The same with the birds. The main profit of this branch of natural history is in the pursuit—not in the name, but in the bird. It is the chase that allures the sportsman, and it is the chase that profits the nature-student. Did you ever receive a gift of brook-trout by express? How pitiful they look—stale fish only! But the trout you brought in at night after threading for miles the mountain stream: its voice all day in your ears; its sparkle all day in your eyes; the love of its beauty and purity all day in your heart; wading through bee-balm or jewel-weed; skirting wild pastures; starting the grouse or the woodcock with their young; surprising bird and beast at their home occupations—these were trout with a flavor.
Whatever opens up new doors or windows for us into the world about us, whatever widens the field of our interests and sympathies, has some sort of value—moral, intellectual, or æsthetic. But much of the so-called nature-study opens no new doors or windows; it affords no mental satisfaction, or illumination, or æsthetic pleasure; it is mainly pottering with dry, unimportant facts and details. Do you know the edelweiss of our own matchless arbutus after you have merely analyzed and classified them? No more than you know a man after having weighed and measured him. The function of things is always interesting. What do they do? How do they pay their way in the rigid economy of nature? How do they survive? How does the bulb of the common fawn-lily[1] get deeper and deeper into the ground each year? Why does the wild ginger hide its blossom when nearly all other plants flaunt theirs? Why are the plants of the common mouse-ear (antennaria) [2] always in groups, one sex here, another there, as if prohibited from mingling by some moral code in nature? Why do nearly all our trees have a twist to the right or the left—hard woods one way, and soft woods the other? Why do the roots of trees flow through the ground like "runnels of molten metal," often separating and uniting again while the branches are thrust out in right lines or curves? Why is our common yellow birch more often than any other tree planted upon a rock? Why do oaks or chestnuts so often spring up where a pine or hemlock forest has been cleared away? Why does lightning so commonly strike a hemlock tree or a pine or an oak, and rarely or never a beech? Why does the bolt sometimes scatter the tree about, and at others only plow a channel down its trunk? Why does the bumblebee complain so loudly when working upon certain flowers? Why does the honey-bee lose the sting when it stings a person, while the wasp, the hornet, and the bumblebee do not? How does the chimney-swallow get the twigs it builds its nest with? From what does the hornet make its paper?
[1] The adder's tongue.
[2]Everlasting.
One of Herbert Spencer's questions was, Why do animals and birds of prey have their eyes in front, and others, as sheep and domestic fowl, on the side of the head? Man, then, by the position of his eyes belongs to the predaceous animals. I have never been greatly interested in spiders, but I have always wanted to know how a certain spider managed to stretch her cable squarely across the road in the woods about my height from the ground? Why are mud turtles so wild? Why is the excrement of the young of some birds carried away by the parents, while with others it is voided from the nest? Among certain of our birds the family relation, more or less marked, is kept up a long time after the young have left the nest. One sees the parent birds and the young going about in loose flocks often till late into the fall. Of what birds is this true?
The questions I have suggested are not important; they do not hold the key to any great storehouse of natural knowledge. Their only value is as a means to quicken the powers of observation. We see vaguely, diffusely. Concentrate the attention—not to the extent of missing total effects, as the specialist so often does, but for the purpose of reading correctly the play of life that is constantly going about us.
Nature's book is like any other book: you must open the covers; you must fix your eyes upon the text; you must get into the spirit of it. When you have read one sentence correctly you are so much the better prepared to read the next one.
A world of nature about us that we are quite apt to be oblivious to, except as it results in our annoyance, is the insect world. We do not take an intelligent interest in the ants, or the bees, or the moths, or the butterflies, yet here is a field of observation that will amply repay one. One day in a great city I saw a butterfly calmly winging its way high above the crowded street. I knew it was the monarch (Anosia plexippus), probably the greatest traveler of all our butterflies. It is quite certain that they migrate to the South in the fall, and that many return in the spring. I learn from Mr. Holland's Butterfly Book in this library that they have even crossed both oceans—of course, by catching a ride on vessels—and are now found in Australia and in the Philippines, and they have been collected in England. Have you not seen its chrysalis suspended from some weed or bush, looking like the trunk from some tiny warrior encased in pale-green armor, riveted with gold-headed rivets, a broad, heavy shield over the abdomen, and plate upon plate over the shoulders and back? It is a milkweed butterfly, and will serve as a good introduction to this new world of winged life. Early last spring I found upon the window of my cabin in the woods a butterfly that had evidently hybernated in some snug crack or corner of the building. This was the mourning cloak, with me the first vernal butterfly. When one sees this butterfly dancing through the open sunny woods in March or early April he may know spring has really come and that the first hepatica will soon open its blue eye.
Mr. Howard's Insect Book ought to start many of its readers to observing flies and bees and prying into their life-histories, many of which are as yet not fully known. Not a farm-boy but knows of the big fat grubs in cows' backs in the spring. It was always a mystery to me how they got there. Now it is known that the creature has traveled all the way from the cow's stomach, where the egg of its parent—the bot-fly—was hatched, making its way slowly "through the connective tissues of the cow, between the skin and the flesh, penetrating gradually along the neck, and ultimately reaching a point beneath the skin on the back of the animal."
We have only to look into nature a little more closely and intently, to whet our powers of observation by the use of such books as this Nature Library contains, to add vastly to our pleasure in and our knowledge of the world that lies about us.