diameters: the unit of measure in the “field” or the lens of the microscope, equivalent to “times.”
white-footed wood mouse: Text should read or wood mouse. There are other wood mice, but Whitefoot is known as the wood mouse.
gives at the touch: an idiom, meaning moves back, gives way.
red-backed salamander: very common under stones; his scientific name is Plethodon erythronolus.
His “red” salamander: Read chapter V in “Pepacton,” by Burroughs. His salamander is the red triton, Spelerpes ruber.
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dull ears: Our ears are dulled by the loud and ceaseless noises of our city life, so that we cannot hear the small voices of nature that doubtless many of the wild creatures are capable of hearing.
tiny tree-frog, Pickering’s hyla: the one who peeps so shrill from the meadows in spring.
“skirl”: a Scotch term; see “Tam O’Shanter,” by Burns: “He screwed the pipes and gart them skirl.”
bunches of Christmas fern: Gathered all through the winter here in the ledges about Mullein Hill by the florists for floral pieces.
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yellow-jacket’s nest: one of the Vespa Wasps, Vespa Germanica. Read the first chapter of “Wasps Social and Solitary,” by G. W. and E. G. Peckham.
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long-tusked boar of the forest: The wild boar, the ancestor of our domestic pigs is still to be found in the great game preserves in European forests; in this country only in zoölogical gardens.
live in a pen: How might one, though living in a big modern house, well furnished and ordered, still make a “pen” of it only.
CHAPTER XII
TO THE TEACHER
Notice again that in the three chapters on things to see and do and hear a few of the characteristic sights and sounds and doings have been mentioned. Let the whole teaching of these three chapters be to quicken the pupil to look for and listen for the dominant, characteristic sights and sounds of the season, as he must be trained to look for and listen for the characteristic notes and actions of individual things—birds, animals, flowers. If, for instance, his eye catches the galloping, waving motion of the woodpecker’s flight, if his ear is trained to distinguish the rappings of the same bird on a hollow limb or resonant rail, then the pupil knows that bird and has clues to what is strange in his plumage, his anatomy, his habits, his family traits.
The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to separate and distinguish things; and there is no better training for this than to get in the way of looking and listening for what is characteristic.
Each locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild life; so that some of the sounds in this chapter may need to have others substituted to meet those differences. Remember that you are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where it is lacking. A good book is a very good thing; but a good teacher is a very much better thing.