For one thing, the ant and the angleworm, the birds and the woodchucks, the little lichens and the big trees, the winds and the rains, are all teachers in the Great School of Out-of-Doors, and in this school you can learn almost everything there is to be learned. It's really a university. Nature study, as you call it in the grades, besides all the facts it teaches you, trains the eye to see, and the ear to listen, and the brain to reason, and the heart to feel.
[STORY OF THE LONDON BANKER AND HIS ANTS]
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
The great London banker who carried ants in his pocket.
Once there was a London banker who used to go around with—what do you think—in his pockets? Money? Yes, I suppose so; but what else? You'll never guess—ants! He was a lot more interested in ants than he was in money; and so, while the business world knew him as a big banker, all the scientific world knew him as a great naturalist. He wrote not only nature books but other books, including one on "[The Pleasures of Life]," and among life's greatest pleasures he placed the "friendship," as he puts it, of things in Nature. He said he never went into the woods but he found himself welcomed by a glad company of friends, every one with something interesting to tell. And, in speaking of the wide-spread growth of interest in Nature in recent years, he said:
"The study of natural history indeed, seems destined to replace the loss of what is, not very happily, I think, termed 'sport.'"
And isn't it curious, when one comes to think of it, why a man should take pleasure in seeing a beautiful deer fall dead with a bullet in its heart? You'd think there would be so much more pleasure in seeing him run—the very poetry of motion. Or, why should a boy want to kill a little bird? You'd think it would have been so much greater pleasure to study its flight or to listen to the happy notes pour out from that "little breast that will throb with song no more."