"Education, ladies and gentlemen, is not the prerogative of Mankind! The kitten learns from the wise mouser, its mother, to stalk its wary prey. The sparrow in its nest is taught to spread its trembling wings. Even the field mouse learns to know its natural enemies and to recognize them from afar. It is God's will on Earth that in every thinking race the parent should instruct its young, the adult impart the accumulated wisdom of its kind to the immature. Education, ladies and gentlemen, is the heritage of the animal kingdom--the privilege which divides us from the leek and the asparagus! I trust that you will not deny that heritage!" Thus Mr. Melchizedek Hobbs, in the days when I first knew him. There were a few of us who tagged him through the woods and fields, listening to his painfully erudite disquisitions on matters of botany or zoology, following his kicking heels and flying coat-tails in wholly undignified pursuit of some new butterfly or beetle, or laboring home under the weight of collecting boxes stuffed with mosses and rare ferns. We learned little enough, I suppose, for I find it hard now to distinguish a primrose from a cowslip, but we appreciated the very real enthusiasm which was his, and his sincere desire to learn and to impart what he had learned. * * * * * Then, in our turn, we graduated and went our separate ways. I heard that a maiden aunt in England--some forgotten relative of his mother's--had died and left Professor Hobbs an income which permitted him to leave the Academy and open a little greenhouse which was as much a laboratory as a business enterprise. I wrote him a letter of congratulation, and from time to time in my wanderings I sent him slips of rare or beautiful plants which came to my attention. And then, only a few months before my travels were ended and I came back to Springville, I happened on the Zulu rose. Where it got its name I do not know, for to the best of my knowledge there are not and never have been Zulus in Madagascar. Probably some African explorer, a little off his regular course, paid a fleeting visit to the isle of marvels and bestowed his taxonomic benediction on everything that came to his attention. In any case, and by any name, the Zulu rose would be the same anomaly. I had gone to Madagascar with some wild idea of finding and dragging back to civilization the fabled man-eating tree. That I failed was probably due in part to the fact that it never existed, save in some retired colonel's fevered imagination. I panted off on the trail of the Aepyornis and had to be satisfied with a much addled egg, still on display in the Springville Free Museum and Loan Library. I shot lemurs and hunted for missing links, for Darwin's "Origin of Species" had been very much before the undergraduate eye during my college career. All I found, in the end, was the Zulu rose.