Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 220, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 September 1911 — Page 3

The Boy Puzzle

By DR. J. S. KIRTLEY

THE BOY WONDER

A boy wonder may still be found, here and. there, but I am not bringing a charge to that effect against any boy of my acquaintance. There have been such in the past, there will be In the future, and we have heard of a few, now living, though It is not likely that the charge could be sustained, in every instance. * We can never forget Watt, whose genius showed itself, when he watched the steam lift the lid of his mother’s tea kettle; nor John Stuart Mill, who was thinking through philosophical problems, and in technical language, long before he reached his teens. Pope said: “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,” even though some now think he never did anything but lisp, except limp. The tate John Fisk was a good Greek and Latin and philosophical scholar, before the average boy of that age had learned his grammar. Students'of music can never forget how the boy, Handel, stol* into the chapel in the dark and placed the organ till they were attracted from all over the estate of the duke of Saxe-Weissenfels and all thought it must be an angel and the duke pronounced him a genius; nor forget how Wolfgang Mozart was playing tunes at four, and did not have an equal on the harpsichord at twelve. Josef Hoffman was the wonderful boy pianist a few years ago. and now has made good as a man. In the line of music, early geniiu has been brilllast, but almost as much so, in literature. Pope wrote his “Ode to Silence” at 11, and “Ode to Soli tude” at 12. At 12 Macaulay won fame, by his first volume. Cowley wrote “Pyrimas and Thisbe” at 12. At 16 Tasso wrote “Rinaldo,” Huge printed a volume of poems and so did Chatterton. Shelley wrote “Queen Mab” and Disraeli “Vivian Gray” at s lB. Dickens was made famous by his “Sketches” and Byron by his “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” at 21. And there have been “Boy Orators" and “Boy Preaahers” and “Boy Business Men." Na one denies that there have been and still will be boy geniuses. Little William James Sidis has dazzled the wise men of the east with his conversations and writings and addresses on philosophical and mathematical subjects, and he will soon know all that Harvard can teach him, while Nicholas Wiener is treating Cornell to the same sort of a sensation. Alexander Hamilton comes in that class. In a few months after airlving'ln New York from his native West Indies, to attend King’s college, he had studied out the question of the right of our country to independence, and, in a patriotic meeting, in ths open field, came forward and electri-

His sports are the jnoat serious thing in his early life; the funnier and louder they are, the more serious. They rank with the solemnities and, H they are at all what they ought to be, their value is beyond calculation. Physically, he is adapted to sport and then developed by it His growing muscles and bones and his unstable nervous system require play. He has several million neurons already and each one is jumping—all of them in different directions. “Can’t you keep still?” asks the impatient mother, when she ought to know from memory that he cannot. He is manufacturing energy so fast it must be taken care of, and play is the very way nature has devised for that. Play gives each muscle and neuron a train them all to work together. But the chief value of play is not physical; it is mental and ethical and social and emotional. It shows what is in a boy; helps to correct him) then discovers great truths and principles to him. He expresses all of himself in play. The psychical as well as physical keeks that form of expression. He expresses his emotions first in foodgetting; next in play. His whole mind gets into it. Imitation and imagination; reason and religion; love and hate; courage and comradeship—all are there. From seven to thirteen he learns to eo-ordinate motion and emotion. He learns law, not alone the laws of the game, but the great law of cause and effect. He learns, perforce, to respect the rights of others. Team work establishes social fellowship. He learns to accept defeat cheerfully and get ready for the next opportunity. Defeats are turned into achievements and obstacles into opportunities, by such a spirt. The skill which the game requires he always acquires, training all his powers to help each other, like soldiers in a well-drlllod army. Here, then, are three groat qualities disciplined by his sports—fairness, pluck and skill. Into the gaining of them go self-coritroi, especially the control of the temper, defiance of temptation, the altruistic sentiments of comradeship, self-confi-dence and obedience. As a baby, his play developed his >musgies; next, his skill; then from twelve on. It trained th* will power and the social sentiments. Nature has graded the school just right. As the spirit of comradeship rises in him, he enjoys his fellow players as well as the play itself, sometimes more.

lied the audience with a great speech, and he was only 17. The late President Harper of of Chicago was such a wonder as a grown man that we forget his remarkable boyhood. - Not every boy, considered a genius by his admirlhg relatives, is one. He may be precocious, good and proper, but not a genius. But suppose there is a real boy genius at large in your community, what then? It brings up the old question: “Why should the spirit of mortal bfe proud?" His spirit or that of his kindred? Who knows but it may be only a case of infantile or puerile genius which will disappear !as the years go? Neither he nor his friends should ever forget that, try as he may, he may be distanced by some whose powers do not develop as fast as his. There are men-wonders whose boyhood was not unusual. Wagner and Bach and Goldsmith and Cowper and Franklin and Darwin and Defoe and De Morgan belong to the latter class. I And there are some alarming possibilities before him. Genius is not insanity, as some of the wranglers have claimed; nor is it abnormal, save that it is unusual, nor what is called a “sport” One may be what we often call a “universal Genius,” like Goethe, or Michael Angelo, or Gladstone, or i And yet he is apt to be ' one sided and have some serious defects, which will prove his undoing, as a defect in will or judgment or sympathy or in power of concentration, and the latter was the defect of Coleridge. He may be repressed and neglected. He may be led to think that he does not need training nor discipline, for genius is never independent of such things and it takes hard work to mature and bring It to the fulfillment of its bright promise. The delicate nerve tissues may t?e burnt out before he reaches the more serl- . ous work of his life and he be left ’ in the condition of the man whose legs 1 were set akimbo he explained his 1 misfortune: “I rode up in a balloon one and walked back.” j If, on careful examination, the boy is prpven to be a. genius, keep it to yourself and never allow him to suspect it. If he should find it out, tell him of the fall of the genius and linger over its harrowing details till he is almost scared out of his wits; then put him at hard work as if his i life depended on it. Make him play with the other £oys, so that they can keep the conceit out of him. Be his master and his adviser and keep heavy responsibilities from him till he gets beyond the most dangerous point. You may save him, after all.

HIS SPORTS

Both play and talk are natural and pleasing to him, while work and conversation are artificial and irksome. Both have to be acquired and sometimes he never succeeds in completely mastering them. But he learns them both easily and eagerly when they can be put into the form* of play. Most boyhood tasks can be dramatized. Trimming the lawn or butting wood or carrying in coal can be made competitive and thereby playful. 'History can be dramatized, especially where it involves war and heroic adventure. Impersonating Indians or any other of the attractive characters is always a pleasure to him. Apparently he is learning mostly how to wrangle and yell and chargehis opponents with being unfair, and is cultivating a narrow class spirit as fast as possible. But something very encouraging is going on. He is learning loyalty, not to himself alone, but to his cause, and each year his cause is growing larger, till, by and by, he will identify himself with the cause of man as such, and he will be loyal. Obedience to the laws of the game is embryo obedience to the laws of the state and the laws of life. It is even claimed that the aesthetic and artistic sense is developed In play. Play is constructive unless .it is brutal. Progress is sometimes an anticlimax —quarterback, halfback, fullback, hunchback, the latter for life. But grace and rhythm of motion, balance and proportion of schemes, courtesy and kindness in team work —these can grow out of well-played games. In these games, constructed for the times, he is growing out of the crude into the arts of civilization. There is peculiar power in each boy to adopt a hobby and thug prepare himself, through the combination of work and play, for his own proper vocation. From fiddling to photography, from gardening to farming, from dramatic reading to writing stories, from raising pups T and rabbits to running cattle and sheep ranches —such is often the course. To his parents or guardians, greeting: 1. Co-operate with nature in letting him play all he can. 2. Give the play instinct expression tn sports, that develop cleanness, comradeship, courage and conscience. 3. Turn the play Into service, by turning service Into play. » 4. Find his special aptitudes and let them follow that lino toward his vocation

HAVING conducted successfully the Mexican revolution by which Diaz was driven from the country, Francisco I. Madero, Jr., now finds that it is not easy to put an end tn the fighting. Bands of Maderists in various parts of the republic still are in arms, and Madero is traveling about trying to pacify them and to restore peace among his countrymen.

METTLE OF FILIPINO

Tossed About on Open Sea for Forty-Eight Hours. He Had Been Maddened by Fear of Sharks and by the Lost Chances of Rescue—He Had Done Best He Could. Manila, P. I.—When the ship Poisat \Egnt down Off Malabon, Phillipine islands, recently Alejandro Lorenzo jumped clear of the wreck. After an hour’s swimming he found a hatch cover on which he rested- Then he started toward San Nicholas, pushing the hatch cover ahead of him. He was nearly successful and was just reaching shallow water when the tide carried hirh out to sea again. As night came the wind increased and the waves tossed him and his hatch cover back and forth until he thought it would be impossible for him to hold his support, but toward midnight he •found that he was being washed toward the Gavite shore. Just as his hope was strong the tide wind carried him to sea again. He struggled against them, but was swept out. Something brushed against his leg. He thought it a shark and screamed in fear. “It did not touch me again or I should have gone mad.” The water was cold, the night dark and the rain beat down on him. He heard a cry in the darkness and pushed his hatch cover in the direction from which it sounded. Toward morning he found a Filipino boy, another survivor of the wreck, clinging to an oil box. They drifted together. When daylight came they could see boats and they shouted until they were exhausted, but could not make themselves heard or seen. They were tortured by thirst. Salt water got into their mouths. They drifted all day. Night came again and shortly after dark they saw the lights of a breakwater, and with new hope noted that they grew larger and more distinct? They were being washed in again. The boy was taken with cramps, lost his

Grizzlies Flee From Fire

Grazing District of Oregon Overrun By Bears Driven From Homes by Last Year's Fires. Portland, Ore.—One effect of the forest fires which swept great areas last year has been to drive a lot of grizzly bears from their former feeding grounds and make them a menace to stock. Many reports have ben received here recently of the depredations of these big animals on the east slope of the Cascade mountains, and preparations are being made to hunt them down. The Cascade mountains have never been known as the haunt of the grizzlies. In the Blue mountains, about 260 miles to the east, however, the animals have been known to be fairly plentiful. Great areas of the Blue mountains and near-by ridges were burned over in the greet forest fires of last year, and so that spring the grizzlies did not find the supplies of food to which they bad been accustomed. It Is believed that they then wandered across the valleys to the range nearer the crest Here they also found insufficient supplies, and so they have turned on the stock which ranges the east slope of the Cascades. Berry Hickson, an old-time woodsman of the Upper McKenzie rivet, had a great surprise recently when he set out on an expedition into the Cascades. In the middle of one night several bears brought down one st

MADERO LABORING TO RESTORE PEACE

hold on the oil box and went down. The man was washed toward the middle of the bay and drifted during the night. At dawn he was almost ready to give up, but the wind and Waves headed him for the east shore and he took heart. Then he saw boats and used his lapt strength in trying to reach them. The boatmen saw him, and were able to get him in time, and picked him out of the water. There was not much of the man left, and he was shrieking for water as he collapsed in the boat He had been 48 hours on a rough sea in a bad storm with a hatch cover for support. He had been maddened by fear of sharks and by the lost chances of rescue. As he lay on a pallet after he found himself able to talk again, his rescuers spoke of his wonderful endurance. He said, of course, he had done the best he could. He wanted to live, he said. /

Fish Imported Into Pacific Ocean Waters Threaten Great Canning Industry—Feast on Young.

Seattle, Wash. —Men engaged in the salmon industry in this state and Oregon are vastly excited over the discovery that their livelihood is threatened by the ravages of bass. There is a demand that immediate measures be taken to exterminate the latter fish. It was only a few years ago when in response to the agitation of sportsmen and others who wanted more variety in fish, bass fry were imported in large quantities and were planted in various Inland waters and the rivers. It appears that they have multiplied at an astonishing rate and at the beginning of the seasop they were reported to be very plentiful. Recently the salmon men made the discovery that has dismayed them. The bass have penetrated far up the Columbia river and its tributaries and have been feasting on young salmon. John M. Crawford, superintendent of the fish hatcheries of Washington

his pack mules and ate it He bad to guard the others on succeeding nights, and with difficulty got out of the country with any of them. He has also suffered losses in stock, and will join with other hunters in going after this big game.

Bass Killing Off Salmon

Boy Plays Spartan.

Cincinnati. —An example of great fortitude has been brought to the notice of the Cincinnati police. When a patrol wagon rushed to the scene of an accident, the crew found a boy of 19, who gives the name of John Cronin, of Indianapolis, sitting calmly against a telegraph post, with both his legs cut off. He had tried to board a freight train and had fallen beneath the wheels. After the accident he crawled to the pole and braced himself against it A passer-by noticed him. "What’s the matter?" asked the stranger. "Nothing much,” he answered; "just lost both my feet—that’s all." * Then the stranger called the police.

Record Wheat Crop.

Dixon, ill.—Elmer Byers of Palmyra township has won the record of having raised the best crop of wheat in that township. He had ten acres that yielded 298 bushels by machine measure, giving sixty pounds to the bushel The wheat average in Lee county has increased about a third over last year

RADIUM AND lODINE TO CURE

Remarkable Results With Consumption Are Claimed for Preparation of Hungarian Doctor. Paris. —A new treatment for tuberculosis, for which is claimed unusual efficiency, was described to the International Tuberculosis society and Therapeutic society here by the eminent tuberculosis specialists, Bernhein and Dieupart The specific employed is a preparation of radio-active menthol and iodine. It was discovered by Doctor Dessendeffy at Budapest. The composition of the preparation is peptonized iodine, 0.06 centigrams, and of radium bariumchloride, one-tenth of a drop, in a gallon of ether. Experiments on animals were so encouraging that careful experiments on humans were tried. After ten Injections, In one case, almost all the distressing symptoms ceased. Bernheim and Dieupart detail 75 cases.

state, tells of the ravages he has observed. The hatcheries he conducts are of great importance to the industry. They were started because it was discovered that the trout played havoc with the young salmon. In big pqnds the fry are hatched and millions of salmon are guarded until they are about three inches long, a size sufficient to permit them to escape the trout. This plan has proved effective for years. “We can rear the salmon large enough to get away from the trout," says Mr. Crawford, "but not the bass. When you think that a bass can eat a salmon four Inches lorig or even larger you can see how utterly impossible it is to keep the fish in the ponds until they are of sufficient size to care for themselves against the new enemy without going to huge expense. We raise them .until they are three inches long and then turn them into the Kalama river, from which they make their way down to the Columbia. We have found that the baas are lying in wait for them and gobbling them as they appear.” He advocates the prohibition by law under heavy penalties of any further planting of bass in the waters of the state, an open season for this fish all the year round and stringent measures to destroy them. Unless something Is done he thinks it will be only a few years before the salmon industry will be seriously crippled. He would also bar pickerel, pike and perch.

INDIAN CARVINGS ON A TREE

Missouri Woodmen Make Peculiar Discoveries in Felling an Old Oak —Work of Chlckasaws. Exeter, Mo. —While woodmen were cutting timber on Indian creek the other day a large oak tree was felled that proved to be historic as well as an old Indian landmark. A picture of an Indian with bow and arrow pointing at a running deer was carved in the bark of the tree near the ground, while higher np were pictures of the rising sun with an Indian kneeling, a flying eagle, a turtle lying on its back and a plctiye of a snake. More than a dozen arrows were embedded in the tree, where they had been shot many years ago. From the character of the carving it is thought to be the work of Chlckasaws.

Suffer From "Oily Eye.”

South Norwalk, Conn. —One hundred thousand gallons of oil have been placed on the streets of this town. Now the people are suffering from “oily eye,” the newest of human afflictions, according to the physician*.

Money

By Dr. Frank Crane

Since the dawn of preaching we preachers have been threatening rich men with our right sist —and extending to them our left palm. It Is hard-' ly to be wondered atthat we find difficulty in being taken seriously. And our advice has been so confusing that we have not had much effect. For now we exhort the youth to all the virtues, giving as an inducement the assurance that thus they will be enabled to get on; and now again we turn to those that have .gotten on and warn them of the danger of riches. It might as well be asked, if riches be dangerous, why acquire them; and if virtues lead to riches, are they really worth cultivating? It may be well, therefore, to set down a few common sense facts In nt riches and the relation of the same to the moral values. In the first place, money Is simply the token or sign of our common human wants. It means power, power over others, power to make our personality felt No wonder we want lt„ Again it means liberty. Poverty i» a curse. It ties the hands. It binds the mind. It narrows the soul. One who has to sweat ten hours a day for bread has no time nor strength left to develop the higher part of himself. Money means also a full life. We can gratify our cravings, whether they be for beer or art, for Paris gowns or Wagner music. With money we have a chance to grow; without it we are stunted. Money, therefore, Is simply concentrated—we might say canned —human ▼slue. It naturally follows that it is good! or bad, never of Itself, but only as giving opportunity to its possessor. Here, then, we have the moral gist of the whole matter: money is simply—-op-portunity. ' It unlocks the door and bids the cramped and chafing passion go and do its will. It liberates desire. Hence it simply emphasizes a man. If be is* good he can noyr be better, having more scope; if bad he can, and probably will, be worse.-- If Idle and useless, he becomes a living fountain of idleness and uselessness, poisoning others. So, money is like any other gift; as beauty, which adds power to the person; or genius, which multiplies the efficiency of the mind and hand; or position, for kinship magnifies a common man to heroic proportions, in his influence on other men. Now, the sole relation of morals to power of any kind is this: that the moral sense adds to power—responsibility. The root of any genuine moral feeling is altruism. Given any desire. It becomes moral as it takes a direction toward the welfare of other people; it is Immoral exactly in proportion as it disregards /others and looks only to self. Wicked people, therefore, are those who live, think, and do for self aldne; and that whether poor or rich. Whoever says, “I would like to be rich, for I could do so much good with 'my money," should examine himself and ask what good he is doing with the little he has. It’s all a matter of relation. If one is not helpful and liberal on S4O a month, he would not be so on $4,000 a month. In the ultimate realm of morals there are no commandments; there is only one test —do I live for myself or for others; am I altruistic or egocentric. The dawdling smart set, flitting from bridge to matinee, from theater to bedizened restaurant, from - the club* to the horse race, axe wicked; but no wickeder than the better poor who want to lead such a life, and who curse their lot because their selfishness is bound and chained. To the real man, therefore, riches means nothing at All, as to his character; it simply means an opening to give vent to his character. And a clear-eyed soul, that sees and realizes what responsibility means, is, never eager for power and opportunity It is easier to be good in moderate means than in riches for the principal reason that it is easier to bear a small than, a great load of responsibility,,. "It is hard for a rich man to enter the klng- - dom of heaven,** just because a rich man to be moral must be great And. unfortunately, great souls are scarce among great fortunes. The greatness of Jesus was not in* | his wisdom, magnetism, nor ethicaK perception, but in the fact that ho wsa utterly altruistic; that is, he used alt his powers not to advance himself bqt to help others. His tormentors unwittingly told the truth, and stated unknowingly his very secret, wheq, as ha bung on the cross, they wagged their heads at him and cried: “He saved others; himself be cannot save!" “

Working for Etemity.

Never mind where your work is. Never mind whether it be visible or not. Never mind whether your name is associated with it. You may never see the issues, of your tolls. You are working for eternity. If you cannot see results here in the hqt worHng day. the cool evening hours'arw drawing near, when you may\rest from your labors, and then they may follow you. So do your duty, and trust God to give the need you sow, "a body as It hath pleased him.”—Dr.. Alan, ander Maclaren.