BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO ATLANTA
DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO LONDON
Copyright, 1915,
By D. C. Heath & Co.
PREFACE
One of the great thinkers of the world has said that all the sciences are embodied in natural history. Hence natural history should be taught to a child from an early age.
Perhaps the best method of teaching it is to set forth the characteristics of animals in the form of a narrative. Then the child reads the narrative with pleasure and almost as a story, not as a tedious "lesson."
I have followed that method in the Wonders of the Jungle. The present work (Book One) is intended to be a supplementary reader for the earlier grades in grammar schools. If it be found useful, I shall write one or two more books in progressive order for the use of higher grades.
In Book One I have depicted only such wild animals as appeal to the interest of young children, and even to their sympathy and love. In subsequent books I shall describe the animals that prey upon others. As those animals are not lovable, it would be better for the child to read about them a year or two later. But even to those animals I shall be just, and shall depict their good qualities as well as their preying habits. How many people know that the very worst animal, the tiger, is a better husband and father than many men? Or that the ferocity of the tigress is prompted entirely by her maternal instinct—and that in every case of unusual ferocity yet recorded it was afterward found that there was a helpless cub somewhere near? Hence in subsequent books I shall enter more fully into the causes of animal instincts and characteristics—their loves and their hates and their fears.