This library is free from the scientific dry rot on the one hand and from the florid and misleading romanticism of much recent nature writing on the other. It is a safe guide to the world of animal and plant life that lies about us. And that is all the wise reader wants. He should want to explore this world for himself. Indeed, nature-study, as it appeals to us in books, fails of its chief end if it does not send us to nature itself. What we want is not the mere facts about the flowers or the animals—we want through them to add to the resources of our lives; and I know of nothing better calculated to do this than the study of nature at first hand. To add to the resources of one's life—think how much that means! To add to those things that make us more at home in the world; that help guard us against ennui and stagnation; that invest the country with new interest and enticement; that make every walk in the fields or woods an excursion into a land of unexhausted treasures; that make the returning seasons fill us with expectation and delight; that make every rod of ground like the page of a book in which new and strange things may be read; in short, those things that help keep us fresh and sane and young, and make us immune to the strife and fever of the world.
The main thing is to feel an interest in Nature—an interest that leads to a loving unconscious study of her. Not entirely a scientific interest, but a human interest as well; science upon the one hand and an appreciation of the mystery, the beauty, and the bounty of life upon the other. The child feels a human interest in nature: when the schoolgirls come to school with their hands full of wild flowers, or the boys make excursions to the woods in May for wintergreens, or black birch, or crinkle root, they are all moved by an interest that is old and deep-seated in the race. Now, if to this interest and curiosity we can add a little science, just enough to guide them, we lift these feelings to another plane and give them a longer lease of life. The boy will not be so likely to rob birds' nests after the savage in him has been humanized by a touch of real knowledge and he has come to look upon the bird as something worthy of naming and studying and that has its place in the economy of the fields and woods.
A touch of real knowledge—how humanizing and elevating it is! Simply to learn that all the plants have been studied and named, even the humblest; that they all have vital relations with one another—family ties; that the great biological laws are operative in them also; that the deep, mysterious principle of variation, which is at the bottom of Darwin's theory of the origin of the species, is working in the lowliest plant we tread upon; to know that the chain of cause and effect runs through the whole organic world, binding together its remotest parts; that everywhere is plan, development, evolution—to know these and kindred things—a few of the fundamentals of science—is a joy to the spirit and a light to the mind.
Science in the world is like the surveyor and the engineer in a new country; it opens up highways for the mind; it bridges the chasms and marshes; it gives us dominion over the wild; it brings order out of chaos. What a maze, what a tangle the world is till we come to look upon it with the clews and solutions in mind which science affords! The heavens seem a haphazard spatter of stars, the earth a wild jumble of plants, and animals, and blind forces all struggling with one another—confusion, contradiction, failure everywhere. And so it was to the early men, and so it still is to those who have not the light of science, but so it need not remain to the child born into the world to-day. The great mysteries of life and death, of final causes and ultimate ends, still remain and will continue, but nature now, compared with the nature of a few centuries ago, is like a land subdued and peopled and cultivated compared with a pathless wilderness.
And yet I would not in this connection, when considering the field of natural history, lay too much stress upon the scientific aspects of the question. To the real nature-lover the bird in the bush is worth much more than the bird in the hand, because the nature-lover is not after a specimen: he is after a living fact; he is after a new joy in life.
It is an important part, but by no means the main part of what ornithology holds for us, to be able to name every bird on sight or call. To love the bird, to appreciate its place in the landscape and in the season, to relate it to your daily life, to divine its character, to know it emotionally in your heart—that is much more. To know the birds as the sportsman knows his game; to experience the same thrill, purged of all thoughts of slaughter; to make their songs music in your life—this is indeed something to be desired.
The same with botany. I regard its class-room uses as very slight. The educational value of the technical part is almost nil. But the humanizing value of a love of the flowers, the hygienic value of a walk in their haunts, the æsthetic value of the observation of their forms and tints—these are all vital. The scientific value which attaches to your knowledge of the names of their parts or of their families—what is that? Their habits are interesting; their means of fertilization are interesting; the part insects play in their lives—the honey-yielders, the pollen-yielders, their means of scattering their seeds, and so forth—all are interesting. To know their habitats and seasons; to have associations with them when you go fishing; to land your trout in a bed of bee-palm or jewel-weed; to pluck the linnæa in the moss on the Adirondack mountain you are climbing; to gather pond-lilies from a boat with your friend; to pluck the arbutus on the first balmy day of April; to see the scarlet lobelia lighting up a dark nook by the stream as you row by in August; to walk or drive past vast acres of purple loosestrife, looking like a lake or sea of color—this is botany with something back of it, and the only place to learn it is where it grows. The botany that trails the days and the season and the woods and the fields with it—that is the kind that has educational value in it.
I confess I have not much sympathy with the laboratory study of nature, except for economic purposes. Nature under the dissecting knife and the microscope yields important secrets to the students of biology, but the unprofessional students want but little of all this. I know a young woman who took a post-graduate course in biology at a noted summer school, and the one thing she learned was that certain bacilli were found only in the aqueous humor of the eyes of white mice. The world is full of curious facts like that, that have no human interest or educational value whatever.
If one could number all the trees of the forest and all the leaves upon the trees, what would it profit him? To know the different kinds of trees when you see them, and the function of the leaves upon them—that were more worth while. I have read studies of leaves that were just as profitless as to know their numbers. I have heard discourses upon the changes in the plumage of certain water-fowl from youth to age, and from one moult to another, that were as profitless and wearisome as studying the variations of the leaves or their numbers.
I hardly know why I am impatient when people come to me with their hands full of different leaves and ask me what tree is this from, and this, and this? If your business is not with trees, if you live in the city and care mainly for city things, why bother about the trees, unless for the pleasure of it during your summer excursions into the country; and if it affords you pleasure, you will not want any one to tell you: you will want to identify the trees themselves.