THE PROBLEM WHICH CONFRONTS THE CHILD.--Well it is that the child,
starting his life"s journey, cannot see the magnitude of the task before
him. Cast amid a world of objects of whose very existence he is
ignorant, and whose meaning and uses have to be learned by slow and
often painful experience, he proceeds step by step through the senses in
his discovery of the objects about him. Yet, considered again, we
ourselves are after all but a step in advance of the child. Though we
are somewhat more familiar with the use of our senses than he, and know
a few more objects about us, yet the knowledge of the wisest of us is at
best pitifully meager compared with the richness of nature. So
impossible is it for us to know all our material environment, that men
have taken to becoming specialists. One man will spend his life in the
study of a certain variety of plants, while there are hundreds of
thousands of varieties all about him; another will study a particular
kind of animal life, perhaps too minute to be seen with the naked eye,
while the world is teeming with animal forms which he has not time in
his short day of life to stop to examine; another will study the land
forms and read the earth"s history from the rocks and geological strata,
but here again nature"s volume is so large that he has time to read but
a small fraction of the whole. Another studies the human body and learns
to read from its expressions the signs of health and sickness, and to
prescribe remedies for its ills; but in this field also he has found it
necessary to divide the work, and so we have specialists for almost
every organ of the body.
