Of the new writers of the end of the last century, none has become more deservedly popular and beloved than John Burroughs, who, on April third, 1919, entered his eighty-third year. Ever since "Wake Robin" was issued in 1870, he has been giving us a succession of essays, at intervals crystalized into books, that have seemed like so many windows opening on ever-new vistas of a world whose delight had hardly been suspected by the general reader. They deal not only with wild beasts, birds and flowers, but with the homely facts of rural life; and they tell of experiences that make us long to take to the woods and the streams, to track the weasel through the winter snows, surprise the secrets of the birds and the bees, launch our boat upon river or lake, and drift or fish, and then rest through the long summer nights upon a couch of boughs beside a mountain fireplace. The very titles of Burroughs' books are aromatic with the fragrance of woods and fields: "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Signs and Seasons," "Winter Sunshine," "Birds and Poets."
As he has advanced in years Mr. Burroughs has become more and more of a philosopher, discussing deep questions with copious information and illuminating thought.
Popular Nature Writers of Today
Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, N.Y.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
In Yosemite National Park. Yosemite Falls in the
background. In a career rich in endeavor and full of
achievement, America's great citizen spent his first
years and his last years as a naturalist
DR. WILLIAM T. HORNADAY
Director of the New York Zoological
Park since 1896, and author of many
books and articles on natural history
To mention even a quarter of the Nature books that have appeared during the past twenty-five years is impossible in this review. New England furnished many of note, such as the gracefully written and informative books of Bradford Torrey, largely reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly; the lively chapters on wild life near home by Dallas Lore Sharp; and the useful volumes by E.H. Forbush. From New York's presses were issued dozens of untechnical nature-books written by such well-known men as W.T. Hornaday, Frank Chapman, F.S. Matthews, W.P. Eaton, Ernest Ingersoll, and the various authors of the "Nature Library." A special note must be made of the series from the pen of Dr. C.C. Abbott, who, like Gilbert White and Thoreau, found on his farm near Trenton, New Jersey, material for half a dozen or more books, including "Rambles of a Naturalist About Home," "Upland and Meadow," and "Wasteland Wanderings." Dr. Henry McCook, a Philadelphia clergyman, wrote in his "Tenants of the Old Farm" a delightful story of the busy lives of ants and bees. All are models of the value of close and continuous observation of what is going on day by day under our eyes, and should be in every library.
One conspicuous reason for the rapid modern growth of the department of Nature literature was the facility in illustration effected by the invention of the half-tone and three-color processes of reproducing photographs and paintings, accompanied by the steady improvement and cheapening of the camera in its application to field-study. These inventions enabled publishers to issue books with accurate and beautiful pictures at a price previously impossible, so that almost everyone might possess them.