"Oh no, I cannot tell that. I can tell you the chemistry of the egg."
"No, I am not looking for that. I am looking for the design in the egg. I am looking for something more divinely mysterious than anything of chemistry. Now, professor, will you tell me where in that egg is the bony frame that next will appear?"
"No, I cannot tell you that."
"Where is the sheening bosom, and where the wings that shall welcome the sun in its coming?"
"No man can tell that," says the professor.
The professor is quite right. It cannot yet be told. Yet, in that egg is the greatest scientific problem with which the world has ever grappled—the beginning of life and the God-given design. In that egg is the secret of life. Professor, tell me where this life begins. The professor says, "No man can answer questions like that."
Then, until we can answer, we must take off our hats every time we meet a setting hen. For that old biddy knows by instinct more about it than any one of us. She knows directly, through her instinctive nature from God, something about the beginnings of life that we cannot understand yet.
The last time I saw Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the grand poet of Massachusetts, he asked me to go out in his back yard and see his chickens. He told me they would answer to their names. But it turned out that they were like our children, and would not show off before company. But I haven't any doubt those little chickens still with the hen did answer to their individual names when she alone called them. I am sure that great man understood the hen and chickens as fully as Darwin did the doves.
It was a wonderful thing for science that men like Holmes and Darwin could learn so much from the hen. It reminds me of a current event in Doctor Holmes's own life, though the biographies do not seem to have taken notice of it. He and Mr. Longfellow were very intimate friends. They were ever joking each other like two boys, always at play whenever they met. One day, it is said, Doctor Holmes asked Mr. Longfellow to go down to Bridgewater, in Massachusetts, to a poultry show. He went; he was greatly interested in chickens.
Those two great poets went down to the poultry show, and as they walked up the middle passageway between the exhibits of hens and chickens they came to a large poster on which was a picture of a rooster. He had his wings spread and mouth open, making a speech to a lot of little chickens. It was such a unique picture that Mr. Longfellow called Doctor Holmes's attention to it, and said:
"There, you love chickens, you understand them. What do you suppose a rooster does say when he makes a speech to chickens like that?"
They went on, and Doctor Holmes was studying over it. Finally he turned around and said, "Go on, I will catch up with you." He went back to that poster, got up on a chair, took the tacks out of the top, turned in the advertisement at the top, above the picture, and then took his pencil and drew a line from the bill of the rooster that was making that speech up to the top. There he wrote what he thought that rooster was saying to those chickens. They say that he did not make a single correction in it, of line or word. He then went after Mr. Longfellow and brought the great poet back to see the poster. He had written these words, in imitation of Longfellow's "Psalm of Life":
Life is real, life is earnest!
And the shell is not its pen;
Egg thou art, and egg remainest,
Was not spoken of the hen,
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
Be our bills then sharpened well,
And not like muffled drums be beating,
On the inside of the shell.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the great barnyard of life,
Be not like those lazy cattle!
Be a rooster in the strife!
Lives of roosters all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And when roasted, leave behind us
Hen tracks on the sands of time.
Hen tracks that perhaps another
Chicken drooping in the rain,
Some forlorn and hen-pecked brother,
When he sees, shall crow again.
Animal life can do much for us if we will but study it, take notice of it daily in our homes, in the streets, wherever we are.
Chapter III. Mastering Natural Forces
It has been demonstrated by science that the mentality and disposition of all kinds of animal life are greatly affected by what they eat. Professor Virchow, of Germany, took two little kittens and fed them on different foods, but kept them in the same environment. After three months he went in and put out his finger at one of those little kittens, and it stuck up its back and spit and scratched and drew the blood. It was savage. He put out his finger to the other kitten, fed on the other food, and it rubbed against his finger and purred with all the loveliness of domestic peace. What was the difference between the kittens? Nothing in the world but what they ate.
Now I can understand why some men swear and some women scratch. It is what they eat.
The universities of the world are now establishing schools of domestic science for the purpose of training people to understand the chemistry of digestion and the chemistry of cooking. Oh, there is an awful need of better cooks! Yet the fashionable aristocratic American lady thinks it is altogether beneath her dignity to cook a pie or pudding, or boil potatoes. How short sighted that is! The need of better cooks is great. How many a man fails in business because his wife is a poor cook. How many a student is marked down because of the bad biscuit in the boarding-house. Oh yes, and how many a grave in yonder cemetery would be empty still if there had been a good cook in that house.
I have grappled with an awful subject now—the need of better cooks. A man can't even be pious with the dyspepsia. The American lady, so called, who sits in the parlor amid the lace curtains and there plies her needle upon some delicate piece of embroidery, and commits the wonderful chemistry of the kitchen to the care of some girl who doesn't know the difference between a frying-pan and a horse-rake, is not fit to be called an American lady. Any fool could sit amid the curtains, but it takes a giant mind to handle the chemistry of the kitchen. If women forsake that throne of power, men must take it, or our civilization must cease.
But I will not follow this thought into the thousands of discoveries animals suggest, because, in this wonderful tradition, the real king was not only followed by animals, but "the sun served him, and the waters obeyed him." Now I can combine those two thoughts for illustration, using the wonderful locomotive which draws our railway trains. The locomotive has within it the coal, which is the carbon of the sun. Thus the sun serves man by heating the water; and there is the water changing to steam and driving the piston-rods over the land, obeying man.
We need so much to travel faster than we do now. I saw a man not long ago who said he did not like to travel a mile a minute in a railway train. If you don't go faster than a mile a minute ten years from now you will feel like that old lady who got in a slow train with a little girl. The conductor came through and asked for a ticket for the little girl, and the old lady said:
"She is too young to pay her fare."
"No," said the conductor. "A great girl like that must pay her fare."
"Well," the mother replied, "she was young enough to go for nothing when we got in this train."
You will feel like that if you don't travel faster than a mile a minute ten years from now. The time is soon coming when, in order to go from Philadelphia to San Francisco, you will get in the end of a pipe or on a wire, and about as quick as you can say "that"