“The _New York Herald_ states that this dangerous and arduous voyage was undertaken by the Swede to show what could be done by a man who has given up meat, tea, coffee, wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco. He prides himself in eclipsing those ‘vegetarians’ who continue the use of tea and condiments. “When in America, at the age of eighteen, Nordin was suffering so from dyspepsia that he could not take ordinary food. He therefore began a diet of fruit, principally apples, whereby he attained to his present robust condition of health.” So, meat-eating, alcoholic-liquor-drinking white race, cast aside your high-headedness and pride, your dietetic errors and ill-health, at one and the same time, and go and learn of the Indian simplicity of diet, wise limitation of your dietary, careful and thorough mastication, and abstention from all flesh foods. CHAPTER XI THE INDIAN AND EDUCATION Take it all in all, I think I believe more in the Indian’s system of education than our own,--I mean, in the principles involved. Our education is largely an education of books. We teach from books, we study from books, we get our ideas from books. Joaquin Miller’s reply to Elbert Hubbard, before quoted, seems to many people to be a foolish remark. But I see a profound thought in it. It was the poet’s protest against the too great use of books. He regards books as subversive of individual thought. He contends that books retard and prevent thought, and that we read, not to stimulate thought, but to deaden it. And undoubtedly too much reading and dependence upon books does deaden and destroy not only thought, but, alas! far worse still, the power to indulge in individual thought. Hence books are often a hindrance and a curse instead of a help and a blessing. The Indian has no books. While he has tradition and legend, myth and story, he has no written word. Everything that is, as differentiated from everything that is supposed, in his life has to be personally learned by individual contact with the things themselves. Botany is the study of flowers, not of words about flowers. There is but one way we can really study botany, and that is out in the fields with the flower growing before us. It must be seen day in and day out from its planting until its fruition. All its development must be known and understood. The properties of its fruit, its roots, its stem, its leaves, for food, medicinal, manufacturing, or other purposes are all connected with the study. It is well to know the names of the plants, the names of all parts of plants, and the families and species to which they belong, but these latter things, important and interesting though they be, are but secondary or tertiary as compared with the primary out-door personal and intimate knowledge I have referred to.