well understood when he was in school.  But his education had left with him a general method of procedure for just such cases, and that method he at once applied.  It had taught him how to find the information that he needed, provided that such information was available.  It had taught him that human experience is crystallized in books, and that, when a discovery is made in any field of science,—­no matter how specialized the field and no matter how trivial the finding,—­the discovery is recorded in printer’s ink and placed at the disposal of those who have the intelligence to find it and apply it.  And so he set out to read up on the subject,—­to see what other men had learned about this peculiar kind of apple rot.  He obtained all that had been written about it and began to master it.  He told his friend about this material and suggested that the latter follow the same course, but the man of narrow education soon found himself utterly at sea in a maze of technical terms.  The terms were new to the other too, but he took down his dictionary and worked them out.  He knew how to use indices and tables of contents and various other devices that facilitate the gathering of information, and while his uneducated friend was storming over the pedantry of men who use big words, the other was making rapid progress through the material.  In a short time he learned everything that had been found out about this specific disease.  He learned that its spores are encased in a gelatinous sac which resisted the entrance of the chemicals.  He found how the spores were reproduced, how they wintered, how they germinated in the following season; and, although he did not save much of his crop that year, he did better the next.  Nor were the evidences of his superiority limited to this very useful result.  He found that, after all, very little was known about this disease, so he set himself to find out more about it.  To do this, he started where other investigators had left off, and then he applied a principle he had learned from his education; namely, that the only valid methods of obtaining new truths are the methods of close observation and controlled experiment.

Now I maintain that the education which was given that man was effective in a degree that ought to make his experience an object lesson for us who teach.  What he had found most useful at a very critical juncture of his business life was, primarily, not the technical knowledge that he had gained either in school or in actual experience.  His superiority lay in the fact that he knew how to get hold of knowledge when he needed it, how to master it once he had obtained it, how to apply it once he had mastered it, and finally how to go about to discover facts that had been undetected by previous investigators.  I care not whether he got this knowledge in the elementary school or in the high school or in the college.  He might have secured it in any one of the three types of institution, but he had to learn it somewhere, and I shall go further and say that the average man has to learn it in some school and under an explicit and conscious method of instruction.