The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-11-22
Wonder As Soul Food
By DIR. FRANK CRANE

COME, one shrewdly said that a molecule solves a problem of higher mathematics - in the fraction of a second, while 1t would take learned professor year.
 All around us Nature is modestly working indescribable miracles of skill. The mind of man has never touched more than the fringe of her garment.
 The commonest human life is led in the midst of a stupendous factory where organ isms more wonderful than a Strassburg clock or Hoe printing press are turned out every minute; in laboratory where, with that no human craft has ever been able to initiate.
 Automobiles are amazing proofs of mans ingenuity, but human foot is more complex and baffling than they.
 As you sit on a bench In the park in the spring and see the young grass growing up. You say it grows" Did you ever reflect what a vast word that is2 Grows! All over the earth trillions upon trilions of little seeds are bursting and sending up green stalks; and no man was ever able to contrive thing that would grow.
 We can make piano players, photographs and all manner of cunning electric machines, but we can make no machine that will "hve, that will automatically draw its sustenance from earth, regulate itself and reproduce itself
 Yet there are people who are bored. There are people who live in this miracle-crowded world and are tired of it all. They must have fe7ered amusements, intoxications, perversions to pick the jaded love of life. That is be- cause their souls are dead.
 Souls die by starvation. That which feeds souls, keeps them alive, young and fresh, is WONDER.
 When one ceases to wonder and begin to think he, knows,, paralysis and. death are not far off. They become ablase, world weary. And when the soul shrivels up the mind hates itself and flies to the body for drunkenness
 The clouds, look at them! What holds them up. herds them, drives them in the racing storm or pastures them golden-clothed in the silent west?
 What is electricity? We use it, but VIC know what it is no more than did Adam. It is a giant spirit, strange, strong, evasive, formless.
 The soul of the Persian who worshipped the sun was nearer alive than that of the scientist who, because he has q spectrum-analysis, has lost surprise.
 All our science, said Calyle, swims as a scum upon the boundless ocean of ncscience.
 We build little walls of wisdom to keep away the vast unknown. Wherein we mutter and drivel.
 Woe to the man that does not feel the infinite, the soul from whom awe has depart ed, in whom wonder is extinct, wonder at the continuous play of miracle and mystery that surround life. The best of little children is that they wonder; and except ye become like them ye shall not see.
 Do you say the age of miracles is past? The marvels of the Old Testament are small compared with the shattering revelations of the spectroscope, the spinthariscope, Crookee tube, and the electrometer, to say nothing ot the microscope and the telescope. Madam Curie's bit of radium. shedding power un- ceasingly into space, is more striking than Moses's marching pillars of cloud and fire
 And we who dwell in continuous crea' tion, and under the shine of galaxics, cannot wonder .....