WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

is unspeakably rich. The questions do not appear to have applied

the microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor

Ravenstein; still, they proved plenty difficult enough without

that. These pupils did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted

with a shot-gun; this is shown by the crippled condition of the

game they brought in:

America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.

North America is separated by Spain.

America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.

The United States is quite a small country compared with

some other countrys, but it about as industrious.

The capital of the United States is Long Island.

The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.

The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.

The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.

The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.

Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and

flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Mason and Dixon’s line is the Equator.

One of the leading industries of the United States is

mollasses, book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber,

manufacturers, paper-making, publishers, coal.

In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.

Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.

Russia is very cold and tyrannical.

Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.

Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the

Mediterranean Sea.

Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so

beautiful and green.

The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon

the surrounding country.

The imports of a country are the things that are paid for,

the exports are the things that are not.

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.

The chapter headed “Analysis” shows us that the pupils in

our public schools are not merely loaded up with those showy

facts about geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that

incomplete state; no, there’s machinery for clarifying and

expanding their minds. They are required to take poems and

analyze them, dig out their common sense, reduce them to

statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation

which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was trying to get

at. One sample will do. Here is a stanza from “The Lady of the

Lake,” followed by the pupil’s impressive explanation of it:

Alone, but with unbated zeal,

The horseman plied with scourge and steel;

For jaded now and spent with toil,

Embossed with foam and dark with soil,

While every gasp with sobs he drew,

The laboring stag strained full in view.

The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an

instrument made of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing,

for, being tired from the time passed with hard labor overworked

with anger and ignorant with weariness, while every breath for

labor he drew with cries full or sorrow, the young deer made

imperfect who worked hard filtered in sight.

I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I

have had glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not as

ignorant with weariness as usual, but this is the first time the

whole spacious idea of it ever filtered in sight. If I were a

public-school pupil I would put those other studies aside and

stick to analysis; for, after all, it is the thing to spread your

mind.

We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one

might say. As one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth

to which one date has been driven into the American child’s head

–1492. The date is there, and it is there to stay. And it is

always at hand, always deliverable at a moment’s notice. But the

Fact that belongs with it? That is quite another matter. Only

the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast Fact has failed

of lodgment. It would appear that whenever you ask a public-

school pupil when a thing–anything, no matter what–happened,

and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492. He applies it

to everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of

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