ntribution if he had been
attached to any of the great institutions or organizations or to big
business. He has left a personal impression and a remarkable literature
that has been very little influenced by group psychology. He is the
interpreter of mountains, forests, and glaciers.

There is one method of aggregation and social intercourse. There is
another method of isolation and separateness. Never in the open country
do I see a young man or woman at nightfall going down the highways and
the long fields but I think of the character that develops out of the
loneliness, in the silence of vast surroundings, projected against the
backgrounds, and of the suggestions that must come from these situations
as contrasted with those that arise from the babble of the crowds. There
is hardiness in such training; there is independence, the taking of
one's own risk and no need of the protection of compensation-acts. There
is no over-imposed director to fall back on. Physical recuperation is in
the situation. As against these fields, much of the habitual golf and
tennis and other adventitious means of killing time and of making up
deficiencies is almost ludicrous.

Many of our reformers fail because they express only a group psychology
and do not have a living personal interpretation. Undoubtedly many
persons who might have had a message of their own have lost it and have
also lost the opportunity to express it by belonging to too many clubs
and by too continuous association with so-called kindred spirits, or by
taking too much post-graduate study. It is a great temptation to join
many clubs, but if one feels any stir of originality in himself, he
should be cautious how he joins.

I may also recall the great example of Agassiz at Penikese. In his last
year, broken in health, feeling the message he still had for the people,
he opened the school on the little island off the coast of
Massachusetts. It was a short school in one summer only, yet it has made
an indelible impression on American education. It stimulates one to know
that the person who met the incoming students on the wharf was Agassiz
himself, not an assistant or an instructor. Out of the great number of
applicants, he chose fifty whom he would teach. He wanted to send forth
these chosen persons with his message, apostles to carry the methods and
the way of approach. (When are we to have the Penikese for the rural
backgrounds?)

Sometime there will be many great unattac