The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Charlie took the shovel and mined away under the rock until he struck a layer of rather hard sandstone. He picked a while at this, then stopped a while; picked again, rather feebly, then stopped and began to think about it. It was hard work,—the thinking, I mean, harder than the picking,—but Charlie, however unscientific, is an honest workman, so he thought it through.

“Well,” he said finally, “‘t ain’t no use, nohow. You can’t keep it down. You bury the darned thing, and it’ll come right up. I suppose it grows. Of course it does. It must. Everything grows.”

Now that is an unscientific attitude. But that is not the mind of the nature-lover, of the boy with the baffling silences along the starlit lake. He is sentimental, certainly, yet not ignorant, nor merely vapid. He does not always wander along the lake by night. He is a nature-student, as well as a nature-lover, and he does a great deal more than hoot at the owls. This, though, is as near as he comes to anything scientific, and so worth while, according to the professor.

II

And it is as near as he ought to come to reality and facts—according to the philosopher.

“We want only the facts of nature,” says the scientist. “Nothing in nature is worth while,” says the philosopher, “but mood, background, atmosphere.”

“Nor can I recollect that my mind,” says one of our philosophers, “in these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or birdlorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of nature. It never seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing the construction of its ovaries.... The wood thrush and the veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with nature.”

So it is. Certainly if ignorance, a great deal of ignorance, were unwholesome, then nature-study would be a very unhealthy course, indeed. For, when the most curious of the herbalists and birdlorists (Mr. Burroughs, say) has made his last prying peep into the private life of a ten-acre woodlot, he will still be wholesomely ignorant of the ways of nature. Is the horizon just back of the brook that marks the terminus of our philosopher’s path? Let him leap across, walk on, on, out of his woods to the grassy knoll in the next pasture, and there look! Lo! far yonder the horizon! beyond a vaster forest than he has known, behind a range of higher rolling hills, within a shroud of wider, deeper mystery.

There isn’t the slightest danger of walking off the earth; nor of unlearning our modicum of wholesome ignorance concerning the universe. The nature-lover may turn nature-student and have no fear of losing nature. The vision will not fade.