Older children revel in the truths of science, if they are presented in story form. Take, for instance, David Starr Jordan’s “Story of a Stone.” Where is there a fairy tale more fascinating than this narrative of “a bit of petrified honeycomb,” plowed up by a Wisconsin husbandman as he made ready to sow his winter wheat? The style and language have the charm of Andersen, the plot is as well sustained as that of any Thuringian folk tale collected by Grimm, and it begins as fairy tales have begun since the beginning of time:
Once upon a time, a great many years ago, so many, many years that one grows very tired in trying to think how long ago it was; in those old days when the great Northwest consisted of a few ragged and treeless hills, full of copper and quartz and bordered by a dreary waste of sand flats, over which the Gulf of Mexico rolled its warm and turbid waters as far north as Escanaba and Eau Claire; in the days when Marquette harbor opened out toward Baffin’s Bay, and the northern ocean washed the crest of Mount Washington and wrote its name on the pictured rocks; when the tide of the Pacific, hemmed in by no snow-capped Sierras, came rushing through the Golden Gate between the Ozarks and the northern peninsula of Michigan, swept over Plymouth Rock, and surged up against Bunker Hill; in the days when it would have been fun to study geography, because there were no capitals, nor any products, and all the towns were seaports,—in fact, an immensely long time ago, there lived somewhere in the northeastern part of Wisconsin a little jellyfish.
Dr. Jordan has also woven into story form information concerning the animal life of sea and stream, of a mother and baby seal, in the delightful tale of “Matka and Kotik,” and there is not a boy or a girl in the heroic period who does not listen eagerly to the adventures of a salmon, “a curious little fellow, not half an inch long, with great, staring eyes which made almost half his length, and with a body so transparent that he could not cast a shadow.” The account of the battle of the fish there under the ripples of the Cowlitz, the beginning of the eventful journey down the river, the merry conflict with the herring and the terrible one with the sea lions, swimming always and always, growing larger and more daring, and having in his watery realm as many adventures as bold Robin had in his greenwood, hold the children from the beginning to the end of the story. They sympathize as he struggles up the stream again, “growing poor and ragged and tired,” and through his life and adventures they come to have an interest in the world of fishes that they will not have without the tale. Such stories demonstrate the fact that information concerning the sciences can be put into fascinating story form, and every worker with young folk should endeavor to present some of it through this delightful medium.