And, understanding these men, he would come
to know philosophy, literature, and language, and so would come to
appreciate more fully what education really is. In contemplating the
expansion of the word, one might easily visualize the ever widening
circle produced by throwing a pebble into a pool; but a better
conception would be the expansion of a balloon when it is being
inflated. This comparison enables one to realize that education enlarges
as a sphere rather than as a circle.
=The scholar's concept of the sea.=--The six-year-old can give the
correct spelling of the word _sea_ as readily as the sage, but the sage
has spent a lifetime in putting content into the word. For him, the word
epitomizes his life history. Through its magic leading he retraces his
journeys through physiography and geology, watching the sea wear away
two thousand feet of the Appalachian Mountains and spread the detritus
over vast areas, making the great fertile corn and wheat belt of our
country. He knows that this section produces, annually, such a quantity
of corn as would require for transportation a procession of teams that
would encircle the earth nine times, at the equator, and he interprets
all this as sea. The word leads him, also, through the mazes and
mysteries of meteorology, revealing to him the origin of the rain, the
snow, the dew, and the frost, with all the wonders of evaporation,
condensation, and precipitation.
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