I am not always in sympathy with nature-study as pursued in the
schools, as if this kingdom could be carried by assault. Such study
is too cold, too special, too mechanical; it is likely to rub the
bloom off Nature. It lacks soul and emotion; it misses the
accessories of the open air and its exhilarations, the sky, the
clouds, the landscape, and the currents of life that pulse
everywhere.
I myself have never made a dead set at studying Nature with
note-book and field-glass in hand. I have rather visited with her.
We have walked together or sat down together, and our intimacy grows
with the seasons. What I have learned about her ways I have learned
easily, almost unconsciously, while fishing or camping or idling
about. My desultory habits have their disadvantages, no doubt, but
they have their advantages also. A too strenuous pursuit defeats
itself. In the fields and woods more than anywhere else all things
come to those who wait, because all things are on the move, and are
sure sooner or later to come your way.
To absorb a thing is better than to learn it, and we absorb what we
enjoy. We learn things at school, we absorb them in the fields and
woods and on the farm. When we look upon Nature with fondness and
appreciation she meets us halfway and takes a deeper hold upon us
than when studiously conned. Hence I say the way of knowledge of
Nature is the way of love and enjoyment, and is more surely found in
the open air than in the school-room or the laboratory. The other
day I saw a lot of college girls dissecting cats and making diagrams
of the circulation and muscle-attachments, and I thought it pretty
poor business unless the girls were taking a course in comparative
anatomy with a view to some occupation in life. What is the moral
and intellectual value of this kind of knowledge to those girls?
Biology is, no doubt, a great science in the hands of great men, but
it is not for all. I myself have got along very well without it. I
am sure I can learn more of what I want to know from a kitten on my
knee than from the carcass of a cat in the laboratory. Darwin spent
eight years dissecting barnacles; but he was Darwin, and did not
stop at barnacles, as these college girls are pretty sure to stop at
cats. He dissected and put together again in his mental laboratory
the whole system of animal life, and the upshot of his work was a
tremendous gain to our understanding of the universe.
I would rather see the girls in the fields and woods studying and
enjoying living nature, training their eyes to see correctly and
their hearts to respond intelligently. What is knowledge without
enjoyment, without love? It is sympathy, appreciation, emotional
experience, which refine and elevate and breathe into exact
knowledge the breath of life. My own interest is in living nature as
it moves and flourishes about me winter and summer.
I know it is one thing to go forth as a nature-lover, and quite
another to go forth in a spirit of cold, calculating, exact science.
I call myself a nature-lover and not a scientific naturalist. All
that science has to tell me is welcome, is, indeed, eagerly sought
for. I must know as well as feel. I am not merely contented, like
Wordsworth's poet, to enjoy what others understand. I must
understand also; but above all things I must enjoy. How much of my
enjoyment springs from my knowledge I do not know. The joy of
knowing is very great; the delight of picking up the threads of
meaning here and there, and following them through the maze of
confusing facts, I know well. When I hear the woodpecker drumming on
a dry limb in spring or the grouse drumming in the woods, and know
what it is all for, why, that knowledge, I suppose, is part of my
enjoyment. The other part is the associations that those sounds call
up as voicing the arrival of spring: they are the drums that lead
the joyous procession.
To enjoy understandingly, that, I fancy, is the great thing to be
desired. When I see the large ichneumon-fly, Thalessa, making a loop
over her back with her long ovipositor and drilling a hole in the
trunk of a tree, I do not fully appreciate the spectacle till I know
she is feeling for the burrow of a tree-borer, Tremex, upon the
larvae of which her own young feed. She must survey her territory
like an oil-digger and calculate where she is likely to strike oil,
which in her case is the burrow of her host Tremex. There is a vast
series of facts in natural history like this that are of little
interest until we understand them. They are like the outside of a
book which may attract us, but which can mean little to us until we
have opened and perused its pages.
The nature-lover is not looking for mere facts, but for meanings,
for something he can translate into the terms of his own life. He
wants facts, but significant facts--luminous facts that throw light
upon the ways of animate and inanimate nature. A bird picking up
crumbs from my window-sill does not mean much to me. It is a
pleasing sight and touches a tender cord, but it does not add much
to my knowledge of bird-life. But when I see a bird pecking and
fluttering angrily at my window-pane, as I now and then do in
spring, apparently under violent pressure to get in, I am witnessing
a significant comedy in bird-life, one that illustrates the limits
of animal instinct. The bird takes its own reflected image in the
glass for a hated rival, and is bent on demolishing it. Let the
assaulting bird get a glimpse of the inside of the empty room
through a broken pane, and it is none the wiser; it returns to the
assault as vigorously as ever.
The fossils in the rocks did not mean much to the earlier
geologists. They looked upon them as freaks of Nature, whims of the
creative energy, or vestiges of Noah's flood. You see they were
blinded by the preconceived notions of the six-day theory of
creation.