in such cases was well known to both men. Each
had picked up a good deal of technical information about caring for
fruit, and each did the same thing in meeting this situation. He got out
his spraying outfit, prepared some Bordeaux mixture, and set vigorously
at work with his pumps. So far as persistence and enterprise went, both
men stood on an equal footing. But it happened that this was an unusual
and not a conventional situation. The spraying did not alleviate the
condition. The corruption spread through the trees like wildfire, and
seemed to thrive on copper sulphate rather than succumb to its corrosive
influence.

Now this was where the difference in training showed itself. The
orchardist who worked by rule of thumb, when he found that his rule did
not work, gave up the fight and spent his time sitting on his front
porch bemoaning his luck. The other set diligently at work to analyze
the situation. His education had not taught him anything about the
characteristics of parasitic fungi, for parasitic fungi were not very
well understood when he was in school. But his education had left with
him a general method of procedure for just such cases, and that method
he at once applied. It had taught him how to find the information that
he needed, provided that such information was available. It had taught
him that human experience is crystallized in books, and that, when a
discovery is made in any field of science,--no matter how specialized
the field and no matter how trivial the finding,--the discovery is
recorded in printer's ink and placed at the disposal of those who have
the intelligence to find it and apply it. And so he set out to read up
on the subject,--to see what other men had learned about this peculiar
kind of apple rot. He obtained all that had been written about it and
began to master it. He told his friend about this material and suggested
that the latter follow the same course, but the man of narrow education
soon found himself utterly at sea in a maze of technical terms. The
terms were new to the other too, but he took down his dictionary and
worked them out. He knew how to use indices and tables of contents and
various other devices that facilitate the gathering of information, and
while his uneducated friend was storming over the pedantry of men who
use big words, the other was making rapid progress through the material.
In a short time he learned everything that had been found out about this
specific