The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since that day it has only sharpened lead pencils.

Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with scientific folk leads me to believe that the attitude of my professor toward the out-of-doors is not exceptional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor, who have to do with out-of-door life and conditions,—zoölogists, botanists, geologists,—look upon naturalists, and others who love birds and fields, as of a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who collect tobacco tags, postage stamps, and picture postal cards. Sentiment is not scientific.

I have a biological friend, a professor of zoölogy, who never saw a woodchuck in the flesh. He would not know a woodchuck with the fur on from a mongoose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the skeleton could he pronounce it Arctomys monax with certainty. Yes, he could tell by the teeth. Dentition is a great thing. He could tell a white pine (strobus) from a pitch pine (rigida) by just a cone and a bundle of needles,—one has five, the other three, to the bundle. But he wouldn’t recognize a columned aisle of the one from a Jersey barren of the other. That is not the worst of it: he would not see even the aisle or the barren,—only trees.

As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter day that followed a day of freezing, my little three-year-old threw his nose into the air and cried: “Oh, fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines,—’ou calls ’em Joisey pines!” And sure enough, around a double curve in the road we came upon a single clump of the scraggly pitch pines. Our drive had taken us through miles of the common white species.

Did you ever smell the pitch pines when they are thawing out? It is quite as healthful, if not as scientific, to recognize them by their resinous breath as by their needles per bundle.

I want this small boy some time to know the difference between these needle bundles. But I want him to learn now, and to remember always, that the hard days are sure to soften, and that then there oozes from the scraggly pitch pines a balm, a piny, penetrating, purifying balm,—a tonic to the lungs, a healing to the soul.

All foolishness? sentiment? moonshine?—this love for woods and fields, this need I have for companionship with birds and trees, this longing for the feel of grass and the smell of earth? When I told my biological friend that these longings were real and vital, as vital as the highest problems of the stars and the deepest questions of life, he pitied me, but made no reply.

He sees clearly a difference between live and dead men, a difference between the pleasure he gets from the society of his friends, and the knowledge, interesting as it may be, which he obtains in a dissecting-room. But he sees no such difference between live and dead nature, nature in the fields and in the laboratory. Nature is all a biological problem to him, not a quick thing,—a shape, a million shapes, informed with spirit,—a voice of gladness, a mild and healing sympathy, a companionable soul.

“But there you go!” he exclaims, “talking poetry again. Why don’t you deal with facts? What do you mean by nature-study, love for the out-of-doors, anyway!”

I do not mean a sixteen weeks’ course in zoölogy, or botany, or in Wordsworth. I mean, rather, a gentle life course in getting acquainted with the toads and stars that sing together, for most of us, just within and above our own dooryards. It is a long life course in the deep and beautiful things of living nature,—the nature we know so well as a corpse. It is of necessity a somewhat unsystematized, incidental, vacation-time course,—the more’s the pity. The results do not often come as scientific discoveries. They are personal, rather; more after the manner of revelations,—data that the professors have little faith in. For the scientist cannot put an April dawn into a bottle, cannot cabin a Hockomock marsh, nor cage a December storm in a laboratory. And when, in such a place, did a scientist ever overturn a “wee bit heap o’ weeds an’ stibble”? Yet it is out of dawns and marshes and storms that the revelations come; yes, and out of mice nests, too, if you love all the out-of-doors, and chance to be ploughing late in the fall.