LUTHER BURBANK ON CHILDTRAINING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 126, 18 November 1911, Page 1 (Supplement)

LUTHER BURBANK ON CHILDTRAINING.

Two articles in a recent number of "The Harbinger of Light," accompanied by an excellent portrait, are devoted to Luther Bui-bank, the great horticulturalist, who has solved the "food for stock" problem for the immense arid area of Western America by evolving from the. barbed cactus a plant, avoided alike by man and beast, a spineless and wholesome edible variety, much relished by cattle, and capable of growing almost anywhere. Professor Larking" description of Mr. Bnrbank-'s beautiful'garden in Santa Rosa, California, introduces the reader to a veritable floral paradise, while the quotations that Mrs. Annie Bright gives us from Mr. Burbank's book on "The Training of the Human Plant" make it clear that he would have the same loving care bestowed, on the training of the human race that he devotes to his flowers and trees. Tn one chapter he says:— Not only would I have the child reared for the first ten years of its life in the open, in close touch with nature, a bare-font boy with all that implies for physical stamina, but T would have him reared in Inve. . . . Love must be at the basis of all our work for the race: not gush, not mere sentimentality, but abiding love, that which outlasts death. A man who hates plants, or is neglectful of them, or wiio has other interests beyond them, could no more be a successful plantcultivator than he could turn back the tides of the ocean with his finger tips. The thing is utterly impossible. You can never bring up a child to its best estate without love. Keep out all fear of the brutal things men have taught children about the future. T believe emphatically in religion. God made religion, and man made theology. ... I have the largest sympathy for religion and the largest contempt I am capable of for a misleading theology. Do not feed children on maudlin sentimcntalism or dogmatic religion: give them nature The injury wrought by keeping too young children indoors at school is beyond the ])o\ver of anyone to estimate. • • • • Preserve beyond all else as the priceless portion of a, child the integrity of the nervous system. Upon this depends its success in life. . . . By surrounding the child with sunshine from the sky, and your own heart, bygiving it, the closest communion with nature, by feeding it with well-balanced, nutritious food, by giving it all that is implied in healthful environmental influences, and by doing all in love, you can cultivate in the child and fix there for all its life all lovable and beautiful frail«.