tones, thorns, and
other shallowing or choking encumbrances, that gave point to the parable.
It was the same seed that fell upon the stony, thorny, and fallow ground
alike.

There is a time to sow, to sow the seed for the special crop you want; but
it is after you have ploughed the field. There is a time to specialize, to
give the information which the life is to produce in kind; but it is when
you have thoroughly prepared the mind by its ploughing disciplines.

I have lately seen the type of agriculture practised out in the fields that
were the Scriptural cradle of the race. There the ploughing is but the
scratching of the surface. Indeed, the sowing is on the top of the ground
and the so-called ploughing or scratching in with a crooked stick comes
after. Contrast this with the deep ploughing of the West, and we have one
explanation at least of the greater productivity of the West. And there is
the educational analogue here as well. In those homelands of the race, the
seed of the mind is sown on the surface and is scratched in by oral and
choral repetitions. The mind that receives it is not ploughed, is not
trained to think. It merely receives and with shallow root, if it be not
scorched, gives back its meager crop.

There must be ploughing before the sowing, and deep ploughing if things
with root are to find abundant life and fruit. And the classics to my
thought furnish the best ploughs for the mind,--at any rate for minds that
have depth of soil. For shallow minds, "where there is not much depth of
earth," where, because there cannot be much root, that which springs up
withers away, it were perhaps not worth while to risk this precious
implement. And then, too, there are geniuses whose fertility needs not the
same stirring disciplines. There are also other ploughs, but as a ploughman
I have found none better for English use than the plough which has the
classical name, the plough which reaches the sub-soil, which supplements
the furrowing ploughs in bringing to the culture of our youthful minds that
which lies deep in the experience of the race.

There are many kinds of fallow as I have already intimated. The more modern
is not the "bare fallow" which lets the land so ploughed and harrowed lie
unsown even for a season, but the fallow, of varied name, where the land is
sown to crops whose purpose is to gather the free nitrogen back into the
ground for its enrichment. So is our fallowing by the classics not only to