The evolution of the child mirrors the evolution of the race. And as the race has passed through the savage, pastoral and agricultural stages, so should the child. As a people we are now in the commercial or competitive stage, but we are slowly emerging out of this into the age of co-operation or enlightened self-interest. It is only a very great man--one with a prophetic vision--who can see beyond the stage in which he is. The stage we are in seems the best and the final one--otherwise, we would not be in it. But to skip any of these stages in the education or evolution of the individual seems a sore mistake. Children hedged and protected from digging in the dirt develop into "third rounders," as our theosophic friends would say, that is, educated non-comps--vast top-head and small cerebellum--people who can explain the unknowable, but who do not pay cash. Third rounders all--fit only for the melting-pot! A tramp is one who has fallen a victim of arrested development and never emerged from the nomadic stage; an artistic dilettante is one who has jumped the round where boys dig in the dirt and has evolved into a missnancy. Young Carl Linnaeus skipped no round in his evolution. He began as a savage, robbing birds' nests, chasing butterflies, capturing bees, bugs and beetles. He trained goats to drive, hitched up a calf, fenced his little farm, and planted it with strange and curious crops. Clergymen once were the only schoolteachers, and in Sweden, when Linnaeus was a boy, there was a plan of farming children out among preachers that they might be educated. Possibly this plan of having some one besides the parents teach the lessons is good--I can not say. But young Carl did not succeed--save in disturbing the peace among the households of the half-dozen clergymen who in turn had him. The boy evidently was a handsome fellow, a typical Swede, with hair as fair as the sunshine, blue eyes, and a pink face that set off the fair hair and made him look like a Circassian. He had energy plus, and the way he cluttered up the parsonages where he lodged was a distraction to good housewives: birds' nests, feathers, skins, claws, fungi, leaves, flowers, roots, stalks, rocks, sticks and stones--and when one meddled with his treasures, there was trouble. And there was always trouble; for the boy possessed a temper, and usually had it right with him. The intent of the parents was that Carl should become a clergyman, but his distaste for theology did not go unexpressed. So perverse and persistent were his inclinations that they preyed on the mind of his father, who quoted King Lear and said, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!" His troubles weighed so upon the good clergyman that his nerves became affected and he went to the neighboring town of Wexio to consult Doctor Rothman, a famed medical expert.