like influences should proceed.  Plodding and prodding is not the teacher’s work.  It is inspiration, on-leading, the flashing of enthusiasms.  A teacher in any field should be one who has chosen his work because he loves it, who makes no repine because he takes with it the vow of poverty, who finds his reward in the joy of knowing and in the joy of making known.  It requires the master’s touch to develop the germs of the naturalist, the philosopher, the artist, or the poet.  Our teacher is the man who has succeeded along the line in which we hope to succeed, whose success is measured as we hope to measure our own.  Each leader of science and of intellectual life is in some degree the disciple of one who has planned and led before him.  There is a heredity of intellect, a heredity of action, as subtle and as real as the heredity of the continuous germ-plasm.  Ask the teacher who has helped mould your life, who in turn was his own master.  In a very few generations you trace back your lineage to one of the great teachers the world knows and loves.  Who was your teacher in Natural History in America?  Was he a pupil of Agassiz, or was he a student of one of Agassiz’s pupils?  Or, again, are there three generations back from you to the grand master of enthusiasms?

And there are masters in the art of living as well as in other arts and sciences.  “A log with Mark Hopkins at one end and myself at the other.”  That was Garfield’s conception of a university.  It was said of Eliphalet Nott at Union College, that he “took the sweepings of other colleges and sent them back to society pure gold.”  The older students of Stanford will always show the traces of the master teacher Thoburn.  “In terms of life,” thus he construed all problems of Science, of Philosophy, of Religion.  In terms of life, Thoburn’s students will interpret all their own various problems, for in terms of life all things we do must finally be formulated.  Every observation we make, every thought of our minds, every act of our hands has in some degree an ethical basis.  It involves something of right or wrong, and without adhesion to right, all thought, all action must end in folly.  And there is no road to righteousness so sure as that which has right living as a traveling companion.

The very humanity of men at large is in itself a source of inspiration.  Study men on the trains, at the ferry, on the road, in the jungles of the forest or in the jungles of great cities,—­“through the ages, every human heart is human.”  Look for the best, and the best shall rise up always to reward you.  One who has traveled among simple-living people, men and women we call savages, because they live in the woods and not in cleared land or cities, will bear witness that a savage may be a perfect gentleman.  Now as I write their faces rise before me.  Joyous, free limbed, white toothed swimmers in Samoan surf, a Hawaiian eel-catcher, a Mexican peon with his “sombrero trailing in the dust,” a deferential Japanese farm boy anticipating your every want, a sturdy Chinaman without grace and without sensitiveness, but with the saving quality of loyalty to his own word, herdsmen of the Pennine Alps, Aleuts, Indians and Negroes, each race has its noblemen and through these humanity is ennobled.  It is worth while to go far from Boston to find that such things are true.