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Updated: June 23, 2025
What an odd variety of figures that congested place disclosed! what strange life-histories were having their culmination there!
Years ago I became fascinated with the study of knots and knot-holes in the timber of wood-piles. They are excellent records of the events in the life of trees. In print I have tried to show what they mean. I also worked out the life-histories of twigs and published them in nature-study leaflets and elsewhere.
Moreover, I have many times requested large groups of students to write freely and frankly concerning the influence of biological courses upon their own attitude; and their papers have strongly supported my observation that study of animal and plant life-histories exerts a profound influence upon the attitude of students towards the human problems of sex and reproduction.
My story is merely a record of some of the impressions left on myself by such a visit, although the boy is certainly not a portrait of myself; and if it has no result, no end, reaching beyond childhood into what is commonly called life, I presume it is not of a peculiar or solitary character in that respect; for surely many that we count finished stories life-histories must look very different to the angels; and if they haven't to be written over again, at least they have to be carried on a few aeons further.
It was a peaky eager face, with a great spirit looking out of it, and possibilities of passion both for good and evil in the keen, alert features. Just beside her was the dour, grim outline of her husband. Their life-histories were in those two portraits. 'Poor dear! said Maude. 'Ay, you may say so, said the matron, whose accent showed that she was from the north of the Tweed.
And the evidences of its truth have been gathered, not alone from the formal and hurried records of the police courts, but from the lips of certain inmates of various Magdalen Asylums who have been reclaimed from their former homes of shame; and from the mouths of other repentant women, who, under circumstances where there was no object to deceive, and at times when their hearts were full of grateful love for those who had interposed to save them from utter despair, have in all simple truthfulness and honor, related their life-histories.
He freely conversed with the inmates, and the life-histories that were revealed were sad indeed. To his utter surprise, a large proportion of the 'soiled doves' traced their fall to influences that met them in the Public Schools; and although Boston is justly proud of its schools, it would seem, from his story, that they need a thorough purification.
In all my classes of twenty years in high school and college I have noted a marked development of serious, scientific, and open-minded attitude in response to natural and frank presentation of animal and plant life-histories.
How recent and intimate had been his acquaintance with those persons! lie had known them from early childhood. He knew everything touching them: the names and life-histories of their parents, the nicknames given them in jest or in tenderness, names given at an age when they were barely lisping. He knew every chamber, almost every corner of the houses in which they had been reared.
Such men should be collectors, for collecting is still necessary; but they should also, and indeed primarily, be able themselves to see, and to set vividly before the eyes of others, the full life-histories of the creatures that dwell in the waste spaces of the world.
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