I do not propose in these introductory remarks to this Nature Library
to discuss the merits or the character of the separate volumes further
than to say that they are all by competent hands and, so far as I can
judge, entirely reliable. While accurate and scientific, I have found
them very readable. The treatment is popular without being
sensational.
This library is free from the scientific dry rot on the one hand and
from the florid and misleading romanticism of much recent nature
writing on the other. It is a safe guide to the world of animal and
plant life that lies about us. And that is all the wise reader wants.
He should want to explore this world for himself. Indeed,
nature-study, as it appeals to us in books, fails of its chief end if
it does not send us to nature itself. What we want is not the mere
facts about the flowers or the animals--we want through them to add to
the resources of our lives; and I know of nothing better calculated to
do this than the study of nature at first hand. To add to the
resources of one's life--think how much that means! To add to those
things that make us more at home in the world; that help guard us
against ennui and stagnation; that invest the country with new
interest and enticement; that make every walk in the fields or woods
an excursion into a land of unexhausted treasures; that make the
returning seasons fill us with expectation and delight; that make
every rod of ground like the page of a book in which new and strange
things may be read; in short, those things that help keep us fresh and
sane and young, and make us immune to the strife and fever of the
world.
The main thing is to feel an interest in Nature--an interest that
leads to a loving unconscious study of her. Not entirely a scientific
interest, but a human interest as well; science upon the one hand and
an appreciation of the mystery, the beauty, and the bounty of life
upon the other. The child feels a human interest in nature: when the
schoolgirls come to school with their hands full of wild flowers, or
the boys make excursions to the woods in May for wintergreens, or
black birch, or crinkle root, they are all moved by an interest that
is old and deep-seated in the race. Now, if to this interest and
curiosity we can add a little science, just enough to guide them, we
lift these feelings to another plane and give them a longer lease of
life. The boy will not be so likely to rob birds' nests after the
savage in him has been humanized by a touch of real knowledge and he
has come to look upon the bird as something worthy of naming and
studying and that has its place in the economy of the fields and
woods.
A touch of real knowledge--how humanizing and elevating it is! Simply
to learn that all the plants have been studied and named, even the
humblest; that they all have vital relations with one another--family
ties; that the great biological laws are operative in them also; that
the deep, mysterious principle of variation, which is at the bottom of
Darwin's theory of the origin of the species, is working in the
lowliest plant we tread upon; to know that the chain of cause and
effect runs through the whole organic world, binding together its
remotest parts; that everywhere is plan, development, evolution--to
know these and kindred things--a few of the fundamentals of
science--is a joy to the spirit and a light to the mind.
Science in the world is like the surveyor and the engineer in a new
country; it opens up highways for the mind; it bridges the chasms and
marshes; it gives us dominion over the wild; it brings order out of
chaos. What a maze, what a tangle the world is till we come to look
upon it with the clews and solutions in mind which science affords!
The heavens seem a haphazard spatter of stars, the earth a wild jumble
of plants, and animals, and blind forces all struggling with one
another--confusion, contradiction, failure everywhere. And so it was
to the early men, and so it still is to those who have not the light
of science, but so it need not remain to the child born into the world
to-day. The great mysteries of life and death, of final causes and
ultimate ends, still remain and will continue, but nature now,
compared with the nature of a few centuries ago, is like a land
subdued and peopled and cultivated compared with a pathless
wilderness. And yet I would not in this connection, when considering
the field of natural history, lay too much stress upon the scientific
aspects of the question. To the real nature-lover the bird in the bush
is worth much more than the bird in the hand, because the nature-lover
is not after a specimen: he is after a living fact; he is after a new
joy in life.
It is an important part, but by no means the main part of what
ornithology holds for us, to be able to name every bird on sight or
call. To love the bird, to appreciate its place in the landscape and
in the season, to relate it to your daily life, to divine its
character, to know it emotionally in your heart--that is much more. To
know the birds as the sportsman knows his game; to experience the same
thrill, purged of all thoughts of slaughter; to make their songs music
in your life--this is indeed something to be desired.
The same with botany. I regard its class-room uses as very slight. The
educational value of the technical part is almost _nil_. But the
humanizing value of a love of the flowers, the hygienic value of a
walk in their haunts, the A|sthetic value of the observation of their
forms and tints--these are all vital. The scientific value which
attaches to your knowledge of the names of their parts or of their
families--what is that? Their habits are interesting; their means of
fertilization are interesting; the part insects play in their
lives--the honey-yielders, the pollen-yielders, their means of
scattering their seeds, and so forth--all are interesting. To know
their habitats and seasons; to have associations with them when you go
fishing; to land your trout in a bed of bee-palm or jewel-weed; to
pluck the linnA|a in the moss on the Adirondack mountain you are
climbing; to gather pond-lilies from a boat with your friend; to pluck
the arbutus on the first balmy day of April; to see the scarlet
lobelia lighting up a dark nook by the stream as you row by in August;
to walk or drive past vast acres of purple loosestrife, looking like a
lake or sea of color--this is botany with something back of it, and
the only place to learn it is where it grows. The botany that trails
the days and the season and the woods and the fields with it--that is
the kind that has educational value in it.
I confess I have not much sympathy with the laboratory study of
nature, except for economic purposes. Nature under the dissecting
knife and the microscope yields important secrets to the students of
biology, but the unprofessional students want but little of all this.
I know a young woman who took a post-graduate course in biology at a
noted summer school, and the one thing she learned was that certain
bacilli were found only in the aqueous humor of the eyes of white
mice. The world is full of curious facts like that, that have no human
interest or educational value whatever.
If one could number all the trees of the forest and all the leaves
upon the trees, what would it profit him? To know the different kinds
of trees when you see them, and the function of the leaves upon
them--that were more worth while. I have read studies of leaves that
were just as profitless as to know their numbers. I have heard
discourses upon the changes in the plumage of certain water-fowl from
youth to age, and from one moult to another, that were as profitless
and wearisome as studying the variations of the leaves or their
numbers.
I hardly know why I am impatient when people come to me with their
hands full of different leaves and ask me what tree is this from, and
this, and this? If your business is not with trees, if you live in the
city and care mainly for city things, why bother about the trees,
unless for the pleasure of it during your summer excursions into the
country; and if it affords you pleasure, you will not want any one to
tell you: you will want to identify the trees themselves.
The same with the birds. The main profit of this branch of natural
history is in the pursuit--not in the name, but in the bird. It is the
chase that allures the sportsman, and it is the chase that profits the
nature-student. Did you ever receive a gift of brook-trout by express?
How pitiful they look--stale fish only! But the trout you brought in
at night after threading for miles the mountain stream: its voice all
day in your ears; its sparkle all day in your eyes; the love of its
beauty and purity all day in your heart; wading through bee-balm or
jewel-weed; skirting wild pastures; starting the grouse or the
woodcock with their young; surprising bird and beast at their home
occupations--these were trout with a flavor.
Whatever opens up new doors or windows for us into the world about us,
whatever widens the field of our interests and sympathies, has some
sort of value--moral, intellectual, or A|sthetic. But much of the
so-called nature-study opens no new doors or windows; it affords no
mental satisfaction, or illumination, or A|sthetic pleasure; it is
mainly pottering with dry, unimportant facts and details. Do you know
the edelweiss of our own matchless arbutus after you have merely
analyzed and classified them? No more than you know a man after having
weighed and measured him. The function of things is always
interesting. What do they do? How do they pay their way in the rigid
economy of nature? How do they survive? How does the bulb of the
common fawn-lily[1] get deeper and deeper into the ground each year?
Why does the wild ginger hide its blossom when nearly all other plants
flaunt theirs? Why are the plants of the common mouse-ear
(_antennaria_)[2] always in groups, one sex here, another there, as if
prohibited from mingling by some moral code in nature? Why do nearly
all our trees have a twist to the right or the left--hard woods one
way, and soft woods the other? Why do the roots of trees flow through
the ground like "runnels of molten metal," often separating and
uniting again while the branches are thrust out in right lines or
curves? Why is our common yellow birch more often than any other tree
planted upon a rock? Why do oaks or chestnuts so often spring up where
a pine or hemlock forest has been cleared away? Why does lightning so
commonly strike a hemlock tree or a pine or an oak, and rarely or
never a beech? Why does the bolt sometimes scatter the tree about, and
at others only plow a channel down its trunk? Why does the bumblebee
complain so loudly when working upon certain flowers? Why does the
honey-bee lose the sting when it stings a person, while the wasp, the
hornet, and the bumblebee do not? How does the chimney-swallow get the
twigs it builds its nest with? From what does the hornet make its
paper?
One of Herbert Spencer's questions was, Why do animals and birds of
prey have their eyes in front, and others, as sheep and domestic fowl,
on the side of the head? Man, then, by the position of his eyes
belongs to the predaceous animals. I have never been greatly
interested in spiders, but I have always wanted to know how a certain
spider managed to stretch her cable squarely across the road in the
woods about my height from the ground? Why are mud turtles so wild?
Why is the excrement of the young of some birds carried away by the
parents, while with others it is voided from the nest? Among certain
of our birds the family relation, more or less marked, is kept up a
long time after the young have left the nest. One sees the parent
birds and the young going about in loose flocks often till late into
the fall. Of what birds is this true?
[1] The adder's tongue.
[2] Everlasting.
The questions I have suggested are not important; they do not hold the
key to any great storehouse of natural knowledge. Their only value is
as a means to quicken the powers of observation. We see vaguely,
diffusely. Concentrate the attention--not to the extent of missing
total effects, as the specialist so often does, but for the purpose of
reading correctly the play of life that is constantly going about us.
Nature's book is like any other book: you must open the covers; you
must fix your eyes upon the text; you must get into the spirit of it.
When you have read one sentence correctly you are so much the better
prepared to read the next one.
A world of nature about us that we are quite apt to be oblivious to,
except as it results in our annoyance, is the insect world. We do not
take an intelligent interest in the ants, or the bees, or the moths,
or the butterflies, yet here is a field of observation that will amply
repay one. One day in a great city I saw a butterfly calmly winging
its way high above the crowded street. I knew it was the monarch
(_Anosia plexippus_), probably the greatest traveler of all our
butterflies. It is quite certain that they migrate to the South in the
fall, and that many return in the spring. I learn from Mr. Holland's
Butterfly Book in this library that they have even crossed both
oceans--of course, by catching a ride on vessels--and are now found in
Australia and in the Philippines, and they have been collected in
England. Have you not seen its chrysalis suspended from some weed or
bush, looking like the trunk from some tiny warrior encased in
pale-green armor, riveted with gold-headed rivets, a broad, heavy
shield over the abdomen, and plate upon plate over the shoulders and
back? It is a milkweed butterfly, and will serve as a good
introduction to this new world of winged life. Early last spring I
found upon the window of my cabin in the woods a butterfly that had
evidently hybernated in some snug crack or corner of the building.
This was the mourning cloak, with me the first vernal butterfly. When
one sees this butterfly dancing through the open sunny woods in March
or early April he may know spring has really come and that the first
hepatica will soon open its blue eye.
Mr. Howard's Insect Book ought to start many of its readers to
observing flies and bees and prying into their life-histories, many of
which are as yet not fully known. Not a farm-boy but knows of the big
fat grubs in cows' backs in the spring. It was always a mystery to me
how they got there. Now it is known that the creature has traveled all
the way from the cow's stomach, where the egg of its parent--the
bot-fly--was hatched, making its way slowly "through the connective
tissues of the cow, between the skin and the flesh, penetrating
gradually along the neck, and ultimately reaching a point beneath the
skin on the back of the animal."
We have only to look into nature a little more closely and intently,
to whet our powers of observation by the use of such books as this
Nature Library contains, to add vastly to our pleasure in and our
knowledge of the world that lies about us.