the other hand I never have seen a man with even ordinary ability and possessing and cultivating these little things but what was prosperous in his business, respected by his neighbors, beloved by his friends and a real benefactor to the world.

A STORK'S NEST.

The following details concerning the structure and contents of a stork's nest investigated on the summit of the Cathedral of Colmar, in Upper Alsace, may be of interest: The city architect has just delivered a public lecture there on "Storks and Their Ways." He described a stork's nest which was about thirty years old; it measured six feet across and was five feet in height; it weighed over three-quarters of a ton, and it was such a solid mass that it had to be broken up by using a pick-ax. The nest was made of twigs of wood and clay, and the materials filled twenty-four sacks. The walls of the nest were found to contain seventeen ladies' black stockings, five fur caps, the sleeve of a white blouse, three old shoes, a large piece of leather and four buttons that had belonged to a railway porter's uniform.

THE CURSE OF EDUCATION AS IT IS LAID ON AMERICAN YOUTH.

By way of preface to an indictment of

the entire school and college training of the land, says Current Literature, Dr. Boris Sidis, one of the most renowned of living psychologists, observes that the education of a child should begin between the second and third years. It is then that the child begins to form his interests. It is at that period that we must seize the opportunity to guide the formative energies of childhood in right channels. To delay is a mistake, a wrong to the child. It is the idlest nonsense, writes Doctor Sidis, to be afraid of forcing the child's mind. We cannot strain the brain prematurely. If we fail to direct the energies in the right direction, the child will waste them in the wrong direction. For the same amount of mental energy used in those silly games which we think specially adapted to the childish mind can be directed with lasting benefit to the development of interest in intellectual activity and love of knowledge. The child will learn to play at "the game of knowledge acquisition" with the same ease now revealed in its nursery games and physical exercises.

"What is more of a truism than the axioms of geometry and mechanicsthat the whole is greater than the part, that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, or that a body remains in the same state unless an external force changes it? And yet the whole of Mathematics and Mechanics is built on those simple axioms.

"The elements of science are just such obvious platitudes. What is needed is to use them as efficient tools and by their means draw the consequent effects. The same holds true in the science of education. The axiom or the law of early training is not new, it is well known, but it is unfortunately too often neglected. and forgotten, and its significance is almost completely lost.

"It is certainly surprising how this law of early training is so disregarded, so totally ignored in the education of the child. Not only do we neglect to lay the

necessary solid basis in the early life of the child, a solid basis ready for the future structure, we do not even take care to clear the ground. In fact, we even make the child's soul a dunghill, full of vermin, of superstitions, fears and prejudices, a hideous heap saturated with the spirit of credulity.

"We regard the child's mind as a tabula rasa, a vacant lot, and empty on it all our rubbish and refuse. We labor under the delusion that stories and fairy tales, myths and deceptions about life and man are good for the child's mind. Is it a wonder that on such a foundation men can only put up shacks and shanties? We forget the simple fact that what is harmful for the adult is still more harmful to the child. Surely what is poisonous to the grown-up mind cannot be useful food to the young. If credulity in old wives' tales, lack of individuality, sheepish submissiveness, barrack-discipline, unquestioned and uncritical belief in authority, meaningless imitation of jingles. and gibberish, memorization of Mother Goose wisdom, repetition of incomprehensible prayers and articles of creed, unintelligent aping of good manners, silly games, prejudices and superstitions and fears of the supernormal and supernatural are censured in adults, why should we approve of their cultivation in the young?"

We press our children into the triumphant march of our industrial Juggernaut, says Dr. Sidis. Over 1,700,000 children under 15 years of age toil in fields, factories, mines and workshops. The slums and the factories cripple the energies of our young generation. The slaughter of the innocents and the sacrifice of our children to the insatiable Moioch of industry exclude us from the rank of civilized society and place us on the level of barbaric nations.

Our educators are narrow-minded pedants. They are occupied with the dry bones of textbooks, the sawdust of pedagogics and the would-be scientific experi

ments of educational psychology; they are ignorant of the real vital problems of human interests, a knowledge of which goes to make the truly educated man.

"It is certainly unfortunate that the favored type of superintendent of our public education should be such a hopeless philistine, possessed of all the conceit of the mediocre business man. Routine is his ideal. Originality and genius are spurned and suppressed. Our schoolsuperintendent with his well-organized training shop is proud of the fact that there is no place for genius in our schools.

"Unfortunate and degraded is the nation that has handed over its childhood and youth to guidance and control by hide-bound mediocrity. Our school-managers are respected by the laity as great. educators and are looked up to by the teachers as able business men. Their merit is routine, discipline and the hiring of cheap teaching-employees. They stifle talent, they stupefy the intellect, they paralyze the will, they suppress genius, they benumb the faculties of our children. The educator, with his pseudogogics, can only bring up a set of philistines with firm, set habits-marionettes -dolls.

"Business is put above learning, administration above education, discipline and order above cultivation of genius and talent. Our schools and colleges are controlled by business men. The schoolboards, the boards of trustees of almost every school and college in the country consist mainly of manufacturers, storekeepers, tradesmen, bulls and bears of Wall Street and the market-place. What wonder that they bring with them the ideals and methods of the factory, the store, the bank and the saloon."

From time to time the "educational" methods of our philistine teachers are brought to light. A girl is forced by a schoolma'am of one of our large cities to stay in a corner for hours, because she unintentionally transgressed against the

barrack-discipline of the school regulations. When the parents became afraid of the girl's health and naturally took her out of school, the little girl was dragged before the court by the truant officer. Fortunately, "the judge turned to the truant officer and asked him how the girl could be a truant, if she had been suspended. He didn't believe in breaking children's wills." In another city a pupil of genius was excluded from school because "he did not fall in with the system" laid out by the "very able businesssuperintendent."

"Our schools brand their pupils by a system of marks, while our foremost colleges measure the knowledge and education of their students by the number of 'points' passed. The student may pass either in Logic or Blacksmithing. It does not matter which, provided he makes up a certain number of 'points!'

"College-committees refuse admission to young students of genius, because 'it is against the policy and principles of the university.' College-professors expel promising students from the lectureroom for 'the good of the class as a whole,' because the students 'happen to handle their hats in the middle of a lecture.' This, you see, interferes with class discipline. Fiat justicia, pereat mundus. Let genius perish, provided the system lives. Why not suppress all genius, as a disturbing element, for 'the good of the classes,' for the weal of the commonwealth? Education of man and cultivation of genius, indeed! This is not school policy.

"We school and drill our children and youth in schoolma'am mannerism, schoolmaster mind-ankylosis, school superintendent stiff-joint ceremonialism, factory regulations and office dicipline. We give our students and pupils artisan inspiration and business spirituality. Originality is suppressed. Individuality is crushed. Mediocrity is at a premium. That is why our country has such clever business men, such cunning artisans, such

resourceful politicians, such adroit leaders of new cults, but no scientists, no artists, no philosophers, no statesmen, no genuine talent, and no true genius."

The red tape of officialdom, like a poisonous weed, grows luxuriantly in our schools and chokes the life of our young generation. Instead of growing into a people of great independent thinkers, the nation is in danger of fast becoming a crowd of well-drilled, well-disciplined, commonplace individuals, with strong philistine habits and notions of hopeless mediocrity.

In leveling education to mediocrity we imagine that we uphold the democratic spirit of our institutions. Our American sensibilities are shocked when the president of one of our leading colleges dares to recommend to his college that it should cease catering to the average student.

"Awaken in early childhood the critical spirit of man; awaken, early in the child's life, love of knowledge, love of truth, of art and literature for their own sake, and you arouse man's genius. We have average mediocre students, because we have mediocre teachers, departmentstore superintendents, clerkly principals and deans with bookkeepers' souls, because our schools and colleges deliberately aim at mediocrity.

"Ribot in describing the degenerated Byzantine Greeks tells us that their leaders were mediocrities and their great men commonplace personalities. Is the American nation drifting in the same direction? It was the system of cultivation of independent thought that awakened the Greek mind to its highest achievement in arts, science and philosophy; it was the deadly Byzantine bureaucratic red tape with it cut-anddried theological discipline that dried up the sources of Greek genius. We are in danger of building up a Byzantine empire with large institutions and big corporations, but with small minds and dwarfed individualities. Like the Byzan

tines we begin to value administration above individuality and official, red-tape ceremonialism above originality.

"We wish even to turn our schools into practical school-shops. We shall in time become a nation of well-trained clerks and clever artisans. The time is at hand when we shall be justified in writing over the gates of our school-shops 'mediocrity made here!'"

To make matters worse, the country is filled with a smug self-satisfaction on the subject. The Americans think they are educated.

DR. BURRAGE, PRUDENTIAL MEDICAL CHIEF, IS DEAD.

Newark, N. J. October 30, 1911.-Dr. Robert Lowell Burrage, Medical Director of The Prudential Insurance Company, and chief of the company's staff of 11,000 medical examiners in the United States and Canada, died October 29, 1911, at his home, 211 Lincoln avenue, Orange, N. J., of heart disease.

Dr. Burrage was 54 years of age and had been with The Prudential nearly 22 years. He graduated from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, New York City, in 1878, and held a conspicuous position among medical men in the life insurance profession. Dr. Dr. Burrage leaves a widow and one son. Dr. Burrage's death came unexpectedly, the official cause being given as myocarditis.

A strange coincidence in connection with the death of Dr. Burrage is that it occurred on the anniversary of the death of the late Edward H. Hamill, Consulting Medical Director of The Prudential, on October 29, 1910. Dr. Burrage, Dr. Hamill and Dr. Leslie D. Ward, former vice-president of The Prudential, who died in Europe a year ago in July, had been closely associated in the direction of the medical work of the company for more than twenty years.

Dr. Burrage was born in Newark, June 14, 1857, of English parentage. Upon graduation from Bellevue Hospital