-master would call, and then there was much
argument as to Why and What, Whence and Whither.

People talk gossip, we are told, for lack of a worthy theme. These two
Spencers--one a school-master and the other a clergyman--found the time
too short for their discussions. In their walks and talks they were
always examining, comparing, classifying, selecting, speculating.
Flowers, plants, bugs, beetles, birds, trees, weeds, earth and rocks
were scrutinized and analyzed.

Where did it come from? How did it get here?

I am told that lions never send their cubs away to be educated by a
cubless lioness and an emasculated lion. The lion learns by first
playing at the thing and then doing it.

A motherless boy, brought up by an indulgent father, one might prophesy,
would be sure to rule the father and be spoiled himself through omission
of the rod. But in the boy problem all signs fail. The father taught by
exciting curiosity and animating his pupils to work out problems and
make discoveries--keeping his discipline well out of sight. How well the
plan worked is revealed in the life of Herbert Spencer himself; and his
book, "Education," is based on the ideas evolved by his father, to whom
he gives much credit. No man ever had so divine a right to compile a
book on education as Herbert Spencer, for he proved in his own life
every principle he laid down.

On all excursions Herbert was taken along--because he couldn't be left
at home, you know. He listened to the conversations and learned by
hearing the older pupils recite.

All out-of-doors was fairyland to him--a curiosity-shop filled with
wonderful things--over your head, under your feet, all around was
life--action, pulsing life, everything in motion--going somewhere,
evolving into something else.

This habit of observation, adoration and wonder--filled with pleasurable
emotions and recollections from the first--lasted the man through life,
and allowed him, even with a frail constitution, to round out a long
period of severe mental work, with never a tendency to die at the top.

Herbert Spencer never wrote a thing more true than this: "The man to
whom in boyhood information came in dreary tasks, along with threats of
punishment, is unlikely to be a student in after-years; while those to
whom it came in natural forms, at the proper times, and who remember its
facts as not only interesting in themselves, but as a long series of
gratifying successes, are likely to continue