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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30246 ***
+
+   Transcriber's Note:                           
+   Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy 
+   has been retained as it appears in the  
+   original publication, and if you cannot  
+   read "Phœbe" clearly please change the
+   encoding of your text reader to UTF-8. 
+  
+
+
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: _Copyright, 1921, by Charles F. Lummis.
+     All rights reserved._
+
+  THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  (March 23, 1921; six days before his death)
+  Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time
+  friend Charles F. Lummis]
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+  BY
+  JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  [Illustration: The Riverside Press]
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and looking
+out upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples at
+Riverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last two
+years of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near his
+Hudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering in
+Southern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breaking
+up on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds,
+the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there in
+spirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the veranda
+of the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busy
+with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.
+
+Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees and
+dripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind,
+one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, he
+suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it _Under the Maples_!"
+
+His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit upon
+this title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among his
+miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows
+It was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It
+looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on my
+fire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as a
+lily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory
+wood to handle--a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning without
+snapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain,
+hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shade
+tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its
+veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the
+year round."
+
+  CLARA BARRUS
+
+    _The Nest at Riverby_
+  _West Park on the Hudson_
+      _New York_
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. THE FALLING LEAVES                                     1
+
+   II. THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST                         11
+
+  III. THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS                                   32
+
+   IV. BIRD INTIMACIES                                       39
+
+    V. A MIDSUMMER IDYL                                      69
+
+   VI. NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE                               79
+
+  VII. WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT                          101
+
+ VIII. A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY                                  109
+
+   IX. UNDER GENIAL SKIES                                   127
+       I. A Sun-Blessed Land                                127
+      II. Lawn Birds                                        129
+     III. Silken Chambers                                   132
+      IV. The Desert Note                                   143
+       V. Sea-Dogs                                          148
+
+    X. A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES                              152
+       I. Nature's Wireless                                 152
+      II. Maeterlinck on the Bee                            156
+     III. Odd or Even                                       163
+      IV. Why and How                                       165
+       V. An Insoluble Problem                              167
+      VI. A Live World                                      169
+     VII. Darwinism and the War                             172
+    VIII. The Robin                                         175
+      IX. The Weasel                                        177
+       X. Misinterpreting Nature                            179
+      XI. Natural Sculpture                                 181
+
+   XI. RUMINATIONS                                          184
+       I. Man a Part of Nature                              184
+      II. Marcus Aurelius on Death                          185
+     III. The Interpreter of Nature                         186
+      IV. Original Sources                                  190
+       V. The Cosmic Harmony                                191
+      VI. Cosmic Rhythms                                    193
+     VII. The Beginnings of Life                            194
+    VIII. Spendthrift Nature                                195
+
+  XII. NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD                      197
+       I. Sunrise                                           197
+      II. Nature's Methods                                  199
+     III. Heads and Tails                                   205
+      IV. An Unsavory Subject                               206
+       V. Chance in Animal Life                             208
+      VI. Mosquitoes and Fleas                              210
+     VII. The Change of Climate in Southern California      210
+    VIII. All-Seeing Nature                                 212
+
+   INDEX                                                    217
+
+
+
+
+UNDER
+THE MAPLES
+
+I
+
+THE FALLING LEAVES
+
+
+The time of the falling of leaves has come again. Once more in our
+morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and
+bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures
+while we slept.
+
+How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of light and color are
+their last days! There are exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of
+the fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously. They bequeath
+their heritage of color to their fruit. Upon it they lavish the hues
+which other trees lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often an
+exception. I have seen pear orchards in October painting a hillside in
+hues of mingled bronze and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, it
+is so chary of color upon its fruit.
+
+But in October what a feast to the eye our woods and groves present! The
+whole body of the air seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They
+are giving back the light they have been absorbing from the sun all
+summer.
+
+The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so clean and delicate when
+it first covers the paths and the highways that one almost hesitates to
+walk upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw down his cloak for
+Queen Elizabeth to walk upon? See what a robe the maples have thrown
+down for you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to soil it! The
+summer robes of the groves and the forests--more than robes, a vital
+part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have
+captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar
+rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when
+they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark,
+the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When
+the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what
+sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands
+reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a
+union and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the old
+trees suddenly become! what suppleness and grace invest their branches!
+The leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the cambium layer beneath
+the bark is the girdle of perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial
+expression of the same quality. The leaves have their day and die, but
+the last leaf that comes to the branch is as young as the first. The
+leaves and the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go, yet they
+age not; under the magic touch of spring the miracle is repeated over
+and over.
+
+The maples perhaps undergo the most complete transformation of all the
+forest trees. Their leaves fairly become luminous, as if they glowed
+with inward light. In October a maple-tree before your window lights up
+your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days its presence helps to
+dispel the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess in a much less
+degree that quality of luminosity, though certain species of oak at
+times are rich in shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees just
+named for the most part turn brown before they fall. The great leaves of
+the sycamore assume a rich tan-color like fine leather.
+
+The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals with which to capture her
+prey, but the net is not a part of herself as the leaf is a part of the
+tree. The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree never repairs its
+leaves. It may put forth new leaves, but it never essays to patch up the
+old ones. Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves that a few more
+or less or a few torn and bruised ones do not seem to matter. When the
+leaf surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some insect pest,
+or some form of leaf-blight, or by the ravages of a hail-storm, the
+growth of the tree and the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked.
+To denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession usually
+proves fatal. The vitality of the tree declines year by year till death
+ensues.
+
+To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy
+of the mechanism by which it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets
+at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top. The
+rootlets absorb the water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and
+the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree
+were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its
+vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds,
+on the other--earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic
+sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold
+upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they
+are; but all are delicate feeders in their mechanism of absorption from
+the earth and air.
+
+The tree touches the inorganic world at the two finest points of its
+structure--the rootlets and the leaves. These attack the great crude
+world of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only the microscope
+can fully reveal them to us. The animal world seizes its food in masses
+little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable,
+through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its
+nourishment molecule by molecule.
+
+A tree does not live by its big roots--these are mainly for strength
+and to hold it to the ground. How they grip the rocks, fitting
+themselves to them, as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's life
+is in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the roots. Darwin says
+those rootlets behave as if they had minute brains in their extremities.
+They feel their way into the soil; they know the elements the plant
+wants; some select more lime, others more potash, others more magnesia.
+The wheat rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the pea
+rootlets select more lime: the pea does not need the silica. The
+individuality of plants and trees in this respect is most remarkable.
+The cells of each seem to know what particular elements they want from
+the soil, as of course they do.
+
+The vital activity of the tree goes on at three points--in the leaves,
+in the rootlets, and in the cambium layer. The activity of the leaf and
+rootlet furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this generative
+layer--the milky, mucilaginous girdle of matter between the outer bark
+and the wood through which the tree grows and increases in size.
+Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have called
+it the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annually
+renewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeed
+the tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may die
+and fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact that
+its cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, is still
+youthful and doing its work. It is this layer that the yellow-bellied
+woodpecker, known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours, thus
+drawing directly upon the vitality of the tree. But his ravages are
+rarely serious. Only in two instances have I seen dead branches on an
+apple-tree that appeared to be the result of his drilling.
+
+What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no
+vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It
+adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a
+tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged
+in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and
+adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a
+plant or a tree are like the laborers in the field that produce for us
+the raw material of our food, while the leaves are like our many devices
+for rendering it edible and nourishing. The rootlets continue their
+activity in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and thus gorge the
+tree with fluid against the needs of the spring. In the growing tree or
+vine the sap, charged with nourishment, flows down from the top to the
+roots. In the spring it evidently flows upward, seeking the air through
+the leaves. Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always flows
+upward, while the nutritive sap flows downward, thus giving the tree a
+kind of double circulation.
+
+A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful when we have come to a
+knowledge of all its hidden processes, but it certainly is no less so.
+We do not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the bark, nor of
+the roots and rootlets, when we gaze upon a noble oak or an elm; we
+admire it for its form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin to
+ourselves; it is the work of a vast community of cells like those that
+build up our own bodies; it is a fountain of living matter rising up out
+of the earth and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a spray of
+leaves and flowers; and if we could see its hidden processes we should
+realize how truly like a fountain it is. While in full leaf a current of
+water is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward against
+gravity. This stream of water is truly its life current; it enters at
+the rootlets under the ground and escapes at the top through the leaves
+by a process called transpiration. All the mineral salts with which the
+tree builds up its woody tissues,--its osseous system, so to speak,--the
+instruments with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon which it
+obtains from the air, are borne in solution in this stream of water. Its
+function is analogous to that of the rivers which bring the produce and
+other material to the great cities situated upon their banks. A cloud of
+invisible vapor rises from the top of every tree and a thousand
+invisible rills enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The trees
+are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters from the earth to the
+clouds. Our own bodies and the bodies of all living things perform a
+similar function. Life cannot go on without water, but water is not a
+food; it makes the processes of metabolism possible; assimilation and
+elimination go on through its agency. Water and air are the two ties
+between the organic and the inorganic. The function of the one is mainly
+mechanical, that of the other is mainly chemical.
+
+As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows out at the top, to which
+point it rises by capillary attraction and a process called osmosis.
+Neither of them is a strictly vital process, since both are found in the
+inorganic world; but they are in the service of what we call a vital
+principle. Some physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a vital
+principle. Huxley thought we might as well talk about the principle of
+aqueosity in water. We are the victims of words. The sun does not shoot
+out beams or rays, though the eye reports such; but it certainly sends
+forth energy; and it is as certain that there is a new activity in
+matter--some matter--that we call vital.
+
+Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up new compounds and begets
+myriads of new forms not found in the inorganic world, till it finally
+builds up the body and mind of man. Death puts an end to this activity
+alike in man and tree, and a new kind of activity sets in--a
+disorganizing activity, still with the aid of water and air and living
+organisms. It is like the compositor distributing his type after the
+book is printed. The micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but they
+are of a different kind from those which build up the body in the first
+instance. But the living body as a whole, with its complex of
+coördinating organs and functions--what attended to that? The cells
+build the parts, but what builds the whole?
+
+How many things we have in common with the trees! The same mysterious
+gift of life, to begin with; the same primary elements--carbon,
+nitrogen, oxygen, and so on--in our bodies; and many of the same vital
+functions--respiration, circulation, absorption, assimilation,
+reproduction. Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell is
+the architect that builds up the bodies of both. Trees are rooted men
+and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through
+the minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillæ, and the animal body
+absorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, called
+lacteals.
+
+Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my
+mind. They are the words of a poet who sees hidden relations and
+meanings everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all animate nature
+is. The trees are wrapped in a kind of slumber in winter, and they are
+reservoirs of living currents in summer. If all living bodies came
+originally out of the sea, they brought a big dower of the sea with
+them. The human body is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held in
+solution by several gallons of water. The ashes of the living tree bulk
+small in comparison with the amount of water it holds. Yes, "the
+slumbering and liquid trees." They awaken from their slumber in the
+spring, the scales fall from their buds, the fountains within them are
+unsealed, and they again become streams of living energy, breaking into
+leaf and bloom and fruit under the magic of the sun's rays.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST
+
+
+I
+
+How closely every crack and corner of nature is packed with life,
+especially in our northern temperate zone! I was impressed with this
+fact when during several June days I was occupied with road-mending on
+the farm where I was born. To open up the loosely piled and decaying
+laminated rocks was to open up a little biological and zoölogical
+museum, so many of our smaller forms of life harbored there. From
+chipmunks to ants and spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the
+chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more beneath the loosely
+piled rocks. There were two of them in a soft, warm nest of dry,
+shredded maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned out of doors, but
+when they heard the racket overhead bolted precipitately. Two living
+together surprised me, as heretofore I had never known but one in a den.
+Near them a milk snake had stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the
+little earthquake which we set up got badly crushed. Two little
+red-bellied snakes about one foot long had also found harbor there.
+
+The ants rushed about in great consternation when their eggs were
+suddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under every
+stone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which they
+picked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-building
+spiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball of
+eggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body.
+This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about held
+between her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand,
+sheltered the chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was attached
+to it at its tail. It was surprising to see this enshrouded creature,
+blind and deaf, wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with its
+wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would about as soon expect to see
+an egg protest.
+
+Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to
+him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to
+eye or ear.
+
+The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or
+summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his
+pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open
+before him and he has only to turn the leaves.
+
+A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory rocking-chair the other day
+was annoyed by one of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want to
+occupy the chair. It held a small worm in its legs. She would "shoo" it
+away, only to see it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it did
+not want to sting her, but that its nest was somewhere in the chair.
+And, sure enough, as soon as she quieted down, it entered a small
+opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and deposited its worm, and
+presently was back with another, and then a third and a fourth; and
+before the day was done it came with little pellets of mud and sealed up
+the opening.
+
+
+II
+
+My morning walk up to the beech wood often brings me new knowledge and
+new glimpses of nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird taking its bath
+in the big dewdrops on a small ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe
+in the dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not before know that
+the hummer bathed at all.
+
+I also discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when
+saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning,
+exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute
+spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow.
+In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a
+pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I
+could not see the completed bow in so small an area. These fragments are
+as unapproachable as the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a
+suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays rainbow tints, you can
+see only one at a time--to the right or left of you. It also is a
+fragment of a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a great
+display of prismatic effects in the foliage of trees, or in the grass
+after a shower, are not to be credited. You may see the drops glistening
+in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit prismatic tints.
+In only one at a time will you see rainbow tints. Change your position,
+and you may see another, but never a great display of prismatic tints at
+one time.
+
+In my walk the other morning I turned over a stone, looking for spiders
+and ants. These I found, and in addition there were two cells of one of
+our solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called "sweat bees," because
+they came around us and would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if
+in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about the size of a honey
+bee, of lighter color, and its abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It
+carries its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs. These cells
+were of a greenish-brown color; each of them was like a miniature barrel
+in which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egg
+hatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment.
+These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits of
+leaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon the
+other. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings from
+leaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, a
+dozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the most
+workmanlike manner.
+
+In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out her
+nesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she had
+cut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and,
+holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen her
+carry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About the
+period of hatching, I do not know.
+
+
+III
+
+Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their game
+up as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which they
+drive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings ago
+the air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the
+size of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happened
+to be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep
+past. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a very
+conspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How
+many hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day!
+Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and other
+insect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!
+
+
+IV
+
+We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. We
+see little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures are
+cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookout
+for them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which,
+except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the night
+prowlers--skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls--yes, and mice.
+
+The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know is
+active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called
+the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to
+suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later it
+was literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.
+
+Turn over a stone in the fields and behold the consternation among the
+small folk beneath it,--ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders,--all
+objecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil,
+but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As I
+write these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the
+roadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants which
+grew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment and
+rot, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep,
+and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of the
+nuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesser
+rodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts.
+
+
+V
+
+In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature,
+Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:
+
+  Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+  inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean
+  ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains--warm mineral
+  springs--the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the
+  upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of
+  perpetual snow--all support organic beings.
+
+Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In the
+earth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the
+mud--he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was never
+scanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardships
+to add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the
+comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys of
+hundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions to
+glean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany or
+zoölogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a great
+altitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which they
+called "puna," and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with a
+twinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossil
+shells."
+
+His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge.
+Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biological
+facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere his
+insatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a different
+purpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read him
+for that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils,
+in reptiles, in volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with each of
+these subjects in mind. I recently had in mind the problem of the
+soaring condor, and I re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had
+studied and mastered that subject, too. If you are interested in seeing
+how the biological characteristics of the two continents, North and
+South America, agree or contrast with each other, you will find what
+you wish to know. You will learn that in South America the
+lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North
+America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps
+itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that
+the obscene fungus, or _Phallus_, taints the tropical forests, as a
+similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and
+that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders
+for their young, just as in North America. Of course there are new
+species of animal and plant life, but not many. The influence of
+environment in modifying species is constantly in his mind.
+
+
+VI
+
+The naturalist can content himself with a day of little things. If he
+can read only a word of one syllable in the book of nature, he will make
+the most of that. I read such a word the other morning when I perceived,
+when watching a young but fully fledged junco, or snowbird, that its
+markings Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young of birds
+always for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parent
+stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have
+speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco
+shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral
+white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper
+sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the
+white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of its
+forbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields,
+but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in the
+woods, and constructs a very artistic nest of dry grass and hair which
+is so well hidden that the passer-by seldom detects it.
+
+Another small word I read about certain of the rocks in my native
+Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray sandstone, that when you have split
+them open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown them up with
+dynamite, instead of the gray fresh surface of the rock greeting you, it
+is often a surface of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled or
+electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from the first muddy day of
+creation. I have such a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It is
+amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of doorstones fall upon it
+with soap and hot water, and utterly fail to make any impression upon
+it. Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with primal mud. The
+fresh-water origin of the Catskill rocks no doubt in some way accounts
+for it.
+
+
+VII
+
+We are all interested students of the weather, but the naturalist
+studies it for some insight into the laws which govern it. One season I
+made my reputation as a weather prophet by predicting on the first day
+of December a very severe winter. It was an easy guess. I saw in Detroit
+a bird from the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the Bohemian
+waxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above the Arctic Circle and is common
+to both hemispheres. I said, When the Arctic birds come down, be sure
+there is a cold wave behind them. And so it proved.
+
+When the birds fail to give one a hint of the probable character of the
+coming winter, what reliable signs remain? These remain: When December
+is marked by sudden and violent extremes of heat and cold, the winter
+will be broken; the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that the
+hum of the bee in December is the requiem of winter. But when the season
+is very evenly spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing through
+November and December, no hurry, no violence, then be prepared for a
+snug winter.
+
+As to wet and dry summers, one can always be guided by the rainfall on
+the Pacific coast; a shortage on the western coast means an excess on
+the eastern. For four or five years past California has been short of
+its rainfall; so much so that quite general alarm is felt over the
+gradual shrinkage of their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs;
+and during the summer seasons the parts of New England and New York with
+which I am acquainted have had very wet seasons--floods in midsummer,
+and full springs and wells at all times. The droughts have been
+temporary and local.
+
+We say, "As fickle as the weather," but the meteorological laws are
+pretty well defined. All signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail in
+a wet season. At one time the south wind brings no rain, at another time
+the north and northwest winds do bring rain. The complex of conditions
+over a continental area of rivers and lakes and mountain-chains is too
+vast for us to decipher; it inheres in the nature of things. It is one
+of the potencies and possibilities which matter possesses. We can take
+no step beyond that.
+
+
+VIII
+
+There seems to me to be false reasoning in the argument from analogy
+which William James uses in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The
+brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but may only sustain the
+relation to it, he says, which the wire sustains to the electric current
+which it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water which it
+conveys.
+
+Now the source and origin of the electric current is outside the wire
+that transmits it, and it could sustain no other than a transient
+relation to any outside material through which it passed. But if we
+know anything, we know that the human mind or spirit is a vital part of
+the human body; its source is in the brain and nervous system; hence, it
+and the organ through which it is manifested are essentially one.
+
+The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo in which the current
+originates is the only logical or permissible one.
+
+
+IX
+
+Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life,
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
+  earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something, on
+  the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to
+  the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One
+  would be inclined to say that the insect comes from
+  another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more
+  insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+
+Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, for
+instance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. The
+scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our land
+animals outside the insect world.
+
+The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have little
+conception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these little
+people. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecular
+constitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by our
+coarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarse
+and fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If they
+exceed three thousand a second, they become too shrill for our ears. It
+is thought that the world of sound with the insects begins where ours
+leaves off. The drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute. What
+would to us be a continuous sound is to them a series of separate blows.
+We begin to hear blows as continuous sounds when they amount to about
+thirty a second. The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; the
+cabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; and
+some species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin to
+think in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and
+vibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed the
+same microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed! We
+might see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies, or hear
+the hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so
+much that disturbs us must escape the insects, because their senses are
+too fine to take it in. Doubtless they do not hear the thunder or feel
+the earthquake.
+
+The insects are much more sensitive to heat and cold than we are, and
+for reasons. The number of waves in the ether that gives us the
+sensation of heat is three or four million millions a second. The number
+of tremors required to produce red light is estimated at four hundred
+and seventy-four million millions a second, and for the production of
+violet light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions a second. No
+doubt the insects react to all these different degrees of vibration.
+Those marvelous instruments called antennæ seem to put them in touch
+with a world of which we are quite oblivious.
+
+
+X
+
+To how many things our lives have been compared!--to a voyage, with its
+storms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with its
+morning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer,
+autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle.
+
+In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of
+chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each
+piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully.
+The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
+universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.
+But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a
+game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over
+an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess
+will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle
+where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more
+vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life
+is coöperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I
+suppose business is more often like a game than is life--your gain is
+often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
+rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that
+suggests a game of any kind.
+
+We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three
+things--money, goods, labor--and the greatest of these is labor. Labor
+is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires
+to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, the
+latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe and
+in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from nature
+what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands or
+under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us from
+obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us.
+
+The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen to
+whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their
+problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful
+suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen,
+artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through
+experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many persons
+who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces and
+conditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have of
+the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?
+
+Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastly
+more logical force in his figures than in those of most writers.
+
+Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a
+mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and
+noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then
+its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life
+that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to
+many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructive
+force.
+
+
+XI
+
+I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted to know why the
+meadow, or field, mice gnawed or barked the apple-trees when there was a
+deep coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because they found it
+difficult to get up through the deep, frozen snow to the surface to get
+seeds to eat? He did not seem to know that meadow mice are not
+seed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots and keep well hidden
+beneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snow
+coming up out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday life
+beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls, and hawks.
+Life then becomes a sort of picnic. They build new nests on the surface
+of the ground and form new runways, and disport themselves apparently in
+a festive mood. The snow is their protection. They bark the trees and
+take their time. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at an
+end, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flat
+stones, and lead once more the life of fear.
+
+
+XII
+
+Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my blanket, recovering from a
+slight indisposition, I was in a mood to be interested in the everyday
+aspects of nature before me--in the white and purple lilacs, in the
+maple-leaves nearly full grown, in the pendent fringe of the
+yellowish-white bloom of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of the
+grapevines, and so forth. All these things formed only a setting or
+background for the wild life near by.
+
+The birds are the little people that peep out at me, or pause and regard
+me curiously in this great temple of trees,--wrens, chippies, robins,
+bluebirds, catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants. A few
+days earlier, for a moment, a mourning ground warbler suddenly appeared
+around the corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and glanced
+hastily up at me. When I arose and looked over the railing, it had gone.
+Then the speckled Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringa
+branches and gave me several good views. The bay-breasted warbler was
+reported in the evergreens up by the stone house, but he failed to
+report to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart, however, came
+several times to the gravel walk below me, evidently looking for
+material to begin her nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren,
+was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying nesting-material
+into the box on the corner of the veranda. How intense and emphatic she
+is! And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with song! Yesterday an
+interloper appeared. He or she climbed the post by the back way, as it
+were, and hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as if to see
+that the coast was clear. He acted as if he felt himself an intruder.
+Quick as a flash there was a brown streak from the branch of a maple
+thirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after him. The culprit
+did not stop to argue the case, but was off, hotly pursued. I must not
+forget the pair of wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maple
+fifty or more feet away. How I love to see them on the ground at my
+feet, every motion and gesture like music to the eye! The head and neck
+of the male fairly glows, and there is something fine and manly about
+his speckled breast.
+
+A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry bushes at the south end
+of the house, and are in evidence at all hours. But when the nest is
+completed, and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out of the public
+eye as much as possible. From the front of the stage they retreat behind
+the curtain.
+
+One day as I sat here I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush down
+in the currant-bushes below me. Instantly I was transported to the deep
+woods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills. I heard the murmuring
+water and felt the woodsy coolness of those retreats--such magic hath
+associative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated vireo sang
+briefly in the maple, a harsh note; and the oriole with its insistent
+call added to the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the oriole. He
+has not one musical note, and in grape time his bill is red, or purple,
+with the blood of our grapes.
+
+But the most of these little people are my benefactors, and add another
+ray of sunshine to the May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacle
+of that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of the porch,
+like a little fairy, and then vanishing.
+
+The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere knowledge of them, is not
+enough. You must live with the birds, so to speak; have daily and
+seasonal associations with them before they come to mean much to you.
+Then, as they linger about your house or your camp, or as you see them
+in your walks, they are a part of your life, and help give tone and
+color to your day.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS
+
+
+To what widely different use birds put their power of flight! To the
+great mass of them it is simply a means of locomotion, of getting from
+one point to another. A small minority put their wing-power to more
+ideal uses, as the lark when he claps his wings at heaven's gate, and
+the ruffed grouse when he drums; even the woodcock has some other use
+for his wings than to get from one point to another. Listen to his
+flight song in the April twilight up against the sky.
+
+Our small hawks use their power of flight mainly to catch their prey, as
+does the swallow skimming the air all day on tireless wing, but some of
+the other hawks, such as our red-tailed hawk, climb their great spirals
+apparently with other motives than those which relate to their daily
+fare. The crow has little other use for his wings than to gad about like
+a busy politician from one neighborhood to another. In Florida I have
+seen large flocks of the white ibis performing striking evolutions high
+up against the sky, evidently expressive of the gay and festive feeling
+begotten by the mating instinct.
+
+The most beautiful flyer we ever see against our skies is the unsavory
+buzzard. He is the winged embodiment of grace, ease, and leisure.
+Judging from appearances alone, he is the most disinterested of all the
+winged creatures we see. He rides the airy billows as if only to enjoy
+his mastery over them. He is as calm and unhurried as the orbs in their
+courses. His great circles and spirals have a kind of astronomic
+completeness. That all this power of wing and grace of motion should be
+given to an unclean bird, to a repulsive scavenger, is one of the
+anomalies of nature. He does not need to hurry or conceal his approach;
+what he is after cannot flee or hide; he has no enemies; nothing wants
+him; and he is at peace with all the world.
+
+The great condor of South America, in rising from the ground, always
+faces the wind. It is often captured by tempting it to gorge itself in a
+comparatively narrow space. But if a strong enough wind were blowing at
+such times, it could quickly rise over the barrier. Darwin says he
+watched a condor high in the air describing its huge circles for six
+hours without once flapping its wings. He says that, if the bird wished
+to descend, the wings were for a moment collapsed; and when again
+expanded, with an altered inclination, the momentum gained by the rapid
+descent seemed to urge the bird upwards with the even and steady
+movement of a paper kite. In the case of any bird _soaring_, its motion
+must be sufficiently rapid for the action of the inclined surface of
+its body on the atmosphere to counterbalance its gravity. The force to
+keep up the momentum of a body moving in a horizontal plane in the air
+(in which there is so little friction) cannot be great, and this force
+is all that is wanted. The movement of the neck and body of the condor,
+we must suppose, is sufficient for this. However this may be, it is
+truly wonderful and beautiful to see so great a bird, hour after hour,
+without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain and
+river.
+
+The airplane has a propelling power in its motor, and it shifts its
+wings to take advantage of the currents. The buzzard and condor do the
+same thing. They are living airplanes, and their power is so evenly and
+subtly distributed and applied, that the trick of it escapes the eye.
+But of course they avail themselves of the lifting power of the
+air-currents.
+
+All birds know how to use their wings to propel themselves through the
+air, but the mechanism of the act we may not be able to analyze. I do
+not know how a butterfly propels itself against a breeze with its
+quill-less wings, but we know that it does do it. As its wings are
+neither convex nor concave, like a bird's, one would think that the
+upward and downward strokes would neutralize each other; but they do
+not. Strong winds often carry them out over large bodies of water; but
+such a master flyer as the monarch beats its way back to shore, and,
+indeed, the monarch habitually flies long distances over salt water when
+migrating along our seacoast in spring and fall.
+
+At the moment of writing these paragraphs, I saw a hen-hawk flap heavily
+by, pursued by a kingbird. The air was phenomenally still, not a leaf
+stirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat his wings vigorously. No
+soaring now, no mounting heavenward, as I have seen him mount till his
+petty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and returned to earth. But
+the next day, with a fairly good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks for
+many minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the skies, till they
+became very small objects against the clouds, and not once did they flap
+their wings! Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top and sailed
+straight into the face of the wind, till he was probably over his mate
+or young, when, with half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-tops
+like an arrow.
+
+In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the air may be divided into
+three grand classes: those which use their wings simply to transport
+themselves from one place to another,--the same use we put our legs
+to,--those which climb the heavens to attain a wide lookout, either for
+the pleasure of soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to scan a
+wide territory in search of food or prey, and those which feed as they
+fly. Most of our common birds are examples of the first class. Our hawks
+and buzzards are examples of the second class. Swallows, nighthawks, and
+some sea-birds are examples of the third class. A few of our birds use
+their wings to gain an elevation from which to deliver their songs--as
+the larks, and some of the finches; but the robins and the sparrows and
+the warblers and the woodpeckers are always going somewhere. The hawks
+and the buzzards are, comparatively speaking, birds of leisure.
+
+Every bird and beast is a master in the use of its own tools and
+weapons. We who look on from the outside marvel at their skill. Here is
+the carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about the verge-board of
+my porch-roof as I write this. It darts swiftly this way and that, and
+now and then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of whirring wings,
+as often does the hummingbird. How it does it, I do not know. I cannot
+count or distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At the same time,
+the chimney swifts sweep by me like black arrows, on wings apparently as
+stiff as if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air, now sailing.
+In some way they suggest winged gimlets. How thin and scimitar-like
+their wings are! They are certainly masters of their own craft.
+
+In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far below the body as
+they do above it. Note the crow flapping his way through the air. He is
+a heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His wings probably
+move through an arc of about ninety degrees. The phœbe flies with a
+peculiar snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird, with a mincing
+and hovering flight; it tiptoes through the air. The woodpeckers gallop,
+alternately closing and spreading their wings. The ordinary flight of
+the goldfinch is a very marked undulatory flight; a section of it, the
+rise and the fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The bird goes half
+that distance or more with wings closed. This is the flight the male
+indulges in within hearing distance of his brooding mate. During the
+love season he occasionally gives way to an ecstatic flight. This is a
+level flight, performed on round, open wings, which beat the air
+vertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song season is common to
+many of our birds. I have seen even the song sparrow indulge in it,
+rising fifty feet or more and delivering its simple song with obvious
+excitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock, inspired by the grand passion,
+rises upon whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and floats and
+circles at an altitude of a hundred feet or more, and in rapid
+smackering and chippering notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasy
+with our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight and is sharp and
+hurried, both flight and song differing radically from its everyday
+performance. One thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually on
+the wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk of all our singing
+birds. His season is brief but hilarious. In his level flight he seems
+to use only the tips of his wings, and we see them always below the
+level of his back. Our common birds that have no flight-song, so far as
+I have observed, are the bluebird, the robin, the phœbe, the social
+sparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the wood warblers, and
+most of the ground warblers.
+
+Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines had this to say about
+the flight of sea-gulls: "Sweeping around in circles, occasionally
+elevating themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide down and up
+the aerial inclines without apparently any effort whatever. But a close
+observation will show that at every turn the angle of inclination of the
+wings is changed to meet the new conditions. There is continual movement
+with power--by the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine only
+through mechanism obeying a mind not nearly so well instructed."
+
+The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing round and round, in a
+brisk breeze, on unbending wing, only now and then righting itself with
+a single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides upon the storm.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+BIRD INTIMACIES
+
+
+When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination to seek out new lands
+in my own country, or in other countries, to see what Nature is doing
+there, and what guise she wears, something prompts me to pause, and
+after a while to say to myself: "Look a little closer into the nature
+right at your own door; do a little intensive observation at home, and
+see what that yields you. The enticement of the far-away is mostly in
+your imagination; let your eyes and your imagination play once more on
+the old familiar birds and objects."
+
+One season in my walks to the woods I was on the lookout for a natural
+bracket among the tree-branches, to be used in supporting a book-shelf.
+I did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree, within a few feet
+from the corner of my own house, I found what I was searching for,
+perfect in every particular--the right angle and the supporting brace,
+or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have not forgotten.
+
+I find that one has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness and
+indifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild life
+about him to realize how much interesting natural history is being
+enacted every day before his very eyes--in his own garden and dooryard
+and apple-orchard and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and
+sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one rides or walks or sits
+under the trees, or loiters about the fields or woods, the play of wild
+life is going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed with the
+seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available for his instruction and
+entertainment. On every farm in the land a volume of live natural
+history goes to waste every year because there is no historian to note
+the happenings.
+
+The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens--a screen of
+leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert
+and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere
+fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that
+take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course
+of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have!
+The drama of wild life is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the
+stage before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other stages.
+
+I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing along the road
+between my place and the railway station one early May day became aware
+that a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees over their
+heads. It was the annual _sängerfest_ of the goldfinches--one of the
+prettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musical
+reunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, many
+hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and in
+the groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to
+the surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to account
+for. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birds
+sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it is difficult to
+identify the singers. It is a minor strain, but multitudinous, and fills
+all the air. The males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if to
+celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which, with the elm-trees,
+afford them their earliest food-supply. While they are singing they are
+busy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down to
+the ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut up
+to ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal flowering
+when they become spheres of fragile silver down.
+
+Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called a
+dandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bring
+the sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss to
+decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days as
+well as on fair. It all has a decidedly festive air, like the fête-days
+of humans. I know of nothing like it among other birds. It is the
+manifestation of something different from the flocking instinct; it is
+the social and holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a brief
+season, as if in celebration of some special event or purpose. I have
+observed it in my vicinity every spring for many years, usually in April
+or early May, and it is the prettiest and most significant bird episode,
+involving a whole species, known to me.
+
+The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one of our most amiable birds.
+So far as my knowledge goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. His
+tones are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring reunions they
+are joyous. In the peculiar flight-song in which he indulges in the
+mating season, beating the air vertically with his round, open wings,
+his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to his mate when she is
+brooding, and when he circles about her in that long, billowy flight,
+the crests of his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling,
+"Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee," as if he were saying, "For love of thee,
+for love of thee," and she calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"--his
+tones at such times express contentment and reassurance.
+
+When any of his natural enemies appear--a hawk, a cat, a jay--his tones
+are plaintive and appealing. "Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and not
+in anger.
+
+When with his mate he leads their brood about the August thistles, the
+young call in a similar tone. When in July the nesting has begun, the
+female talks the prettiest "baby talk" to her mate as he feeds her. The
+nest-building rarely begins till thistledown can be had--so literally
+are all the ways of this darling bird ways of softness and gentleness.
+The nest is a thick, soft, warm structure, securely fastened in the fork
+of a maple or an apple-tree.
+
+None of our familiar birds endear themselves to us more than does the
+bluebird. The first bluebird in the spring is as welcome as the blue sky
+itself. The season seems softened and tempered as soon as we hear his
+note and see his warm breast and azure wing. His gentle manners, his
+soft, appealing voice, not less than his pleasing hues, seem born of the
+bright and genial skies. He is the spirit of the April days incarnated
+in a bird. He has the quality of winsomeness, like the violet and the
+speedwell among the flowers. Not strictly a songster, yet his every note
+and call is from out the soul of harmony. The bluebird is evidently an
+offshoot from the thrush family, and without the thrush's gift of song;
+still his voice affords us much of the same pleasure.
+
+How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer
+them suitable nesting-retreats! Bring them something from nature,
+something with the bark on--a section of a dry beech or maple limb in
+which the downy woodpecker has excavated his chamber and passed the
+winter or reared his brood; fasten it in early spring upon the corner of
+your porch, or on the trunk of a near-by tree, and see what interesting
+neighbors you will soon have. One summer I brought home from one of my
+walks to the woods a section, two or three feet long, of a large yellow
+birch limb which contained such a cavity as I speak of, and I wired it
+to one of the posts of the rustic porch at Woodchuck Lodge. The next
+season a pair of bluebirds reared two broods in it. The incubation of
+the eggs for the second brood was well under way when I appeared upon
+the scene in early July. My sudden presence so near their treasures, and
+my lingering there with books and newspapers, disturbed the birds a good
+deal. The first afternoon the mother bird did not enter the cavity for
+hours. I shall always remember the pretty and earnest manner in which
+the male tried to reassure her and persuade her that the danger was not
+so imminent as it appeared to be, probably encouraging a confidence in
+his mate which he did not himself share. The mother bird would alight at
+the entrance to the chamber, but, with her eye fixed upon the man with
+the newspaper, feared to enter. The male, perched upon the telegraph
+wire fifty feet away, would raise his wings and put all the love and
+assurance in his voice he was capable of, apparently trying to dispel
+her fears. He would warble and warble, and make those pretty wing
+gestures over and over, saying so plainly: "It is all right, my dear,
+the man is harmless--absorbed there in his newspaper. Go in, go in, and
+keep warm our precious eggs!" How long she hesitated! But as night grew
+near she grew more and more anxious, and he more and more eloquent.
+Finally she alighted upon the edge of the overhanging roof and peered
+down hesitatingly. Her mate applauded and encouraged till finally she
+made the plunge and entered the hole, but instantly came out again; her
+heart failed her for a moment; but she soon returned and remained
+inside. Then her mate flew away toward the orchard, uttering a cheery
+note which doubtless she understood.
+
+The birds soon became used to my presence and their household matters
+progressed satisfactorily. Both birds took a hand in feeding the young,
+which grew rapidly. When they were nearly ready to leave the nest, a
+cruel fate befell them: I slept upon the porch, and one night I was
+awakened by the cry of young bluebirds, and the sound of feet like those
+of a squirrel on the roof over me. Then I heard the cry of a young bird
+proceed from the butternut-tree across the road opposite the house. I
+said to myself, "A squirrel or an owl is after my birds." The cry coming
+so quickly from the butternut-tree made me suspect an owl, and that the
+bird whose cry I heard was in his talons. I was out of my cot and up to
+the nest in a moment, but the tragedy was over; the birds were all gone,
+and the night was silent. In the morning I found that a piece of the
+brittle birch limb had been torn away, enlarging the entrance to the
+cavity so that the murderous talons of the owl could reach in and seize
+the young birds. I had been aroused in time to hear the marauder on the
+roof with one, and then hear its cry as he carried it to the tree. In
+the grass in front I found one of the young, unable to fly, but
+apparently unhurt. I put it back in the nest, but it would not stay. The
+spell of the nest was broken, and the young bird took to the grass
+again. The parent birds were on hand, much excited, and, when I tried to
+return the surviving bird to the nest, the male came at me fiercely,
+apparently charging the whole catastrophe to me.
+
+We had strong proof the previous season that an owl, probably the
+screech owl, prowled about the house at night. A statuette of myself in
+clay which a sculptor was modeling was left out one night on the porch,
+and in the morning its head was unusually bowed. The prints of a bird's
+talons upon the top told what had happened. In the bronze reproduction
+of that statuette the head has more of a droop than the artist at first
+planned to give it.
+
+The next season the bluebirds occupied the cavity in the birch limb
+again, but before my arrival in July the owls had again cleaned them
+out. In so doing they had ripped the cavity open nearly to the bottom.
+For all that, early the following May bluebirds were occupying the
+cavity again. It held three eggs when I arrived. I looked over the
+situation and resolved to try to head off the owl this time, even at the
+risk of driving the bluebirds away. I took a strip of tin several inches
+wide and covered the slit with it and wired it fast. Then I obtained a
+broad strip of dry birch-bark, wrapped it about the limb over the tin,
+and wired it fast, leaving the entrance to the nest in its original
+form. I knew the owl could not slit the tin; the birch-bark would hide
+it and preserve in a measure the natural appearance of the branch. When
+the bluebirds saw what had happened to their abode, they were a good
+deal distressed; they could no longer see their eggs through the slit
+which the owl had made, and they refused to enter the cavity. They hung
+about all day, uttering despondent notes, approaching the nest at times,
+but hesitating even to alight upon the roof above it. Occasionally the
+female would fly away toward the distant woods or hills uttering that
+plaintive, homesick note which seemed to mean farewell. The male would
+follow her, calling in a more cheery and encouraging tone. Once the
+couple were gone three or four hours, and I concluded they had really
+deserted the place. But just before sundown they were back again, and
+the female alighted at the entrance to the nest and looked in. The male
+called to her cheerily; still she would not enter, but joined him on the
+telephone wire, where the two seemed to hold a little discussion.
+Presently the mother bird flew to the nest again, then to the roof above
+it, then back to the nest, and entered it till only her tail showed,
+then flew back to the wire beside her mate. She was evidently making up
+her mind that the case was not hopeless. After a little more
+maneuvering, and amid the happy, reassuring calls of her mate, she
+entered the nest cavity and remained, and I was as well pleased as was
+her mate.
+
+No owls disturbed them this time, and the brood of young birds was
+brought off in due season. In July a second brood of four was
+successfully reared and sent forth on their career.
+
+The oriole nests in many kinds of trees--oaks, maples, apple-trees,
+elms--but her favorite is the elm. She chooses the end of one of the
+long drooping branches where a group of small swaying twigs affords her
+suitable support. It is the most unlikely place imaginable for any but a
+pendent nest, woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical twigs,
+and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests are so secure, so hidden, and
+so completely sheltered from the rains by the drooping leaves above and
+around it. It is rarely discoverable except from directly beneath it. I
+think a well-built oriole's nest would sustain a weight of eight or ten
+pounds before it would be torn from its moorings. They are also very
+partial to the ends of branches that swing low over the highway. One May
+I saw two female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five feet
+above our State Road, where automobiles and other vehicles passed nearly
+every minute all the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far from
+highways and dwellings is a rare occurrence.
+
+Birds of different species differ as widely in skill in nest-building as
+they do in song. From the rude platform of dry twigs and other coarse
+material of the cuckoo, to the pendent, closely woven pouch of the
+oriole, the difference in the degree of skill displayed is analogous to
+the difference between the simple lisp of the cedar-bird, or the little
+tin whistle of the "chippie," and the golden notes of the wood thrush,
+or the hilarious song of the bobolink.
+
+Real castles in the air are the nests of the orioles; no other nests are
+better hidden or apparently more safe from the depredations of crows and
+squirrels. To start the oriole's nest successfully is quite an
+engineering feat. The birds inspect the branches many times before they
+make a decision. When they have decided on the site, the mother bird
+brings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches it to a twig by
+winding it around and around many times, leaving one or both ends
+hanging free. I have nests where these foundation strings are wound
+around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings and tuckings and
+loopings the bird occasionally ties a substantial knot, but it is never
+the result of a deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but purely
+a matter of chance. When she uses only wild vegetable fibers, she
+fastens it to the twig by a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about the
+craziest kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastened
+many lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds to
+span the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her claws
+clasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping up
+and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest
+looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she
+did it, but all I could see was the bird standing astride the chasm she
+was trying to bridge, and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze
+of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom of the nest thickens,
+till some morning you see the movement of the bird inside it; her beak
+comes through the sides from within, like a needle or an awl, seizes a
+loose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightens
+it. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of any
+particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it were
+the work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no conscious
+method of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is not
+something builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethought
+enter; it is the result of the blind groping of instinct which rarely
+errs, but which does not see the end from the beginning, as reason does.
+The oriole sometimes overhands the rim of her nest with strings and
+fibers to make it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perch
+upon, but it is like the pathetic work which an untaught blind child
+might do under similar conditions. The birds use fine, strong strings in
+their nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results from it. I
+have an oriole's nest sent me from Michigan on the outside of which is a
+bird's dried foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it. It would
+be difficult to tie so complicated a knot. The tragedy is easy to read.
+Another nest sent me from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of
+fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them. But there is no sign
+that the bird came to grief using this dangerous material. Where the
+lives of the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always a
+danger-line to them. They are partakers of our bounty in many ways, but
+they pay a tax to fate in others.
+
+The orioles in my part of the country always use the same material in
+the body of their nests--a kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which they
+apparently get from some species of everlasting flower. Woven together
+and quilted through with strings and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm,
+feltlike walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the walls are made of
+something that suggests brown human hair, except that it is too hard and
+brittle for hair.
+
+Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest, but not so deep and
+pocketlike as that of the Baltimore oriole, and showing no such
+elaborate use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of some sort of
+dried grass, very elaborately woven together.
+
+Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely of the long,
+strong threads which it draws out of the palm-leaves. The only one I
+have seen was suspended from the under side of one of those leaves.
+
+I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except the nest of the
+hummingbird, is that of the wood pewee. It is as smooth and compact and
+symmetrical as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike
+substance. Of course, the phœbe's artistic masonry under the shelving
+rocks, covered with moss and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry
+grass and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and beyond the reach
+of four-footed prowlers, is almost ideal. It certainly is a happy
+thought.
+
+The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, the
+indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders, each with a style of its own.
+
+About the most insecure nest in our trees is that of the little social
+sparrow, or "chippie." When the sudden summer storms come, making the
+tree-tops writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest amid the
+tossing branches. Pass through the grove or orchard after the tempest is
+over, and you are pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon the
+ground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of nest-building in trees.
+She is a poor architect. She should have kept to the ground or to the
+low bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their nests fast to the
+branches, but "Chippie" does not; she simply arranges her material
+loosely between them, where the nest is supported, but not secured. She
+seems pathetically ignorant of the fact that there are such things as
+wind and storm. Hence her frail structure is more frequently dislodged
+from the trees than that of any other bird.
+
+Recently, after a day of violent northwest wind, I found a wrecked
+robin's nest and eggs upon the lawn under a maple--not a frequent
+spectacle. The robin's firm masonry is usually proof against wind and
+rain, but in this case the nest was composed almost entirely of dry
+grass; there was hardly a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible and
+yielding, and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently the second
+nest of the pair this season, and the second nest in summer of any
+species of bird is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first nest
+in spring. Comparatively few of our birds attempt to bring off a second
+brood unless the first attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sure
+to bring off two, and may bring off three. But the robin is a hustler,
+probably the most enterprising of all our birds. I recall a mother robin
+that, in late June, repaired a nest in a climbing rosebush which her
+first brood had vacated only a week before. A brood of wood thrushes
+which left their nest about the same time was still being fed by their
+parents about the place.
+
+The song sparrow, the social sparrow, the phœbe, the bluebird, all
+build a second nest. The first brood of the bluebird will be looked
+after by the father in some near-by grove or orchard, while the mother
+starts a new family in the old nest. If all goes well with them, those
+two bluebird families will unite and keep together in a loose flock till
+they migrate in the fall.
+
+So many of our birds nest about our houses and lawns and gardens and
+along our highways, that at first sight it seems as if they must be
+drawn there by a sense of greater security for their eggs and young. The
+robin has become almost a domestic institution. It is rarely that one
+finds a robin's nest very far from a human habitation. One spring there
+were four robins' nests on my house and outbuildings--in the vines, on
+window-sills, or other coigns of vantage. There were at the same time at
+least fifteen robins' nests on my lot of sixteen acres, and I am quite
+certain that I have not seen all there were. They were in sheds and
+apple-trees and spruces and cedars, in the ends of piles of grape-posts,
+in rosebushes, in the summer-house, and on the porch. We did not expect
+to get one of the early cherries, and might count ourselves lucky if we
+got any of the later ones.
+
+A robin has built her nest in my summer-house. She abuses me so when I
+try to tarry there, after incubation has begun, that I take no comfort
+and presently withdraw. Until her brood has flown, I am practically a
+stranger in my open-air rest-house and study.
+
+When the fish crows come egging in the spruces and maples about the
+house, and I hear the screaming of the robins, I seize my gun and rush
+out to protect them, but am not always successful, as the mischief is
+often done before I get within reach; I am not sure but that the robins
+think--if they think at all--that I am in league with the crows to
+despoil them. I was not in time to save the eggs of the wood thrush the
+other morning, when I heard the alarm calls of the birds, but I had the
+satisfaction of seeing the black marauder go limping over the hill,
+dropping quills from his wings at nearly every stroke. I am sure he will
+not come back. The fish crow is one of the most active enemies of our
+small birds. Of course, he only obeys his instincts in hunting out and
+devouring their eggs and young, but I fancy I obey something higher than
+instinct when I protest with powder and shot.
+
+The birds do not mind the approach of the domestic animals, such as the
+cow, the horse, the sheep, the pig, and they are only a little
+suspicious of the dog, but the appearance of the cat fills them with
+sudden alarm. I think that birds that have never before seen a cat join
+in the hue and cry. What alarms one alarms all within hearing. The
+orioles are probably the most immune from the depredations of crows and
+jays and owls of all our birds, and yet they will join in the cry of
+"Thief, thief!" when a crow appears. (The alarm cry of birds will even
+arrest the attention of four-footed beasts, and often bring the
+sportsman's stalking to naught.)
+
+I fancy that Phœbe selects our sheds and bridges and porticoes for
+her nesting-sites because they are so much more numerous than the
+overhanging rocks where her forbears built. For the same reason certain
+of the swallows and the swifts select our barns and chimneys.
+
+If the birds themselves are not afraid to draw near us, why should their
+instinct lead them to feel that their enemies will be afraid of us? How
+do they know that a jay or a crow or a red squirrel will be less timid
+than they are? And why also, if they have such confidence in us, do they
+raise such a hue and cry when we pass near their nests? The robin in my
+summer-house knew, if she knew anything, that I had never raised a
+finger against her. On the contrary, my hoe in the garden had unearthed
+many a worm and slug for her. Still she sees in me only a possible
+enemy, and tolerate me with my book or my newspaper near her nest she
+will not. Another robin has built her nest in a rosebush that has been
+trained to form an arch over the walk that leads to the kitchen door and
+only a few yards from it; but whenever we pass and repass she scurries
+away with loud, angry protests and keeps it up as long as we are in
+sight, so that we do not feel at all complimented by her settling down
+so near us. If one's appearance is so alarming, even when he is going to
+hoe the garden, why did the intolerant bird set up her household gods so
+near? If I keep away her enemies, why will she not be gracious enough to
+regard me as her friend? The robin that trusted her brood to the
+sheltering vines of the woodshed, and lined her nest with the hair of
+our old gray horse--why should she scream, "Murder!" whenever any of us
+go to the well a few feet away?
+
+What is the real explanation of the fact that so many of our birds nest
+so near our dwellings and yet show such unfriendliness when we come near
+them? Their apparent confidence, on the one hand, contradicts their
+suspicion on the other. Is it because we have here the workings of a new
+instinct which has not yet adjusted itself to the workings of the older
+instinct of solicitude for the safety of the nest and young? My own
+interpretation is that birds are not drawn near us by any sense of
+greater security in our vicinity. It is evident from the start that
+there is an initial fear of us to be overcome. How, then, could the
+sense of greater safety in our presence arise? Fear and trust do not
+spring from the same root. How should the robins and thrushes know that
+their enemies--the jays, the crows, and the like--are more afraid of
+human beings than they are themselves? Hunted animals pursued by wolves
+or hounds will at times take refuge in the haunts of men, not because
+they expect human protection, but because they are desperate, and
+oblivious to everything save some means of escape. If the hunted deer or
+fox rushes into an open shed or a barn door, it is because it is
+desperately hard-pressed, and sees and knows nothing but some object or
+situation that it may place between itself and its deadly enemy. The
+great fear obliterates all minor fears.
+
+The key to the behavior of the birds in this respect may be found in the
+Darwinian theory of natural selection. From the first settlement of the
+country a few of the common birds, attracted by a more suitable or more
+abundant food-supply, or other conditions, must inevitably have nested
+near human dwellings. These birds would thrive better and succeed in
+bringing off more young than those that nested in more exposed places.
+Hence, their progeny would soon be in the ascendancy. All animals seem
+to have associated memory. These birds would naturally return to the
+scenes and conditions of their youth, and start their nests there. It
+would not be confidence in men that would draw them; rather would the
+truth be that the fear of man is inadequate to overcome or annul this
+home attraction.
+
+The catbird does not come to our vines on the veranda to nest from
+considerations of safety, but because her line of descent runs through
+such places. The catbirds and robins and phœbe-birds that were reared
+far from human habitations doubtless return to such localities to rear
+their young. The home sense in birds is strong. I have positive proof in
+a few instances of robins and song sparrows returning successive years
+to the same neighborhood. It is very certain, I think, that the
+phœbe-birds that daub our porches with their mud, and in July leave
+a trail of minute creeping and crawling pests, were not themselves
+hatched and reared in the pretty, moss-covered structure under the
+shelving rocks in the woods, or on the hillsides.
+
+How different from the manners of the robins are the manners of a pair
+of catbirds that have a nest in the honeysuckle against the side of the
+first-floor sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from the nature of the
+catbird than the hue and cry which the robin at times sets up. The
+catbird is sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline _mew_ is her
+characteristic note. She never raises her voice like the town-crier, as
+the robin does, perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold him.
+The catbird peers and utters her soft protest from her hiding-place in
+the bushes. This particular pair of catbirds appeared in early May and
+began slyly to look over the situation in the vines and bushes about the
+house. All their proceedings were very stealthy; they were like two dark
+shadows gliding about, avoiding observation--no tree-tops or house-tops
+for them, but coverts close to the ground. We hoped they would divine
+safety in the shadow of the cottage, but tried to act as if oblivious of
+their goings and comings. We saw them now and then stealthily inspecting
+the tangle of honeysuckle on the east side of the veranda, where a robin
+last season reared a brood, and the low hedge of barberry-bushes on the
+south side of the cottage, where a song sparrow had her nest. If they
+come, which will they take, we wondered. Several times in the early
+morning I heard the male singing vivaciously and confidently in the
+thick of the honeysuckle. I guessed that the honeysuckle was the choice
+of the male, and that his song was a pæan in praise of it, addressed to
+his mate. But it was nearly a week before his musical argument prevailed
+and the site was apparently agreed upon.
+
+When the nest-building actually began, the birds were so shy about it
+that, watch as I might, I failed to catch them in the act. One morning I
+saw the mother bird in the garden with nesting-material in her beak, but
+she failed to come to the honeysuckle with it while I watched from a
+near-by covert. At the same time robins were flying here and there with
+loaded beaks, and wood thrushes were going through the air trailing long
+strips of white paper behind them, but the catbird was an emblem of
+secrecy itself. She, too, brought fragments of white paper to her nest,
+but no one saw her do it. Like other nest-builders, she apparently put
+in her big strokes of work in the early morning before the sleepers on
+the veranda were stirring. A few times my inquisitive eye, cautiously
+peering over the railing, started her from the vine, but I never saw her
+enter it with leaf, stick, or straw; yet slowly the nest grew and came
+into shape, and finally received its finishing touches. So cautiously
+had the birds proceeded that, were they capable of concepts like us, I
+should fancy they flattered themselves that we had not the least
+suspicion of their little secret. The male ceased to sing near the house
+after the nest was begun. So much time elapsed after the finishing of
+the nest before the first egg appeared in it that some members of the
+household feared the birds had deserted it, especially as they were not
+seen about the premises for several days. But the weather was wet and
+cool, and the eggs ripened slowly. Then one morning the birds were seen
+again, and one blue-green egg was discovered in the nest. The next
+morning another egg was added, and a third egg on the third morning, and
+a fourth on the fourth morning. In due time incubation began, and
+thenceforth all went well with our dusky neighbors.
+
+It is an anxious moment for all birds when their young leave the nest.
+One noontime by the unusual mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure that
+the critical time had come. Sure enough, there sat one of the young on a
+twig a few inches above the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty
+response to the agitated cry of the mother, as is usually the case with
+the robin. "No publicity" is the watchword of the young catbirds as well
+as of the old. An hour or two later another young one was perched on a
+branch, and before night, when no one was looking, they both
+disappeared, leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The next morning
+early, without any signs of alarm or agitation on the part of the old
+birds, they took the important step. It could hardly have been much of a
+flight with any of them, as their wing-quills were only partially
+developed, and their tails were mere stubs. For several days afterward
+no sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard. They were probably
+keeping well concealed in the near-by trees or in the vines and
+currant-bushes in the vineyard. In about a week the whole family
+appeared briefly in upper branches of the maples near the house. The
+young were distinguishable from the old only by their shorter tails. A
+few days later the parent birds were seen moving stealthily through the
+vines and bushes about the house, or perching on the near-by stakes that
+supported the wire netting. Are they coming back for a second brood? was
+the question in our minds.
+
+Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the male, then one morning a
+regular old-time burst of joy from him in the vine that held the old
+nest. Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window on the south side
+of the cottage, and both birds were soon seen paying frequent visits to
+the bush. We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether or not the
+first brood were now shifting for themselves, we did not know; they
+never again appeared upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of the
+Fourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was started in the
+syringa-bush three feet from the ground, and barely four feet from the
+window!
+
+We had a view of the proceedings that the first site did not afford us.
+The old nest appeared to be in perfect condition, but there was
+evidently no thought with the birds of using it again, as the robins
+sometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff swallows always do. A new nest,
+built of material almost identical with that of the old, and in a more
+exposed position, was decided upon. It progressed rapidly, and I was
+delighted to find that the male assisted in the building. Indeed, he was
+fully as active as the female. Very often they were both in the nest
+with material at the same moment. They seemed to agree perfectly. At
+first I got the impression that the male was not quite as decided as the
+female, and hesitated more, once or twice bringing material that he
+finally rejected. But he soon warmed up to the work and certainly did
+his share.
+
+With most species of our birds the nest is entirely built by the female.
+With the robin, the wood thrush, the phœbe, the oriole, the
+hummingbird, the pewee, and many others, the male is only an interested
+spectator of the proceeding. He usually attends his mate in her quest
+for material, but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the cock
+wren assists in nest-building. I know the male cedar-bird does, and
+probably the male woodpeckers do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeak
+assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing upon the nest. It seems
+fair to infer that he assists in the nest-building also, but I am not
+certain that he does, and I have heard another observer state that in a
+nest which he watched the female apparently did it all.
+
+My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon at least, being on their
+job as late as seven o'clock. In three days the nest was done, all but
+touching up the interior. During the construction I laid out pieces of
+twine and bits of white paper on the bushes and wire netting, also some
+loose material from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly used.
+How much labor the birds would have saved themselves had they pulled the
+old nest to pieces and used the material a second time! I have known the
+oriole to start a nest, then change her mind, and then detach some of
+her strings and fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once saw a
+"chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull the old nest to pieces and
+rebuild it in a tree a hundred feet away.
+
+The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking than his mate,
+but we could easily tell her by her often simulating the actions of a
+young bird when she came with material in her beak; she would alight on
+a near-by post and slightly spread and quiver her wings in a tender,
+beseeching kind of way. She would do this also when bringing food to her
+first brood. When one of the parent birds of any species simulates by
+voice or manner the young birds, it is always the female; her heart
+would naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation than that of the
+male.
+
+On the fifth day the nest was completed and received its first egg.
+There was considerable delay with the second egg, but it appeared on the
+second or third day, and the third egg the following day. Then
+incubation began. In twenty days from the day the nest was begun, the
+birds were hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly left the
+nest.
+
+A friend of mine who has a summer home on one of the trout-streams of
+the Catskills discovered that the catbird was fond of butter, and she
+soon had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room window for
+its lump of fresh butter, and finally entering the dining-room, perching
+on the back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter from a fork
+held in the mistress's hand. I think the butter was unsalted. My friend
+was convinced after three years that the same pair of birds returned to
+her each year, because each season the male came promptly for his
+butter.
+
+The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird contrast strongly with
+the frank, open manners of the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrasher
+goes skulking about in much the same way, flirting from bush to bush
+like a culprit escaping from justice. But he does love to sing from the
+April tree-tops where all the world may see and hear, if said world does
+not come too near. In the South and West the thrasher also nests in the
+vicinity of houses, but in New York and New England we must look for him
+in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of any bad traits that go with
+the thrasher's air of suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that
+goes with the catbird's--I have seen her perch on the rim of another
+bird's nest and deliberately devour the eggs. But only once. Whether or
+not she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If she does, she is
+doubtless so sly about it that she escapes observation.
+
+I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so attractive a neighbor as
+the wood thrush. She has none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace.
+She skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the wood thrush stands
+up before you or perches upon a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoat
+toward you in the most open and trusting manner. In fact, few birds have
+such good manners as the wood thrush, and few have so much the manner of
+a Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The flight of the wood
+thrush across the lawn is such a picture of grace and harmony, it is
+music to the eye. The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I told you
+so, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!" But the courteous thrush
+(just here I heard the excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry caw
+of a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow fly away from the
+maple in front of the Study, pursued by a mob of screeching robins. He
+took refuge in the spruces above the house where the collected robins
+abused him from surrounding branches. On my appearance he flew away, and
+the robins dispersed)--but the courteous thrush, I say, invites the
+good-breeding in you which he himself shows. The thrush never has the
+air of a culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other air. But I
+welcome them both. One shall stand for the harmony and repose of bird
+life, and the other for its restlessness and curiosity. The songs and
+the manners of birds correspond. The catbird, the brown thrasher, and
+the mockingbird are all theatrical in their manners--full of gestures of
+tail and wings, and their songs all imply an audience, while the serene
+melody of the thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of their
+behavior.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A MIDSUMMER IDYL
+
+
+As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the wide-open doors of a
+big hay-barn, busy with my pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my
+farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I idly contrast his harvest
+with mine. I have to admit that he succeeds with his better than I do
+with mine, though he can make hay only while the sun shines, while I can
+reap and cure my light fancies nearly as well in the shade as in the
+sun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. But
+I have this advantage over him--I might make literature out of his
+haymaking, or might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest he
+never dreamed of. What does Emerson say?
+
+  One harvest from the field
+    Homeward bring the oxen strong;
+  A second crop thine acres yield,
+    Which I gather in a song.
+
+But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only where he has sown, and if
+Emerson had not scattered his own heart in the fields his Muse would not
+reap much there. Song is not one of the instruments with which I gather
+my harvest, but long ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving
+the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself there, and whatever
+comes back to me now from that source is honestly my own. The second
+crop which I gather is not much more tangible than that which the poet
+gathers, but the farmer as little suspects its existence as he does that
+of the poet. I can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies, his
+buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow, his meadow-rue, serve my
+purpose better than they do his. They look better on the printed page
+than they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy and clover have their
+literary uses, and his new-mown hay may perfume a line in poetry. When
+one of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod round his quiet bed,"
+he makes better use of this weed than the farmers can.
+
+Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with all its sights and
+sounds, its singing birds, its skimming swallows, its grazing or
+ruminating cattle, its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes from
+the meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with his men and teams
+busy with the harvest, has material for the literary artist. A good hay
+day is a good day for the writer and the poet, because it has a certain
+crispness and pureness; it is positive; it is rich in sunshine; there is
+a potency in the blue sky which you feel; the high barometer raises your
+spirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You can sit in a circle
+of shade beneath a tree in the fields, or in front of the open hay-barn
+doors, as I do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature all
+about you. The brimming meadows seem fairly to purr as the breezes
+stroke them; the trees rustle their myriad leaves as if in gladness; the
+many-colored butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the swallows' backs
+glistens in the sun as they skim the fields; and the mellow boom of the
+passing bumble-bee but enhances the sense of repose and contentment that
+pervades the air. The hay cures; the oats and corn deepen their hue; the
+delicious fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the breeze; your
+mental skies are lucid, and life has the midsummer fullness and charm.
+
+As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of the scarlet tanager in
+the maple woods that crown a hill above me, and in the loft overhead two
+broods of swallows are chattering and lining up their light-colored
+breasts on the rims of their nests, or trying their newly fledged wings
+while clinging to its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound is the
+call of the cuckoo, which I hear and have heard at nearly all hours for
+many days, and which surely bodes rain. The countryman who first named
+this bird the "rain crow" hit the mark. The cuckoo is a devourer of
+worms and caterpillars, and why he should be interested in rain is hard
+to see. The tree-toad calls before and during a shower, mainly, I think,
+because he likes to have his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like
+the cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a mystery, unless the
+rain and the shadows are congenial to the gloomy mood in which he
+usually seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery of our birds,
+and the part of doleful prophet in our bird drama suits him well.
+
+A high barometer is best for the haymakers and it is best for the human
+spirits. When the smoke goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likely
+to soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons who do not like
+to get up in the morning till the day has been well sunned and aired
+evidently thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do seem better
+ventilated, and our lungs take in fuller draughts of air. How curious it
+is that the air should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light when
+it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days when it is an effort to move,
+and the grasshopper is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the
+trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we are on its crest, and are
+buoyed up both in mind and in body, on the crisp, bright days when the
+air seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the heavier salt
+sea-water buoys us up more than the fresh river or pond water, but we do
+not feel in the same way the lift of the high barometric wave. Even the
+rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring are quickly susceptible to
+these atmospheric changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine and
+crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as to make hay. Let the high
+blue-domed day with its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer,
+overcast, humid day from the south, and the flow of sap lessens at once.
+It would seem as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their dry
+bark, they respond to the change so quickly. There is no sap without
+warmth, and yet warmth, without any memory of the frost, stops the flow.
+
+The more the air presses upon us the lighter we feel, and the less it
+presses upon us the more "logy" we feel. Climb to the top of a mountain
+ten thousand feet high, and you breathe and move with an effort. The air
+is light, water boils at a low temperature, and our lungs and muscles
+seem inadequate to perform their usual functions. There is a kind of
+pressure that exhilarates us, and an absence of pressure that depresses
+us.
+
+The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy work, sets one up, while the
+idle, the unemployed, has a deficiency of hæmoglobin in his blood. The
+Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the man so over-employed that the
+pressure upon him is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled
+with compressed air.
+
+Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of the
+harvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day--the high
+blue dome, the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still white
+in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, the
+clover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds
+of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds still
+vocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. Very soon it
+will begin to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become dry and
+harsh, the clover will fade, the girlish daisies will become coarse and
+matronly, the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the pastures
+will turn brown, and the haymakers will find the hay half cured as it
+stands waiting for them in the meadows.
+
+What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common, so abundant, so various,
+a green summer snow that softens the outlines of the landscape, that
+makes a carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields, and that
+furnishes food to so many and such various creatures! More than the
+grazing animals live upon the grass. All our cereals--wheat, barley,
+rye, rice, oats, corn--belong to the great family of the grasses.
+
+Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment of the hills. It
+gives us the meadow, a feature in the northern landscape so common that
+we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once when we enter a
+tropical or semi-tropical country. In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw
+no meadows and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the genial,
+mellow look which our landscape presents. Harshness, rawness, aridity,
+are the prevailing notes.
+
+From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows with their boundary line of
+stone fences that are like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover.
+They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in the breeze, the green
+inundation seems about to overwhelm its boundaries, all the surface
+inequalities of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and stones are
+hidden, the woodchucks make their roads through it, immersed like
+dolphins in the sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowing
+beneficence of our temperate zone it all presents! Nature in her kinder,
+gentler moods, dreaming of the tranquil herds and the bursting barns.
+Surely the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for the most part
+noiseless, peace-yielding victories that gladden the eye and
+tranquillize the heart.
+
+The meadow presents a pleasing picture before it is invaded by the
+haymakers, and a varied and animated one after it is thus invaded; the
+mowing-machine sending a shudder ahead of it through the grass, the
+hay-tedder kicking up the green locks like a giant, many-legged
+grasshopper, the horserake gathering the cured hay into windrows, the
+white-sleeved men with their forks pitching it into cocks, and, lastly,
+the huge, soft-cheeked loads of hay, towering above the teams that draw
+them, brushing against the bar-ways and the lower branches of the trees
+along their course, slowly winding their way toward the barn. Then the
+great mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the fields, and the battle
+is won. Milk and cream are stored up in well-cured hay, and when the
+snow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills them in summer, the
+tranquil cow can still rest and ruminate in contentment.
+
+As the swallows sweep out and in near my head they give out an angry
+"Sleet, sleet," as if my presence had suddenly become offensive to them.
+I know what makes the change in their temper. The young are leaving
+their nests, and at such eventful times the parent birds are always
+nervous and anxious. When any of our birds launch a family into the
+world they would rather not have spectators, and you are pretty sure to
+be abused if you intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a good deal
+of sharp emphasis into that "Sleet, sleet," though she is not armed to
+make any of her threats good. Who knows that all will go well with them
+when they first make the plunge into space with their untried wings? A
+careful parent should keep the coast clear.
+
+They have been testing their wings for several days, clinging to the
+sides of the nest and beating the wings rapidly. And now comes the
+crucial moment of letting go and attempting actual flight. Several of
+them have already done it, and I see them resting on the dead limbs of a
+plum-tree across the road. But more are to follow, and parental anxiety
+is still rife. I shall be sorry when the spacious hayloft becomes
+silent. That affectionate "Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing
+squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged companionship. The
+old barn is the abode of friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of
+them and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of poetry and
+romance to these familiar scenes.
+
+Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest of birds? Known to the
+poets and sages and prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless
+and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, the
+child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in
+the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly
+food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly
+coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape
+of a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have got
+that steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of course
+I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of the
+sky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, and its shape
+and motions less arrowy. More varied in color, its hues yet lack the
+intensity, and its flight the swiftness, of those of its brother of the
+haylofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows are pleasing, but they
+are much more local and restricted in their ranges than the
+barn-frequenters. As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the barn
+swallows the summer always brought.
+
+After all, there is but one swallow; the others are particular kinds
+that we specify. How curious that men should ever have got the notion
+that this airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams, spends
+the winter hibernating in the mud of ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of
+newts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of the
+blindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain of
+the rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the
+fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would as
+soon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow
+follows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, where
+it hibernates on the wing, buried in tropical sunshine.
+
+Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the swallows, a good day for
+the haymakers, and a good day for him who sits before his open barn door
+and weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this slight literary
+fabric.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE
+
+
+The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own way
+so quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate an
+interest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a line
+of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. One
+thing is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surer
+way to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In the
+blackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest or
+the indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed my
+fish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled the
+branch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. I
+unwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbled
+upon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; on
+still another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossy
+softness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log.
+
+Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fisherman
+often sees the nest of the phœbe-bird, which does not cease to please
+for the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry.
+On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far less
+pleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
+the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.
+
+Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight
+on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye
+upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the
+roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her
+secret--a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the
+finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited
+her first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season.
+Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably her
+first brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added an
+egg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out,
+the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said when
+she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they were
+mildewed.
+
+These ground-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the great
+common of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every
+hour--the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels,
+coons by night, and crows and hawks by day--what bird-lover does not
+experience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
+nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly;
+he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate.
+Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves a
+purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it is
+placed. What a center of solicitude and forethought.
+
+Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road,
+is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any other
+ground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden.
+The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only a
+nest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blind
+man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A little
+screen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of the
+nest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand did
+the mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with drooping
+wings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting up
+the whole performance.
+
+A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of the
+male many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
+one male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stone
+wall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford a
+hint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a very
+successful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall and
+in the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usually
+precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and
+breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.
+
+When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself
+into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
+her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays
+of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the
+hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be
+considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely
+placed in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of
+Canada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few square
+yards, the grazing is very poor. I do not think that the chances are one
+in fifty that the hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that the
+problem presented itself to the bird as it does to me, but her instinct
+was as sure a guide as my reason is to me--or a surer one.
+
+The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by a New England bird-lover,
+Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned writer on our birds, fifty or more years
+ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by our earlier
+writers. It haunts the hilly pastures and roadsides in the Catskill
+region. It is often called the road-runner, from its habit of running
+along the road ahead when one is driving or walking--a very different
+bird, however, from the road-runner of the Western States. The vesper is
+larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and russet, and does not
+frequent our gardens and orchards as does the latter. In color it
+suggests the European skylark; the two lateral white quills in its tail
+enhance this impression. One season a stray skylark, probably from Long
+Island or some other place where larks had been liberated, appeared in a
+broad, low meadow near me, and not finding his own kind paid court to a
+female vesper sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt pestered
+her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately and seemed much
+embarrassed by the attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.
+
+When the young of any species appear, the solicitude and watchfulness of
+the mother bird are greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the
+vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of my harmless
+character now for several weeks and, one would think, must know that her
+precious secret is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in her
+beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards away, she maneuvers
+around for a minute or two, flying up to the telephone wire or a few
+yards up or down the road, and finally approaches the nest with much
+hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her in the act. When she comes
+again and again and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.
+
+After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the half-fledged young were
+lying on the ground in front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous
+marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I could not divine.
+
+What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently so wise on some
+occasions and so absurd on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food
+to her young, going through the same tactics over and over, learns no
+more than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think;
+hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom of
+nature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to us
+sheer folly under changed conditions.
+
+When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better of her, she often
+devours the food she has in her beak, so fearful is she of betraying her
+precious secret. But the next time she comes she may only maneuver
+briefly before approaching the nest, and then again hesitate and parley
+with her fears and make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I had
+only just appeared upon the scene.
+
+One of the best things a bird-lover can have in front of his house or
+cabin is a small dead tree with numerous leafless branches. Many kinds
+of birds love to perch briefly where they can look around them. I would
+not exchange the old dead plum-tree that stands across the road in front
+of my lodge for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It bears a
+perpetual crop of birds. Of course the strictly sylvan birds, such as
+the warblers, the vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit thrushes,
+do not come, but many kinds of other birds pause there during the day
+and seem to enjoy the unobstructed view.
+
+All the field and orchard and grove birds come. In early summer the
+bobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows
+below, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comes
+and shows his brilliant front. The purple finch, the goldfinch, the
+indigo bunting, the bluebird, the kingbird, the phœbe-bird, the great
+crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee, the high-hole,
+the downy woodpecker, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy,
+pause there in the course of the day, and some of them several times
+during the day. Occasionally the scarlet tanager lights it up with his
+vivid color.
+
+But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song sparrow whose mate
+has a nest not far off. Here he perches and goes through his repertoire
+of three or four different songs from dawn till nightfall, pausing only
+long enough now and then to visit his mate or to refresh himself with a
+little food. He repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening
+his plumage in the intervals. He sings several hundred times a day and
+has been doing so for many weeks. The house wren during the
+breeding-season repeats his song thousands of times a day, while the
+red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning till night for several
+months. How a conscious effort like that would weary our human singers
+and their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious, in our sense, of
+what they are doing.
+
+When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle this singing sparrow
+presents! A little wild bird sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its
+voice in song hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
+
+In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, but
+viewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a song
+of praise and thanksgiving--joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mate
+and brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, a
+voice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving for
+the universal beneficence without which you and I and the little bird
+would not be here? In foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain
+and the cold do not silence him.
+
+There are few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the call
+of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of
+despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint
+of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from
+pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to
+being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay,
+with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in that
+category, were it not for their songs when the love passion makes
+optimists even of them. The strain of the hermit thrush which floats
+down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but
+more as the shades of night are falling--what does this pure, serene,
+exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words,
+
+  God's in his heaven--
+  All's right with the world!
+
+The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone, but what puts it
+into his heart to do that? Certainly it is good to have a mate and a
+brood!
+
+A new season brings new experiences with the same old familiar birds, or
+new thoughts about them. This season I have had new impressions of our
+cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen. Of the two species, the
+black-billed and the yellow-billed, the former prevails in the latitude
+of New England, and the latter farther south. We cannot hail our
+black-billed as "blithe newcomer," as Wordsworth does his cuckoo.
+"Doleful newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing cheery or
+animated in his note, and he is about as much a "wandering voice" as is
+the European bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of flowers. He is
+a prophet of the rain, and the country people call him the rain crow.
+All his notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His nesting-instincts
+seem to lead him, or rather her, to the thorn-bushes as inevitably as
+the grass finch's lead her to the grass.
+
+The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and inefficient bird that it is
+interesting to see it doing things. One of our young poets has a verse
+in which he sings of
+
+  The solemn priestly bumble-bee
+  That marries rose to rose.
+
+He might apply the same or similar adjectives to the cuckoo. Solemn and
+priestly, or at least monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and
+suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights, or is gay and
+cheerful like our other birds, I have yet to witness it.
+
+During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by my
+door toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill.
+One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch very
+still and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on the
+tentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh,
+guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two he
+began to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose the
+nest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped or
+flitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note every
+minute or two.
+
+After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thorny
+branches which separated the thicket from the meadow and stepped
+outside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the nest
+on an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was covering
+her half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off,
+withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls.
+
+In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, while
+another barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened,
+while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The most
+mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if
+petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents
+was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke
+the parents up and they got down to real work in caring for their
+charge.
+
+The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellow
+stripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell.
+
+That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo--how long in the
+history of its race since it mastered it and became its own
+nest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is.
+Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree,
+with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs a
+foot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking
+nest and nursery I ever beheld--a mere platform of twigs about four
+inches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material,
+looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this very
+thorn.
+
+In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, which
+is their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green
+worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest worm
+that is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in
+force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of the
+worms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a day
+with a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it is
+doing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is a
+solemn creature; its note is almost funereal.
+
+Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive about its nesting-habits
+as any of the sparrows. The male bird seems to know that his brilliant
+color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far away from the nest,
+singing at all hours of the day in a circle around it, the radius of
+which must be more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest was near
+the house, almost under the clothes-line, in a low blackberry-bush,
+partly masked by tall-growing daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass
+near it, when off went the little brown bird with her sharp, chiding
+manners. She is a very emphatic creature. It is yea and nay with her
+every time.
+
+The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is not a very pleasing
+singer, but an all-day one and an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer
+birds. In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows and
+goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds. Their range of
+food is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them taking
+food of any kind.
+
+How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if we
+look closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
+woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on a
+cushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smooth
+exposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself up
+to a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping or
+looping along.
+
+I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of my
+straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
+an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind
+legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt
+for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for
+a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping
+worm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a little
+silvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a brief
+season of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitable
+place and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some other
+bird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and on
+dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.
+
+A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and a
+quarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother of
+the green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousand
+times, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have--a traveling
+arch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than your
+head, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standing
+twenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is a
+puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose.
+
+With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go
+looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to
+go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By
+chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes
+looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
+of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig,
+six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it the
+creature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, then
+turns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. This
+it explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, then
+loops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored,
+profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measures
+off another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves.
+
+Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way like
+this? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but
+has there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm?
+The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth into
+surrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to be
+sure that no chance to make a new connection is missed.
+
+Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet,
+lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it
+would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night
+posing as a twig.
+
+Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a
+hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes short
+work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemed
+to be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs
+or bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yards
+from me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy
+bird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart of
+all the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the winged
+jewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders--it came
+like a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly.
+
+All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of their own, all except the
+woodchuck; wherever he is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is
+known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a real sylvan frog, as
+pretty as a bird, the color of the dry leaves, slender and elegant in
+form and quick and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one in the bed
+of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand toward him and stroked his back
+with a twig. If you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put a spell
+upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized. He was instantly responsive to my
+passes. He began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my finger
+instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly, rose up more upon his
+feet, and bowed his head. As I continued the titillation he began to
+give forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if he were going to
+break out in song. He did not, but he seemed loath to go his way. How
+different he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in large numbers
+make a multitudinous croaking and clucking in the little wild pools in
+spring! He wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in the pools
+celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice is off them, and then in two
+or three days he takes to the open woods and assumes the assimilative
+coloring of the dry leaves.
+
+The little orange-colored salamander, a most delicate and highly colored
+little creature, is as harmless as a baby, and about as slow and
+undecided in its movements. Its cold body seems to like the warmth of
+your hand. Yet in color it is as rich an orange as the petal of the
+cardinal flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an outside color;
+it is a glow, and renders the creature almost transparent, an effect as
+uniform as the radiance of a precious stone. Its little,
+innocent-looking, three-toed foot, or three and a half toed--how
+unreptilian it looks through my pocket glass! A baby's hand is not more
+so. Its throbbing throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes with
+a glint of gold above them--only a close view of these satisfies one.
+
+Here is another remarkable transformation among the small wild folk. In
+the spring he is a dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;
+now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the woods. This is said
+to be an immature form, which returns to the ponds and matures the next
+season; but whether it is the male or the female that assumes this
+bright hue, or both, I do not know. The coat seems to be its midsummer
+holiday uniform which is laid aside when it goes back to the marshes to
+hibernate in the fall.
+
+Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means of protection that do
+not at once appear. In the case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or
+other disagreeable secretion, which would cause any animal to repent
+that took it in its mouth. It is even less concerned at being caught
+than is the skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.
+
+In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon the domain of another
+sylvan denizen, the chipmunk. One afternoon one suddenly came up from
+the open field below me with his pockets full of provender of some sort;
+just what sort I wondered, as there was no grain or seeds or any dry
+food that it would be safe to store underground for the winter.
+
+Beholding me sitting there within two yards of his den was a great
+surprise to him. He eyed me a long time--squirrel time--making little,
+spasmodic movements on the flat stone above his den. At a motion of my
+arm he darted into his hole with an exultant chip. He was soon out with
+empty pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little tocsin of
+distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan folk might hear. As I made no
+sign, he soon ceased and went about his affairs.
+
+All this time, behind and above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposed
+that lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of her
+chrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fern
+screen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless as
+the snow, and her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and delicate
+as--well, as only those of a luna moth can be. It is as immaculate as an
+angel. With a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple
+sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her for the night.
+
+While I was loitering there on the threshold of the woods, observing the
+small sylvan folk, about a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was
+a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than a score of years,
+the nest of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Some friends were camping
+there with their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech woods, and
+passed and repassed hourly within a few yards of the nest, and, although
+they each had sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen nor
+heard the birds during the two days they had been there.
+
+While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of a
+thrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food in
+its beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew down
+to a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, about
+ten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flew
+out of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movements
+sent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. I
+parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was the
+nest with two half-fledged young.
+
+A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to a
+sparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chanced
+to see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained
+four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
+carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were
+not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would
+alight upon the wall to make observations.
+
+But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious
+bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked
+into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds
+usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to
+find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
+strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they
+seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them,
+I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them
+and watched.
+
+I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped
+some food into an open mouth and disappeared.
+
+Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the
+woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
+morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy
+basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery,
+brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground
+enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was
+in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown
+solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a
+part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the
+dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders'
+cocoons--all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.
+
+I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths
+instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
+flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and
+uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
+away!" This I soon did.
+
+Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But
+the red-eyed vireo sings on into September--not an ecstatic strain, but
+a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT
+
+
+It was in May during the last term of his Presidency that Roosevelt
+asked me to go with him down to Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him name
+his birds. I stayed with him at the White House the night before we
+started. I remember that at dinner[1] there was an officer from the
+British army stationed in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indian
+affairs. I did not take part in it because I knew nothing about India,
+but Roosevelt was so conversant with Indian affairs and Indian history
+that you would think he had just been cramming on it, which I knew very
+well he had not. But that British officer was put on his mettle to hold
+his own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India and England's relation
+to it than the officer seemed to know. It was amazing to see the
+thoroughness of his knowledge about India.
+
+  [1] Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The
+  incident he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House,
+  just before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903.
+    C. B.
+
+The next morning we started off for Virginia, taking an early train.
+
+Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from Washington. I think we left
+the train at Charlottesville, Virginia, and drove about ten miles to
+Pine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on the edge of the
+woods, a mile from the nearest farmhouse.
+
+Before we reached there we got out of the wagon and walked, as there
+were a good many warblers in the trees--the spring migration was on. It
+was pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the President insisted on
+carrying it. We identified several warblers there, among them the
+black-poll, the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap. He knew
+them in the trees overhead as quickly as I did.
+
+We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but as he was eager for a
+walk we started off, he leading, as if walking for a wager. We went
+through fields and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile or
+more, when we stopped and mopped our brows and turned homeward without
+having seen many birds.
+
+Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when she saw the heated
+condition in which we returned, for not long afterwards he came to me
+and said: "Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we were in too
+much of a hurry." I replied, "No, Mr. President, that isn't the way I
+usually go a-birding." His thirst for the wild and the woods, and his
+joy at returning to these after his winter in the White House, had
+evidently urged him on. He added, "We will try a different plan
+to-morrow."
+
+So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along the highways. Very soon
+we heard a wren which was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren," he said. We
+got out and watched it as it darted in and out of the fence and sang.
+
+I asked him if he knew whether the little gray gnatcatcher was to be
+seen there. I had not seen or heard it for thirty years. "Yes," he
+replied, "I saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run."
+
+We walked over to some plum-trees where there had been a house at one
+time. No sooner had we reached the spot than he cried, "There it is
+now!" And sure enough, there it was in full song--a little bird the
+shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine musical strain.
+
+As we were walking in a field we saw some birds that were new to me.
+Roosevelt also was puzzled to know what they were till we went among
+them and stirred them up, discovering that they were females of the blue
+grosbeak, with some sparrows which we did not identify.
+
+In the course of that walk he showed me a place where he had seen what
+he had thought at the time to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described
+how they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the tree where they
+alighted. I was skeptical, for it had long been thought that wild
+pigeons were extinct, but that fact had not impressed itself upon his
+mind. He said if he had known there could be any doubt about it, he
+would have observed them more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as
+it was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable evidence. We
+talked with the colored coachman about the birds, as he also had seen
+them. His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had seen wild
+pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts. Subsequently Roosevelt
+wrote me that he had come to the conclusion that they had been mistaken
+about their being pigeons.
+
+One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, I
+chanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the
+ground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention to
+it and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop your
+hat over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and crept up on the
+bird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when the
+bird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this
+bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almost
+succeeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time to
+save itself from his hand.
+
+One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seen
+and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry
+grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not
+appear.
+
+During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and
+fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He
+taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the
+swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine
+warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been
+one ahead of me.
+
+I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for
+the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor,
+I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes.
+
+"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I
+do."
+
+"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is an
+able and amiable man, he is not a born leader."
+
+(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of the
+proposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt's
+estimate of him.)
+
+Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in the
+lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the
+man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her
+needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a
+bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a
+slightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what _is_ the matter?"
+
+He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished
+an African lion.
+
+It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President
+of the United States to be so unprotected--without a guard of any
+kind--in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to
+him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.
+
+"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and
+they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."
+
+Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night
+sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost
+immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from
+the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking
+of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every
+night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day
+at a farmhouse in that vicinity. She did not let the President know of
+this because it would irritate him.
+
+The only flower we saw there which was new to me was the Indian pink.
+Roosevelt seemed to know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink
+moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were common in that
+locality.
+
+On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being on the train, Roosevelt
+threw himself into the dictation of many letters, the wrens and the
+warblers already sidetracked for the business of the Administration.
+
+I passed another night at the White House, and in the morning early we
+went out on the White House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming
+to attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by.
+
+"They often stare at me as though they thought me crazy," he said, "when
+they see me gazing up into the trees."
+
+"Well, now they will think I am your keeper," I said.
+
+"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.
+
+When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds that we had seen
+while at Pine Knot and hoped that I would sometime write up the trip; in
+fact, for years after, whenever we would meet, almost the first thing he
+would say was, "Have you written up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?"
+And his disappointment at my failure to do so was always
+unmistakable.[2]
+
+  [2] The following letter may be of interest in this
+  connection.
+    C. B.
+
+  DEAR OOM JOHN:
+
+  Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration? If
+  not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will
+  include in your coming volume of sketches a little account
+  of the time you visited us at Pine Knot, our little
+  Virginia camp, while I was President. I am very proud of
+  you, Oom John, and I want the fact that you were my guest
+  when I was President, and that you and I looked at birds
+  together, recorded there--and don't forget that I showed
+  you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's wren, and almost
+  all the other birds I said I would!
+
+  Ever yours,
+
+  THEODORE ROOSEVELT
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY
+
+
+One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a two
+weeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie--joy-riders with a
+luxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.
+
+We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. I
+confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I
+can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great
+Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew
+it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with
+younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not
+warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was
+younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter
+half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in
+order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new
+scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more
+strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.
+
+Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, so
+forest-clad--the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys
+cutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and rural
+homesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturing
+interests in the western, the source of noble rivers; and the storehouse
+of many of Nature's most useful gifts to man.
+
+The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of least
+resistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and it
+goes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a
+sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lighter
+cars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents,
+nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for the
+heavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its great
+namesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or through
+gives the automobilist pause.
+
+As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I remember
+with the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army trucks
+we met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on that
+Lincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb,
+khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host of
+them, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded with
+soldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous
+resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-off
+land. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were converging
+toward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim,
+processions--how impressive they were!
+
+Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of
+brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the
+hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever
+did in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at times
+driving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. It
+might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening and
+blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of
+destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire
+seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them--much that
+suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the
+lake bottoms.
+
+We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from
+entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic
+history of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power,
+and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are all
+gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white
+coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much
+more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may
+never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the
+mountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the
+silver age will displace the iron age.
+
+The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer has
+only to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out his
+winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and grassy
+the hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it
+seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly
+care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black
+remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling
+and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying
+down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that
+wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out.
+
+Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast of
+Pittsburgh, an ideal place--a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence
+well carpeted with grass, with wood and water in abundance. But the
+night was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily
+warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with
+plenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. She
+tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got
+up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the
+"long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth
+was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.
+
+The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of
+many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was
+the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days
+Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand
+information, which he did to our great comfort.
+
+Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we
+slept indoors.
+
+On the following day one of the big cars had an accident--the fan broke,
+and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be
+delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made
+our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the
+best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the
+only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no
+way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a
+chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves,
+he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of
+drills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed arms
+to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled
+car was again in running order.
+
+On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek
+in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road
+from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the
+widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of
+roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had
+experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even
+when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison
+was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of
+the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring,
+eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our
+mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual
+tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
+But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants.
+Pure elements--air, water, earth--these settle the question; Camp
+Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first
+view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting--a bird rarely seen north of
+the Potomac.
+
+An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, with
+a huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the
+wheel and had our pictures taken.
+
+At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girl
+appeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invited
+her into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all of
+her apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled the
+new one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She did
+not look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed her
+about many things and got straight, clear-cut answers--a very firm,
+level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told her
+the names of some of the members of the party, and after she had
+returned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down upon
+us. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any of
+the local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and mills
+were something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. I
+do not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom we
+gave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train five
+times, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead and
+her father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with her
+grandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and
+ever so many miles."
+
+The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all the
+way from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or
+Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed--stately, hardy growths, and very
+pleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and the
+eupatorium with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.
+
+August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clear
+mountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Every
+mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. It
+was flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We were
+working south and east.
+
+We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club,
+on the banks of the river--an ideal spot. The people at the big
+clubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. I
+found the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much like
+those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate even
+colder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they
+had a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines of
+big trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse told
+the story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently Cheat
+River deserves a better name.
+
+The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a marked
+contrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed
+down and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part in
+shaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped,
+while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep that
+they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on the
+tops of the broad, rounded hills, though we passed through some broad,
+open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms in
+which hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were large
+fields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming with
+bees.
+
+Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape,
+I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in these
+mountains during the great Ice Age.
+
+We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d--a famous spring, and a
+beautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some of
+the party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned the
+overflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek,
+not far from the Narrows--a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximity
+to the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of a broad,
+limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horses
+disturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have only
+pleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.
+
+We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many times
+the border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, all
+the time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views from
+mountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm
+Springs, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet Water
+Springs. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineral
+water and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. This
+part of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in the
+building, and the elements are unevenly distributed.
+
+I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazy
+proposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. We
+certainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent--or
+with its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplex
+affair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places,
+but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth is
+more like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many
+sections.
+
+One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm.
+One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in
+bringing wood and doing other errands.
+
+A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did the
+others, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked up
+here and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger towns
+we could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old.
+When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four exciting
+years, one is lost when cut off from them.
+
+Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark,
+especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain,
+near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hill
+below the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and
+Firestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtful
+success. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on with
+broad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle
+tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedly
+an equivocal smile--the trick was not so easy as it looked. Evidently
+Mr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm in
+Michigan.
+
+Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences you
+have, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background.
+Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemical
+problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he
+were reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps has
+few, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on
+mechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing a
+master discuss his own art.
+
+A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge into
+the Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and
+people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For
+the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the
+roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stone
+road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates
+appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the
+cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way,
+driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy
+on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or
+returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback,
+on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus
+my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.
+
+The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature.
+One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are
+made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature,
+indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the
+South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with
+poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive
+bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the
+South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near
+which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of
+whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late
+August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.
+
+No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurrying
+tourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolina
+a youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a few
+feet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blank
+curiosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent
+interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of a
+five-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain
+districts of the South--good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, and
+industrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outside
+world, their unsophistication is shocking to see.
+
+It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition
+going forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms--dust,
+rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents--is pretty sure to
+come to those who go a-gypsying in the South. But discomfort, after all,
+is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our
+luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization,
+and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully
+endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights,
+just to touch naked reality once more.
+
+Our two chief characters presented many contrasts: Mr. Ford is more
+adaptive, more indifferent to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest
+in the stream is in its potential water-power. He races up and down its
+banks to see its fall, and where power could be developed. He never
+ceases to lament so much power going to waste, and points out that if
+the streams were all harnessed, as they could easily be, farm labor
+everywhere, indoors and out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon
+the benefit that would accrue to every country neighborhood if the
+water-power that is going to waste in its valley streams were set to
+work in some useful industry, furnishing employment to the farmers and
+others in the winter seasons when the farms need comparatively little
+attention. He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to the
+greatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of the
+great mass of the people. As with his touring-car, so with his tractor
+engine, he has had the same end in view. Nor does he forget the
+housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing power into every household
+that will greatly lighten the burden of the women-folk.
+
+Partly owing to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his
+meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active
+than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make
+camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or
+curl up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while Mr. Ford would
+inspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr.
+Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenged some of
+the party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and from
+every camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk
+half-hour walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all occasions, and
+his optimism in regard to all the great questions, are remarkable. His
+good-will and tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his practical
+turn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanical arts and of business
+methods, he is through and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, he
+is much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life like
+a philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work more
+completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and his
+tractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, less
+expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and
+universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities
+which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Those
+who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, and
+the crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause
+in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely
+to a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent human
+force, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of
+universal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only brought
+pleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and written
+large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the business
+man--that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling
+passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his
+humanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, and
+has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of his
+great enterprise--a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are
+so often used to enslave or destroy.
+
+In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison:
+his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make life
+easier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, a
+trenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life,
+though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature--a
+practical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight.
+And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings.
+A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hair
+disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and can
+rough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so
+little that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts or
+turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards,
+as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the open
+and for wild nature.
+
+Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type--the clean,
+clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, always
+ready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at the
+service of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative,
+devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas--a
+manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen.
+
+It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip.
+All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In
+retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I
+was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant,
+and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at
+this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon
+the whole trip with unmixed pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+UNDER GENIAL SKIES
+
+
+I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND
+
+The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West,
+differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the
+coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of
+a world made up of three elements--sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific
+stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating
+floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon
+the Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of the
+Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I saw
+of them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down.
+They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. The
+mountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are of
+the same character. They are young, and while they carry their heads
+very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with the
+granite of our coast.
+
+As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep
+lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains
+wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their
+unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the
+conceit all out of them.
+
+The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what it
+is on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiously
+adapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there under
+arid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlantic
+seaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably less
+than ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of a
+large lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture of
+small and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soil
+does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours would
+almost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a good
+tillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as if
+it were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it has
+virtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown here
+have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothing
+in the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous
+and tough.
+
+I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songs
+here, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of
+climate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocal
+cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrasts
+with that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies
+contrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land.
+
+
+II. LAWN BIRDS
+
+To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to
+have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty
+spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and
+plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves--not so highly
+colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black
+phœbe flits about your porch and arbor vines.
+
+Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other
+variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the
+tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are
+next in number.
+
+Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a
+solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the
+American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual
+trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks
+about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a
+teetering motion of the hind part of the body.
+
+While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found
+the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was
+tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain
+such as Alaska alone can afford.
+
+But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the
+ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more
+of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the
+spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a
+few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that
+curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their
+shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and
+powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air--all arrest your
+attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the
+furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings.
+They fly around the world.
+
+The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity
+from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial
+creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the
+motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in
+its behavior?
+
+However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all
+do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are
+all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass,
+but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods
+are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He
+scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making
+frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the
+prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same
+judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and
+evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go
+its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their
+food-supplies.
+
+On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the
+tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and
+pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look
+upon--airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as
+to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white
+and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh
+water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail
+themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which
+discharge on the beach.
+
+There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown
+pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves,
+shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for
+a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at it
+were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air
+for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and
+forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore
+birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the
+water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for
+his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
+down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb
+style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
+creature as before.
+
+A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a bird
+that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--is
+the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the
+face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.
+
+I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above
+the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
+In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate
+to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
+them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of
+the shore.
+
+
+III. SILKEN CHAMBERS
+
+The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting
+bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner
+near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of
+uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows
+of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to
+the place.
+
+The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My
+guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed,
+found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's
+touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of
+detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground
+and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet
+of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how,
+fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with
+my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown
+earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. I
+stooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long
+needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soil
+nearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on the
+straight side of it, and behold--the entrance to the spider's castle! I
+was not prepared for anything so novel and artistic--a long silken
+chamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a
+silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side of
+the door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, and
+its top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, and
+slightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaring
+or beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner could
+have done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine as
+a hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was held
+open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.
+
+Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, I
+gave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My
+guide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point them
+put to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to find
+them unaided.
+
+We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no
+mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in
+two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself
+(as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance
+surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often
+danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enough
+to allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes farther
+down in her burrow.
+
+Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a young
+spider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from their
+tunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made of
+straws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws lifted
+up, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found the
+straw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in the
+night.
+
+As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects,
+such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright
+specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so small
+they probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I think
+these spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense.
+They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unless
+they have a sixth sense of which we know nothing.
+
+All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well as
+all their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection with
+their extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-histories
+a difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer and
+harder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on the
+spot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, and
+working it up into a finer product.
+
+The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the hinge, and is then
+discarded and a new door manufactured. We saw many nests with the old
+door lying near the entrance. The door is made of several layers of silk
+and clay, and is a substantial affair.
+
+The spider families all have the gift of genius. Of what ingenious
+devices and arts are they masters! How wide their range! They spin, they
+delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original spinners. They have
+probably been on their job since carboniferous times, many millions of
+years before man took up the art. And they can spin a thread so fine
+that science makes the astonishing statement that it would take four
+millions of them to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of our
+head--a degree of delicacy to which man can never hope to attain.
+
+Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems, secrets and betrayals,
+and this species of the arachnids is proficient in all these things.
+
+The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes of
+this spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in all
+such cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. It
+is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast--the soil for cañons
+and the rectangular watercourses, and for the trap-door spider. It is a
+tough, fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does not crumble or
+disintegrate; the cohesion of particles is such that sun-dried brick are
+easily made from it.
+
+This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Jamaica. It
+belongs to the family of _Mygalidae_. It resembles in appearance the
+tarantula of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many of the same
+habits; but its habitation is a much more ingenious and artistic piece
+of workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has no
+door to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind of
+breastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from this
+fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than does
+our spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, her
+fangs, and lines it with silk from her own body.
+
+Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect of
+her kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance--no visible
+drills for such rough work--one wonders how she excavates a burrow six
+inches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and
+how she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has been
+surprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weapons
+with which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the
+_cheliceræ_. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, says
+Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon's
+scalpel." And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet
+at a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest.
+Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a
+hole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth.
+
+One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turned
+over, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants of
+the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started the
+construction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed as
+if the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out a
+semicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice,
+each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surrounded
+it, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. I
+read somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit of
+ground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made the
+soil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss like
+the old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in the
+first case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seems
+to know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know."
+
+On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size,
+but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more artfully
+concealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completely
+covered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, and
+had so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eye
+was baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet it
+seemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick I
+found a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Day
+after day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at it
+on the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer of
+the soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength.
+
+Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, according
+to Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they are
+very active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping up
+the supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun,
+Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and the
+organic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can take
+at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and it
+seems to be so, it is most extraordinary.
+
+In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering,
+it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insect
+world and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinck
+has forgotten to point out, is this:
+
+In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondary
+part. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female is
+supreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him.
+Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is the
+female mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider that
+spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with the
+female. The female spider eats up the male after he has served her
+purpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the male
+in the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survives
+the winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on the
+window-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud,
+but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed by
+the female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate,
+but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In
+the vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey that the female
+is the larger and bolder; the care of the young devolves largely upon
+her. Yes, there is another exception: Among the fishes, the females are,
+as a rule, larger than the males; the immense number of eggs which they
+carry brings this about.
+
+There are always exceptions to this dominance of the female in the
+insect world. We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She would
+not be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male that
+dominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground,
+always in the larval state.
+
+In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold the
+showy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the
+willows, and other trees. The stamens of most flowers are numerous and
+conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries its panicle of pollen high above
+the silken tresses which mother the future ear.
+
+One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by a spider with her brood of
+young ones. I took up a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or
+more, and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I kept it in the
+house under observation for a week, hoping that at some hour of day or
+night the spider would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious
+friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance over the door which he
+had used successfully before. But the latch was never lifted. Madam
+Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at the bottom of her den. At the end
+of a week I broke open the nest and found her alone. She had evidently
+devoured all her little ones.
+
+I kept two nests with a spider in each in the house for a week, and in
+neither case did the occupant ever leave its nest.
+
+Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests of their own when they
+are about half-grown. As to where they stay, or how they live up to that
+time, I have no clue. The young we found in several nests were very
+small, not more than an eighth of an inch long. Of the size and
+appearance of the male spider, and where he keeps himself, I could get
+no clue.
+
+One morning I went with my guide down to the spider territory, and saw
+him try to entice or force a spider out of her den. The morning previous
+he had beguiled several of them to come up to the opening by thrusting a
+straw down the burrow and teasing them with it till in self-defense they
+seized it with their fangs and hung on to it till he drew them to the
+surface. But this morning the trick would not work. Not one spider would
+keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at the end in the shape of
+a hook, he finally lifted one out upon the ground. How bright and clean
+and untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of the thorax were as
+black as jet and shone as if they had just been polished. No lady in her
+parlor could have been freer from any touch of soil or earth-stain than
+was she. On the ground, in the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost.
+We turned her around and tried to induce her to enter the nest again;
+but over and over she ran across the open door without heeding it. In
+the novel situation in which she suddenly found herself, all her wits
+deserted her, and not till I took her between my thumb and finger and
+thrust her abdomen into the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of
+that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and she backed quickly
+into it and disappeared.
+
+Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider has I do not know. I never
+saw a nest that had been broken into or in any way disturbed, except
+those which we had disturbed in our observations.
+
+
+IV. THE DESERT NOTE
+
+I often wonder what mood of Nature this world of cacti which we run
+against in the great Southwest expresses. Certainly something savage and
+merciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor. How well she tempers
+her daggers and bayonets! How hard and smooth and sharp they are! How
+they contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and leaves which bear
+them! It is a desert mood; heat and drought appear to be the exciting
+causes. The scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to store up
+water in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates men to build great
+dams and reservoirs. These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But why
+spines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly cannot be for
+protection or defense; the grass and other vegetation upon which the
+grazing animals feed are not armed with spines.
+
+If the cacti were created that grazing animals in the desert might have
+something to feed upon, as our fathers' way of looking at things might
+lead us to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated by the armor
+of needles and spines?
+
+Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures this broad, mittened
+hand like a cruel joke. It smites like a serpent and stings like a
+scorpion. The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert! Beware! Agonies
+are one of her garments.
+
+All we can say about it is that Nature has her prickly side which
+drought and heat aggravate. In the North our thistles and thorns and
+spines are a milder expression of this mood. The spines on the
+blackberry-bush tend against its propagation for the same reason. Among
+our wild gooseberries, there are smooth and prickly varieties, and one
+succeeds about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees in rough or
+barren places that have a severe struggle for life, often develop sharp,
+thorny branches. It is a struggle of some kind which begets something
+like ill-temper in vegetation--heat and drought in the desert, and
+browsing animals and poor soil in the temperate zones. The devil's club
+in Alaska is one mass of spines; why, I know not. It must just be
+original sin. Our raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but the
+large, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed.
+
+Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert expresses the belief that
+thorns and spines are given to the desert plants for protection; and
+that if no animal were there that would eat them, they would not have
+these defenses. But I believe if there had never been a browsing animal
+in the desert the cacti would have had their thorns just the same.
+
+Nature certainly arms her animal forms against one another. We know the
+quills of the porcupine are for defense, and that the skunk carries a
+weapon that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that any plant form
+is armed against any creature whose proper food it might become. Cacti
+carry formidable weapons in the shape of spines and thorns, but the
+desert conditions where they are found, heat and aridity, are no doubt
+their primary cause. The conditions are fierce and the living forms are
+fierce.
+
+We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From our point of view she often
+seems partial and inconsistent. But I would just as soon think that
+Nature made the adobe soil in the arid regions that the human dwellers
+there might have material at hand with which to construct a shelter, as
+that she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable forms to
+secure their safety. One may confute Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth.
+He says:
+
+  Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of a
+  family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive
+  armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn
+  like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert to the
+  high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is plenty
+  of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to
+  thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the
+  thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and
+  the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their
+  cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a
+  soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.
+
+But are they not just as much exposed to browsing animals in the high
+table-lands as in the desert, if not more so?
+
+Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous about the species
+than about the individual. She is no more solicitous about the one than
+the other. The same conditions apply to all. But the species are
+numerous; a dozen units may be devoured while a thousand remain. A
+general will sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will sacrifice
+one man to save ten, but Nature's ways are entirely different. Both
+contending armies are hers, and she is equally solicitous about both.
+She wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the desert animals to
+survive, and she favors both equally. All she asks of them is that they
+breed and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke,
+Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yet
+confesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless
+true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla--fruit, stem, and
+trunk--though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the human
+hand at the slightest touch."
+
+This question of spines and thorns in vegetation is a baffling one
+because Nature's ways are so unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in
+his theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded upon the idea
+that Nature selects as man selects. You cannot put Nature into a
+formula.
+
+Behold how every branch and twig of our red thorn bristles with cruel
+daggers! But if they are designed to keep away bird or beast from eating
+its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own ends! If no creature
+ate its little red apples and thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would
+rot on the ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red thorns
+would not increase. And increase alone is Nature's end.
+
+It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the animal kingdom is
+full of design. Every part and organ of our bodies has its purpose which
+serves the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any character of
+bird or beast, fish or insect, that does not show purpose, but in the
+plant world Nature seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not work
+on so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ash
+serve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry
+bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, and
+thrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry do
+not save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. In
+fact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow their
+seeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in a
+spiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We know
+that hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedling
+pear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why.
+
+The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe
+(_Agave americana_), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and
+fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no more
+edible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defense
+question about spines.
+
+
+V. SEA-DOGS
+
+There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front of
+me that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have
+their rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, and
+keep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like a
+group of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed
+by the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem to
+show above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time.
+
+Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of
+green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in
+the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea,
+until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or
+hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it
+has a half-muffled, smothered sound.
+
+They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems something
+incongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep--badgers
+or marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt their
+prey in the sea.
+
+Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell us
+what they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony
+of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any new
+species is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and
+the short span of human life, or of the whole human history, gives us no
+adequate vantage-ground from which to solve the problem.
+
+I can easily believe that these hair seals are close akin to the dog.
+They have five digits; they bolt their food like dogs; their sense of
+smell is said to be very acute, though how it could serve them in the
+sea does not appear. The young are born upon the land and enter the
+water very reluctantly.
+
+This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence of the dog and
+attaches itself to its master as does the dog. Its sense of direction
+and locality is very acute. This group of seals in front of me, day
+after day, and week after week, returns to the same spot in the
+ever-changing waters, without the variation of a single yard, so far as
+I can see. The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst, and it
+seems as if some sixth sense must guide them to it. Locality is as
+unreal in the sea as in the sky, but these few square yards of shifting
+waters seem as real to these seals as if they were a granite ledge. They
+keep massed there on the water at that particular point, with their
+flippers protruding above the surface, as if they were as free from
+danger as so many picnickers. Yet something attracts them to this
+particular place. I know of no other spot along the coast for a hundred
+miles or more where the seals congregate as they do here. What is the
+secret of it? Evidently it is a question of security from their enemies.
+At this point the waves break much farther out than usual, which
+indicates a hidden reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow
+water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, from
+stealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear their
+barking in the early part of the night, but long before morning their
+half-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire for
+the night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or more
+out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protection
+from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on
+account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity
+offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning,
+I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the
+unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short
+intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my youth.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES
+
+
+I. NATURE'S WIRELESS
+
+The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to
+give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one
+knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if
+they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like
+community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
+process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an
+impulse.
+
+So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in
+the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The
+members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to
+the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know
+it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated.
+The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and
+coöperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
+without scheme or direction.
+
+This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the
+migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these
+little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to
+commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in
+Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight
+toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When
+the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course.
+Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive
+with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of
+insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal
+life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same
+unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual
+migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the
+flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast
+armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our
+youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They
+came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in
+the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were
+as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our
+flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of
+blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air
+with astonishing precision.
+
+In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I have
+seen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going through
+various intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroom
+quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of men
+try it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and the
+tumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as to
+bring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of their
+breasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a giant
+hand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a
+tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues a
+bird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robin
+dashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactly
+coincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of a
+tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or a
+squirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the same
+machine-like unity.
+
+In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent,
+uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon some
+infusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal,
+the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of action
+as of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity.
+
+How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals!
+How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first day
+of the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seem
+to feel the impending danger.
+
+The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate the
+same law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go South
+and thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in the
+trees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a new
+kind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in the
+spring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley in
+California was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west.
+In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshoppers
+witnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. They
+stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodies
+making the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have made
+them. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one.
+
+This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makes
+up to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what we
+call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathy
+is probably a survival from our earlier animal state.
+
+
+II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE
+
+Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the
+conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more
+intelligent than honey bees:
+
+  If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir
+  John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle
+  down horizontally with its base to the window, you will
+  find that the bees will persist till they die of
+  exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an
+  issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two
+  minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on
+  the opposite side.
+
+The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems of
+life are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers;
+their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few natural
+enemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores of
+flycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. The
+kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally
+snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies;
+the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while,
+besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the
+vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them.
+Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficult
+the trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to
+"swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himself
+and plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready for
+a trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is,
+and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is
+reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crush
+it is as easy as to crush a beetle.
+
+The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle for
+existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our
+skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take
+thought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them.
+
+To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for folly
+so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that
+the more fool you are, the more you know.
+
+Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of
+the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other
+animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free
+intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an
+overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,
+
+  She makes of labor an eternal lust.
+
+Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or
+better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows
+and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.
+
+The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the
+swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.
+
+It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize
+one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees
+from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box,
+when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in
+carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees
+from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they
+have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.
+
+Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon
+during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news
+of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!
+
+Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration,
+and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The
+secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this
+solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not.
+He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the
+explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the
+power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings";
+of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the
+"extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they
+are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring
+outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive
+superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer
+of the dawn,--the early bee,--like the early bird that catches the worm,
+returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming
+to-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay
+with white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "the
+mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the
+bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably
+call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities
+proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the
+sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand
+juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations
+as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine
+liquid."
+
+When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing its
+commands," or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritual
+communications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he is true to his own
+conception.
+
+The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like all
+their other economies--not a matter of thought, but of instinct.
+
+Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake of
+humanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as we
+communicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another this
+and that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters,
+and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous to
+verbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the
+Spirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and coöperate with one
+another as the cells of the body communicate and coöperate in building
+up the various organs. The spirit of the body coördinates all the
+different organs and tissues, making a unit of the body.
+
+If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates into
+the hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it
+lies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object in
+the body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomes
+encysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless.
+
+Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body will
+infuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by the
+bee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from the
+same hive heed it not.
+
+Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another as
+animals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, they
+ruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another world
+of beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form a
+part. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their work
+of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their
+apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not
+personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the
+cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers,
+sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers,
+working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the
+kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These
+little people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; they
+breathe and hear through their legs, their antennæ.
+
+The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instincts
+lead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, and
+they know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, while
+the workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power of
+vision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen in
+her course through the air.
+
+The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fans
+at the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring
+the bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that go
+forth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of the
+hive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and
+crevices--all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive.
+
+After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear us
+out in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of the
+insect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinck
+is the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world in
+his latest volume, "Mountain Paths":
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain
+  earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and
+  amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There
+  is something, on the other hand, about the insect that
+  does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology
+  of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect
+  comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic,
+  more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+  One would think that it was born of some comet that had
+  lost its course and died demented in space.
+
+Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman
+and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of
+hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from
+foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as
+welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they
+attract the attention of one they know _who recognizes their signal by
+thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the
+stranger has departed_." (The italics are mine.) He says the same
+hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their
+arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
+with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in
+camp some time."
+
+Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What
+would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when
+we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them
+lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the
+nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.
+
+
+III. ODD OR EVEN
+
+One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that in
+the inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic world
+by odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampy
+meadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium,
+and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality I
+might have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel,
+or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive
+of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the
+freedom and irregularity of growing things.
+
+One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things.
+Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some
+eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the
+number six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be so
+sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and
+incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly
+odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually have
+three or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and the
+cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We have five fingers and five
+toes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers
+serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganic
+world things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world the
+equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence the
+danger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not be
+driven into a corner.
+
+Well may Emerson ask--
+
+  Why Nature loves the number five,
+  And why the star form she repeats?
+
+The number five rules in all the largest floral families, as in the
+crowfoot family, the rose family (which embraces all our fruit trees),
+the geranium family, the flax family, the campanula family, the
+convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then there is a large number
+of flowers the parts of which go in threes, one of the best known of
+which is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the only form I
+recall based on the number five.
+
+
+IV. WHY AND HOW
+
+One may always expect in living nature variations and modifications. It
+is useless to ask why. Nature is silent when interrogated in this way.
+Ask her how, and you get some results. If we ask, for instance, why the
+sting of the honey bee is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and
+bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth like a needle, so that
+they can sting and sting again, and live to sting another day, while the
+honey bee stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one species
+of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has a powerful electric
+battery; or why the porcupine has an armor of quills while his brother
+rodent the woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on--we make no
+addition to our knowledge.
+
+But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and defenseless an animal as
+the rabbit manages to survive and multiply, we extend our knowledge of
+natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of its wakefulness--by
+never closing its eyes--and by its speed; also by making its home where
+it can command all approaches, and so flee in any direction. Or if we
+ask how our ruffed grouse survives and prospers in a climate where its
+cousin the quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of certain
+trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder and is often cut off by a deep
+fall of snow.
+
+If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get no answer; but if we ask
+how he does it, we find out that he stores up food in his den, hence
+must take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck hibernates, also, but
+he stores up fuel in the shape of fat in his own body. The porcupine is
+above ground and active all winter. He survives by gnawing the bark of
+certain trees, probably the hemlock. We have two species of native mice
+that look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the jumping, or
+kangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is active the season through, over and
+under the snow; the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparently
+accomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely keeping the spark of
+life burning. His fires are banked, so to speak; his temperature is very
+low, and he breathes only at long intervals.
+
+If, then, we ask with Emerson, "_why_ Nature loves the number five," and
+"_why_ the star form she repeats," we shall be put to it for an answer.
+We can only say that with living things odd numbers are more likely to
+prevail, and with non-living, even numbers.
+
+Some seeds have wings and some have not. To ask why, is a blind
+question, but if we ask _how_ the wingless seeds get sown, we may add to
+our knowledge.
+
+In our own practical lives, in which experimentation plays such a part,
+we are often compelled to ask why this result and not that, why this
+thing behaves this way and that thing that way. We are looking for
+reasons or causes. The farmer asks why his planting in this field was a
+failure, while it was a success in the next field, and so on. An
+analysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture will give him the
+answer.
+
+
+V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM
+
+That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and a good and wise man
+admits of no question, but to us, at this distance, it seems strange
+enough that he should have thought that he had hit upon the key to the
+origin of species in the slow and insensible changes which he fancied
+species underwent during the course of the geologic ages, and should
+thus have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had he called his
+work the "Variability of Species," or the "Modification of Species," it
+would not have been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us new
+varieties, but not new species. In fact, of the origin of species we
+know absolutely nothing, no more than we do about the origin of life
+itself.
+
+Of the development of species we know some of the factors that play a
+part, as the influence of environment, the struggle for existence, and
+the competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherent
+tendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution?
+Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originate
+species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening a
+species, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. The record of the
+rocks reveals to us the relation of species, and their succession in
+geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.
+
+Agassiz believed that every species of animal and plant was the result
+of a direct and separate act of the Creator. But the naturalist sees the
+creative energy immanent in matter. Does not one have to believe in
+something like this to account for the world as we see it? And to
+account for us also?--a universal mind or intelligence
+
+  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+  And the round ocean and the living air,
+  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
+
+Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to the Infinite Mystery
+in terms of our own wills and acts. When we think of a Creator and the
+thing created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fire
+and light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could not
+look upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of the
+origin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said,
+speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they
+"have all been produced by laws acting around us," he spoke as a great
+philosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind
+grouping of irrational forces.
+
+
+VI. A LIVE WORLD
+
+It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked
+upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this
+world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive."
+But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a
+disordered mind.
+
+Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on
+the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living
+organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and
+palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms
+do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
+Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held
+in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast
+sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no
+doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding
+to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of
+air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call
+life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and
+bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a
+colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which
+the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be
+measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference
+of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet
+from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the
+throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times.
+They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call
+them, are occurring constantly.
+
+Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which
+translates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors and
+agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty
+feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet
+from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what
+is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions,
+occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds."
+"The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one
+occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible
+earthquake.
+
+Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams
+we know little of.
+
+From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression
+which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky
+planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself.
+Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more
+advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe
+at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of
+Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while both
+Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions,
+which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern
+Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more
+like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The
+flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man
+originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that
+the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival
+the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.
+
+
+VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR
+
+That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems
+to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has
+more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of
+the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the
+fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories
+fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and
+greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly
+made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when
+they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the
+jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the
+strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their
+political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the
+divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact
+that the organic world had reached its present stage of development
+through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these
+ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to
+development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that
+power comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them.
+
+The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of our
+higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous.
+Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the
+Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind,
+in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his
+plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his
+mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his
+simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore
+fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.
+The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code.
+Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of the
+territory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in the
+fields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had the
+sanction of natural law, that was enough; they were quite oblivious to
+the fact that with man's moral nature had come in a new biological law
+which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with, but which has
+tremendous authority and survival value--the law of right, justice,
+mercy, honor, love.
+
+We do not look for the Golden Rule among swine and cattle, or among
+wolves and sharks; we look for it among men; we look for honor, for
+heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of these things are
+involved in the Darwinian hypothesis. There is no such thing as right or
+wrong in the orders below man. These are purely human distinctions. It
+is not wrong for the wolf to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass,
+but an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the farthest star.
+Germany's assault upon the peace and prosperity of the world was a crime
+against the very heavens.
+
+Darwin occupied himself only with the natural evolution of organic
+forms, and not with the evolution of human communities. He treated man
+as an animal, and fitted him into the zoölogical scheme. He removed him
+from the realm of the miraculous into the plane of the natural. For all
+purposes of biological discussion, man is an animal, but that is not
+saying he is only an animal, and still under the law of animal
+evolution. The European man is supposed to have passed the stage of
+savagery, in which the only rule of right is the rule of might. To have
+made Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is to have debased a
+sound natural philosophy to a selfish and ignoble end.
+
+Germany lifted the law to the human realm and staked her all upon it,
+and failed. The moral sense of the world--the sense of justice, of fair
+play--was against her, and inevitably she went down. Her leaders were
+morally blind. When the rest of the world talked of moral standards, the
+German leaders said, "We think you are fools." But these standards
+brought England into the war--the sacredness of treaties. They brought
+the United States in. We saw a common enemy in Germany, an enemy of
+mankind. We sent millions of men to France for an ideal--for justice and
+fair play. To see our standards of right and justice ignored and
+trampled upon in this way was intolerable. The thought of the world
+being swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said to myself from the
+first, "The Allies have got to win; there is no alternative." And what
+astonishes me is that certain prominent Englishmen, such as Lord Morley,
+and others, did not see it. Would they have sat still and watched
+Germany destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel and make ready
+to destroy England? The very framework of our moral civilization would
+have been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his natural selection
+theory was to lead.
+
+
+VIII. THE ROBIN
+
+Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or best
+stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility,
+adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous
+feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From
+cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the
+only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks
+upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most
+diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on a
+horizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your
+porch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or under
+the shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground
+above a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on a
+projecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said
+he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days.
+
+He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a
+dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in
+September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word--a typical
+American in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first I
+hear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there are
+twenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The song
+sparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is far
+behind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows or
+bluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as well
+as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins.
+Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is
+near at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or New
+England. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a
+plebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one would
+not like to miss.
+
+The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be a
+runner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"--it starts "in
+high" and stops "in high."
+
+
+IX. THE WEASEL
+
+In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the
+strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red
+squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red
+squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel
+would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave
+him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both.
+Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at
+work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them.
+Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it
+released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by
+stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The
+bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many
+yards and then had pulled it down.
+
+Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a
+weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and
+round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and
+looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the
+squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the
+squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would
+not have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of my
+neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and
+took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then
+dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such
+terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy
+prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form,
+that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell
+upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a
+hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my
+foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its
+methods are a kind of _Schrecklichkeit_ in the animal world. It is the
+incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.
+
+
+X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE
+
+We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption that
+her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among
+plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool
+from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we
+want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk,
+irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want
+butter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains
+and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object
+with as little waste and delay as possible.
+
+Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her
+fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she
+subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her
+one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will
+be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize
+fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.
+
+Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are
+necessary for the survival of the species--strength, speed, sharpness of
+eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.
+
+Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the
+crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and
+can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey
+wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing
+that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons
+that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and
+cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and
+unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's
+hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?
+
+Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no
+concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly
+to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow
+sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the
+obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume that
+Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle
+of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He
+wants some particular good--a race-horse, a draft-horse--better quality
+or greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with
+her progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts with
+her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The
+stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She
+pits one species of plant or animal against another--heads I win, tails
+you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles
+their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are
+unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of
+mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage,
+but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass because
+it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.
+
+
+XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE
+
+We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or
+by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical
+or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the
+earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling
+up and pulling down--aggregating and accumulating, and separating and
+disintegrating.
+
+It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in
+inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process,
+but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an
+obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and
+monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Cañon and in the
+Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other
+aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and
+structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking
+forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to
+liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were
+not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the
+leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the
+earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and
+suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of
+them in the Grand Cañon! It looks as though titanic architects and
+sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand
+and a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologic
+ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the
+river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the
+material it took out of this chasm! But it could not--poetry at one end
+of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form
+of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains--material for a new series
+of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Cañons may be
+carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders of
+the mountains are only ordinary workmen.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+RUMINATIONS
+
+
+I. MAN A PART OF NATURE
+
+This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of
+as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its
+own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature
+external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call
+nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its
+crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little
+way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very
+limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are
+things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.
+
+It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as
+distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the
+world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals
+are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization
+is the separating of one thing from another and classifying and
+organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are
+absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be
+savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We
+improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own
+purposes. All the forces we use--wind, water, gravity, electricity--are
+still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to
+the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane
+soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty
+miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter
+projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the
+hammer because he greatly outweighs it.
+
+
+II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH
+
+Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of
+the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is
+like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is
+unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of
+the body the component elements--water, lime, iron, phosphorus,
+magnesia, and so on--remain the same, but their organization is changed.
+Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page,
+the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist
+independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then
+not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter
+in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it
+is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the
+brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds
+of our neighbor or friend--his character, his personality--exists after
+he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?
+
+We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or
+even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its
+ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the
+same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character,
+personality, mentality--do not these escape your analysis? and are they
+not also real?
+
+
+III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE
+
+Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter
+of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that
+same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His
+interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself
+also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his
+literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase
+of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic
+orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so
+that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well
+interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because
+the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew
+into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new
+enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and
+the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and
+our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting
+Nature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart and
+mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and
+his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives
+the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the
+perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical
+order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night
+prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there
+is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows
+and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they
+are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature
+interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her
+terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her
+presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
+emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him
+his susceptibility to beauty.
+
+It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in
+the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall
+into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the
+flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in
+the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
+and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot
+of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn,
+the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no
+resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it.
+We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the
+laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of
+brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.
+
+The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul
+through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's
+color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is
+in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and
+the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of
+physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the
+perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that
+apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret
+the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in
+the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the
+huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or
+Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
+mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's
+mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.
+
+All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an
+unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of
+chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as if
+they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own
+minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we
+habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be
+annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though
+theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's
+mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.
+
+The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine
+and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines
+of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit which
+the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt
+prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the
+attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official
+prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no
+avail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that the
+prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and
+clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for
+the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to
+reach one's hands for the moon.
+
+
+IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES
+
+The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are,
+in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the
+libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to
+the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the
+fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those
+forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence
+cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the
+air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at
+first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the
+vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in
+direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life
+possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its
+chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant,
+or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.
+
+The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for their
+religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to
+Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth
+inspires them.
+
+
+V. THE COSMIC HARMONY
+
+The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man
+produces or aims to produce in his work--the order and harmony that will
+give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic
+order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and
+circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are
+the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the
+spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles
+round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one
+law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends;
+and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently
+celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make
+their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, which
+undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as
+they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star
+suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a
+star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly
+grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic
+accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough,
+would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it
+even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the
+world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are
+the exception--else there would be no living world. Organic evolution
+reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious
+course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its
+course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels
+ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable
+life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a
+living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that
+disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we
+call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the
+orderly development of life.
+
+The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds
+tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she
+diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures,
+she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on the
+other hand, tends to multiply the mouths.
+
+Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work in
+deforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions of
+drought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations.
+
+
+VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS
+
+The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean are not merely the
+result of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is in
+them. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic
+than terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment which
+the sun and moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to side. Only
+the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The great
+inland bodies of water are unresponsive to them--they are too small for
+the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that only
+great souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What a
+puzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford of
+the cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in their
+net! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tied
+to the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters--how they follow the sun
+and moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round the world"! The
+land feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobile
+clouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of the
+sun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious of
+it. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.
+
+
+VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE
+
+It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and
+Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or
+unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the
+Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I
+saw in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado where they were laid down
+horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a
+mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series
+of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living
+bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms.
+Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure
+silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many
+exquisite forms, _Foraminiferæ_. The Pyramids are said to be built of
+rocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animal
+kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at present
+contributing, so largely as has the _Foraminiferæ_ to the formation of
+the earth's crust." In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem
+Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the
+continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh
+waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the
+"bordering primordial seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the mark.
+There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living
+organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them,
+but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring
+another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists
+usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter
+begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with
+myriads of animal forms.
+
+
+VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE
+
+Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to
+her ends." She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written
+large--written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of
+that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so
+of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal
+parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many
+trees yield fruit only every other year.
+
+I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most.
+Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses
+in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as
+of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts--butternuts,
+hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the
+agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the
+wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than
+they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she
+offers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find the
+service its own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and woods
+hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery
+arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries,
+and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels
+doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds
+have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with
+strychnine.
+
+We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few,
+extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western
+farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own account
+in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are
+stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD
+
+
+As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in
+Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again,
+which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the
+rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more
+familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I
+detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect
+to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in
+the whole performance.
+
+
+I. SUNRISE
+
+The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the
+rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his
+coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the
+forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes
+very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become
+conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly
+increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten
+minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge--the gold turns to silver.
+After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to
+appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a
+minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon
+line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me
+blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One
+realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its
+axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day.
+The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil"
+to describe this moment?--"Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks
+of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I
+watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It
+is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning.
+Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the
+heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually
+enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest
+veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down.
+His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the
+morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or
+storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
+are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as
+if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and
+yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this
+mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it
+could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God
+to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and
+particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.
+
+
+II. NATURE'S METHODS
+
+Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his
+inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The
+first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies
+hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed
+steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
+her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models.
+There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case
+of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with
+those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term.
+She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal
+and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is
+like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.
+
+The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the
+secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of
+the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the
+original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one
+another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one
+case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one
+overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and
+no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat
+rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the
+origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
+of the animal species.
+
+The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is
+analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated
+sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the
+other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of
+high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must
+have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and,
+while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
+approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it
+is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.
+
+We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in
+the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and
+tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned
+instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was
+developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as
+indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in
+the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
+that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or
+are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have
+slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from
+the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes
+and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things.
+The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought
+their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they
+graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for
+us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels;
+they teach us what to shun.
+
+How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for
+instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and
+elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They
+are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their
+horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our
+common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does
+not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.
+
+Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose
+and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.
+
+What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footed
+mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special
+tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use
+his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet
+have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it
+back with his nose.
+
+Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows
+its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition
+it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just
+beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven
+inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its
+conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.
+
+A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner,
+demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly
+distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in
+one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my
+answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural
+law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his
+letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.
+
+There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to
+scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command--to
+increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is
+limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs.
+Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum
+to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the
+fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
+robin--in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers--may
+and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.
+
+The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is
+mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on
+all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds
+do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be
+"fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail
+as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak
+many advantages.
+
+There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another--the
+fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and
+sharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with the
+blunt of scent--which we call natural competition; but the slow, the
+stupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and
+thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to
+be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and
+sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent
+secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the
+antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have
+speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful
+because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the gray
+squirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunk
+below him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows in
+the ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store of
+nuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates the
+rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels.
+
+The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, the
+cold, the heat--the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment,
+survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life than
+those who fall by the way.
+
+
+III. HEADS AND TAILS
+
+I have heard a story of a young artist who, after painting a picture of
+a horse facing a storm, was not satisfied with it, and, feeling that
+something was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly the great
+artist said to him, "Turn the horse around."
+
+The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse turns his tail. Why this
+difference? Because each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and
+its anatomy. How much better suited is the broad, square head of the
+cow, with its heavy coating of hair and its ridge of bone that supports
+its horns, to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous and
+sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast between their noses and
+their mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the
+grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off and
+loves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile and
+sensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and the
+equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow a
+feeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, the
+cow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. The
+tail of the cow is of less protection to her than is that of the horse
+to him. Her great need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the
+rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then her bony stern,
+with its ridges and depressions and thin flanks, is less fit in any
+encounter with storm or with beast than is her head. On the other hand,
+the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with their huge masses
+of muscles, his smooth flanks, and his tail--an apron of long, straight,
+strong hair--are well designed to resist storm and cold. What animal is
+it in Job whose neck is clothed with thunder? With the horse, it is the
+hips that are so clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.
+
+
+IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT
+
+If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I suppose the breath
+of the obscene fungus by any other name would smell as rank. The
+defensive weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would probably not be
+less offensive if we called him by that name alone, instead of the
+common one by which he is universally known.
+
+While in southern California last winter I heard of one that took up his
+abode in the basement of a house that stood on the side of a hill in the
+edge of the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where all sorts of
+odds and ends had accumulated. On some shelves was a box of
+miscellaneous articles, such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old
+toothbrushes, bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire, chips of wood,
+and the dried foot and leg of a hen. One morning, on opening the door of
+the basement, the mistress of the house was surprised to see the whole
+collection of trash laid out in a line across the floor. The articles
+were placed with some degree of regularity covering a space about
+fifteen inches wide and ten feet in length. There were sixty-one
+articles in the row.
+
+Having such an unsavory creature in the basement of one's house is
+rather ticklish business; not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet
+fraught with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away the exhibit and
+left the door open, hoping their uninvited guest would take his
+departure. But he did not. A few nights later he began another
+collection, finding a lot of new material--among other things a box with
+old atomizer bulbs, four of which bulbs he arranged here and there, in
+the row--a motley array.
+
+What is his object? I confess I do not know. No one has seen him do it,
+as he works at night, but there is little doubt that it is his work.[3]
+The Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger than a gray
+squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.
+
+  [3] Later investigations point to this having been the
+  work of a wood rat instead of a skunk.--C. B.
+
+I wish some one would tell me why this night prowler so often seems to
+spray the midnight air with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He
+never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our Eastern species is
+as free from odor as a squirrel or a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by
+day or night in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground that
+lasts for months. While at a friend's house in the Catskills last August
+a wood pussy came up behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap. We
+saw him from the window in the early evening, and we smelled him. For
+some reason he betrayed his presence. Late that night I was awakened by
+a wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose smart, yet in the
+morning no odor could be detected anywhere about the place. Of course
+the smell is much more pronounced in the damp night air than by day, yet
+this does not seem an adequate explanation. Does he signal at night to
+his fellows by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I have never
+heard him make a vocal sound. When caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs
+in a stone wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping his feet. He
+is the one American who does not hurry through life. I have no proof
+that he ever moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he ever
+experiences the feeling of fear, so common to nearly all our smaller
+animals. His track upon the snow is that of a creature at peace with all
+the world.
+
+
+V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE
+
+Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of some animals than of
+others. The frog and the toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn
+thousands, but most birds lay only five or six eggs.
+
+A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a miser with the other. She
+lets loose an army of worms upon the forests, and then sends an
+ichneumon-fly to check them. She wastes no perfume or color upon the
+flowers which depend upon the wind to scatter their pollen.
+Cross-fertilization is dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways
+to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will rob the bones of the
+fowl of their lime to perfect the shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or
+cunning on the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has already
+endowed each of them with a perfect means of defense.
+
+Two things Nature is not chary of--fear and pain. She heaps the measure
+here because fear puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them
+from many real dangers. What dangers have lurked for man and for most
+wild things in the dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a
+fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic. Pain, too,
+safeguards us; it shields us against real dangers. The pains of
+childbirth are probably no check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of
+procreation, especially on the part of the male, overcomes all other
+considerations.
+
+
+VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS
+
+Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and ticks for the South--this
+seems to be Nature's decree, at least in this country. The mosquitoes of
+the Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously, while our Jersey
+mosquitoes hesitate and parley and make exasperating feints and passes.
+On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a swarm of these
+insects rose out of the grass as if they had been waiting for me all the
+years (as they had) and were so hungry that they could not stand upon
+the order of their proceeding, but came headlong.
+
+In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to death by the fleas. They
+were the most sorry, forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life was
+evidently a burden to them. I remember that Lewis and Clark, in their
+journey across the continent, were greatly pestered by fleas. I have
+found that our woodchucks, when they "hole up" in the fall, are full of
+fleas.
+
+
+VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
+
+I have just been reading, for the third time, Dana's "Two Years Before
+the Mast," my sojourn near San Diego for a few months, where so many of
+the scenes and events he describes took place, having given me a renewed
+interest in the book.
+
+It is very evident that the climate of southern California has greatly
+changed since Dana was here in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in
+1832 and 1833. The change has been from wet to dry. At that time his
+ship collected, and others engaged in the same trade collected, hundreds
+of thousands of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from cattle
+grown by the missions between San Diego and Santa Barbara. This fact
+implies good pasturage. The cattle grazed on the hills and plains that
+are now, during a large part of the year, as dry as a bone. At present
+cattle left to their own devices on this coast would soon starve to
+death.
+
+Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain, mainly from the
+southeast, which the ship, anchored a few miles off the coast, or
+cruising up and down, experienced at all times of year--one or more
+storms each week, often lasting for days. One December he describes it
+as raining every hour for the whole month. The dread of the southeasters
+was ever present with the sailors. One of these, lasting three days,
+which came out of a cloudless sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays a
+southeast storm of half a day is, according to my experience, an
+uncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely a drop of rain falls here from
+April till November, yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August. At
+present, in some of the interior valleys, where they grow alfalfa by
+means of irrigation, I see herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the season
+of rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle do well, but during
+the long dry season there is no pasturage save dry pasturage.
+
+Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season here, I have been
+here during three seasons and have so far seen only light rains. To-day
+(December 16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as you care to
+dig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in grain, and a great cloud of dust
+streamed out behind him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavy
+rainfall in this locality that inundated large sections of the country
+and destroyed much property, the dry San Diego River getting out of
+bounds and carrying away bridges and floating houses on its banks. But
+it has been as dry as a highway ever since. It is clear that when the
+big rains do come they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly.
+
+
+VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE
+
+Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on my home acres in the
+Catskills, I noticed that the wild strawberry-vines sent out their
+runners over the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the turf,
+just as over the ground. Of course they could not take root, but they
+went through all the motions of taking root; the little clusters of
+leaves developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their points or stood
+at "attention," and the runners pushed out two or three feet over the
+barren surface and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the desert
+whose strength begins to fail. The first knot, or, one might say, the
+first encampment, was about one foot from the last one upon the turf,
+the next one about eight inches farther in; then the distance dropped to
+six inches, then to four. I think the runner finally gave it up and
+stopped reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently draws its main
+sustenance from the one next behind it, and when this one fails to reach
+the soil it loses heart and can give little succor to the next in front.
+The result is that the stools become smaller and smaller, and the
+distances between them less and less, down the whole line.
+
+Nature's methods are seen in the little as well as in the big, and these
+little purple runners of the vine pushing out in all directions show the
+all-round-the-circle efforts of Nature as clearly as do the revolving
+orbs in sidereal space. Her living impulses go out in all directions.
+She scatters her seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots.
+She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as upon the land. She
+knows not our parsimony nor our prudence. We say she is blind, but
+without eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live to
+particular ends, and are limited to particular spheres, have need of
+eyes. Nature has all time and all space and all ends. Delays and failure
+she knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do not reach their
+goal, the trouble corrects itself; they finally stop searching for it in
+that direction, and the impulse of the plant goes out stronger and
+fuller on other sides.
+
+If the rains were especially designed to replenish our springs and
+supply our growing crops, the clouds might reasonably be expected to
+limit their benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the rains are
+older than are we and our crops, and it is we who must adjust ourselves
+to them, not they to us.
+
+The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized vision. Does the
+blood need eyes to find its way to the heart and lungs? Does the wind
+need eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop its winged seeds?
+It drops them upon all spots, and each kind in due time finds its proper
+habitat, the highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants,
+hitting their marks as surely as do others.
+
+Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps are numbered and must
+go in a particular direction, but the goal of all-seeing Nature is
+everywhere, and she arrives before she starts. She has no plan and no
+method, and she is not governed.
+
+These conceptions express too little, not too much. Nature's movements
+are circular; her definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The
+rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no more an end than is
+the rising vapor. Each is a part of the great circuit of beneficent and
+malevolent forces upon which our life (and all life) depends, upon which
+the making of the soil of the earth and the shaping of the landscape
+depend; all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and perfume of the
+world, all the glory of cloud and sky, all the hazards of flood and
+storm, all the terror of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit
+of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back again through the rivers
+to the sea. In our geologic time there is, in this circuit of the
+waters, more that favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say,
+we should not be here. The enormous destruction of human life, of all
+life, which has taken place and will continue to take place, in this
+beneficent circuit, is only an incident in the history of the globe; the
+physical forces are neither for nor against it; they are neutral; life
+to be here at all has to run these risks; has to run the gantlet of
+these forces, and to get many a lash and gash in the running. Against
+the suffering and death incident thereto there is no insurance save in
+the wit of man himself. All this wit has been developed and sharpened by
+much waste and suffering. We learn to deal with difficulties through the
+discipline of the difficulties themselves. If man were finally to learn
+to control the rains and the floods, it would be through the experience
+which they themselves bring him. The demons that destroy him are on his
+side when he strikes with the strength which they give him. Gravity,
+which so often crushes and overthrows him, is yet the source of all his
+might. The fire that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same fire
+that warms him and drives his engines across the continent.
+
+There is no god that pities us or weeps over our sufferings, save the
+god in our own breasts. We have life on heroic terms. Nature does not
+baby us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take our chances with
+all other forms of life. Our special good fortune is that we are capable
+of a higher development, capable of profiting to a greater extent by
+experience, than are the lower forms of life. And here is the mystery
+that has no solution: we came out of the burning nebulæ just as our
+horse and dog, but why we are men and they are still horse and dog we
+owe to some Power, or, shall I say, to the chance working of a multitude
+of powers, that are beyond our ken. That some Being willed it, designed
+it, no; yet it was in some way provided for in the constitution of the
+world.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Agassiz, Louis, 168, 169.
+
+  Air, light and heavy, 72, 73.
+
+  Albatross, 38.
+
+  Animal life, abundance, 11, 12.
+
+  Antlers, 201.
+
+  Ants, 11.
+
+  Army trucks, 110, 111.
+
+  Arum, 196.
+
+  Automobile trip, 109-26.
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis, 186.
+
+  Barton, W. Va., 119.
+
+  Bee, honey, spirit of the hive, 152, 158-62;
+    intelligence, 156, 157;
+    communication, 159, 160;
+    their world, 161;
+    sting, 165.
+
+  Bee, leaf-cutter, 14, 15.
+
+  Beech, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Birds, living with, 31;
+    flight, 32-38;
+    and cats, 56;
+    nesting near houses, 54-59;
+    home sense, 59;
+    nests of most species built by the females, 64, 65;
+    and dead trees, 84, 85;
+    song, 86;
+    at Pine Knot, Va., 102-05;
+    of southern California, 129-32;
+    community of mind in flocks, 153, 154.
+
+  Birds' nests, finding, 79-81.
+
+  Bluebird, endearing qualities, 43;
+    nesting, 43, 44, 54;
+    experience with a pair, 44-48.
+
+  Bobolink, song flight, 38, 85.
+
+  Bolar Springs, 117.
+
+  Brain, as organ of the mind, 22, 23.
+
+  Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc, 157.
+
+  Bumble-bee, carpenter, 36.
+
+  Bunting, indigo, nesting, 90, 91.
+
+  Bunting, painted, 114.
+
+  Butterflies, flight, 34;
+    flocking, 155.
+
+  Butterfly, monarch, 34, 35, 155.
+
+  Buzzard, turkey, 32-34.
+
+
+  Cacti, 143-48.
+
+  California, southern, observations in, 127-51;
+    coast, 127;
+    mountains, 127, 128;
+    climate and soil, 128;
+    bird-song, 128, 129;
+    birds, 129-32;
+    change of climate in, 210-12.
+
+  Cambium layer, 5, 6.
+
+  Carpenter, W. B., quoted, 194.
+
+  Catbird, 30;
+    stealthiness, 60, 67, 68;
+    experience with a pair, 60-66;
+    fondness for butter, 66;
+    theatrical, 68;
+    notes, 87.
+
+  Caterpillars, 91-94.
+
+  Causes, 165-67.
+
+  Cedar-bird, 65.
+
+  Chance, in animal life, 208, 209.
+
+  Cheat River, W. Va., 116.
+
+  Chipmunks, two in a den, 11;
+    storing currants, 17;
+    carrying provender, 96, 97.
+
+  Chippie. _See_ Sparrow, chipping.
+
+  Chlorophyll, 190, 191.
+
+  Chrysalis, 12.
+
+  Condor, 33, 34.
+
+  Connellsville, Pa., 113.
+
+  Cormorant, 132.
+
+  Cosmos, the, order and harmony of, 191-93.
+
+  Cow, 205.
+
+  Crow, flight, 37;
+    needs no great wing-power, 180.
+
+  Crow, fish, 55, 56, 68.
+
+  Cuckoo, 71, 72, 87;
+    solemnity, 88;
+    nesting, 88, 89;
+    young, 89;
+    nest, 90;
+    food, 90.
+
+  Cuckoo, black-billed, notes, 87, 88;
+    nesting-habits, 88.
+
+  Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 87.
+
+
+  Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., at San Diego, 210, 211.
+
+  Darwin, Charles, quoted, 5,17, 18, 33;
+    his eager study of natural history, 17, 18;
+    observations during the voyage of the Beagle, 18, 19;
+    failure of his theory, 147, 167-69;
+    his mind, 173;
+    treated man as an animal, 174.
+
+  Darwin, George Howard, on the tides, 169, 170.
+
+  Darwinism, a cause of the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Death, an analogy of, 185, 186.
+
+  Desert, vegetation of the, 143-48.
+
+  Dove, mourning, _or_ turtle-dove, 86.
+
+
+  Earth, the, quiverings of the surface, 169-71;
+    the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Edison, Thomas A., 114, 119;
+    contrasted with Mr. Ford, 122-25.
+
+  Elm, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 69, 165, 186.
+
+  Erosion, as sculpture, 181-83.
+
+
+  Fabre, Jean Henri, 162;
+    quoted, 139.
+
+  Far-away, the, 39.
+
+  Fear in animals, 58, 59, 154, 155, 209.
+
+  Fireflies, 19.
+
+  Firestone, H. S., 119, 125.
+
+  Fish, schools of, 154.
+
+  Fleas, 210.
+
+  Flies, intelligence, 156, 157.
+
+  Foraminiferæ, 194.
+
+  Ford, Henry, 113, 114, 119, 120;
+    contrasted with Mr. Edison, 122-24.
+
+  Foxes, 180.
+
+  Frog, wood, 94, 95.
+
+
+  Germans, Darwinism, and the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Giraffe, 200.
+
+  Girls, two West Virginia, 115.
+
+  Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 103.
+
+  God, man appropriating, 199.
+
+  Goldfinch, flight, 37, 42;
+    chorus singing, 40-42;
+    notes, 42;
+    notes of young, 43;
+    nesting, 43.
+
+  Grand Cañon, 182, 194.
+
+  Grass, the wonder of, 74, 75.
+
+  Grasshoppers, 155.
+
+  Great Smoky Mts., 109.
+
+  Greensborough, Pa., 112.
+
+  Grosbeak, rose-breasted, nesting, 65.
+
+  Grouse, ruffed, 166.
+
+  Gull, herring, 131.
+
+  Gulls, flight, 38.
+
+
+  Hawk, red-tailed, 32.
+
+  Hawks, flight, 35.
+
+  Haymaking, 69-76.
+
+  Hen-hawk, flight, 35.
+
+  Hornets, 163.
+
+  Horns, 201, 202.
+
+  Horse, 205, 206.
+
+  Horseshoe Run, W. Va., 114.
+
+  Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 64;
+    bathing in dew, 13;
+    nest, 79;
+    a fairy bird, 94.
+
+  Hurley, Edward N., 113.
+
+  Huxley, Thomas Henry, 27;
+    quoted, 8, 25.
+
+
+  Ibis, white, 32, 153, 154.
+
+  Insects, their world, 23-25, 162;
+    senses, 24;
+    reaction to heat,
+    cold, and vibrations, 25;
+    antennæ, 25;
+    the ruling sex among, 140, 141.
+
+  Interpretation, 186-90.
+
+  Ironweed, 116.
+
+
+  James, William, 22.
+
+  Jay, blue, notes, 87.
+
+  Joe-Pye-weed, 116.
+
+  Junco, young, 19, 20;
+    nesting, 81;
+    abundance, 82.
+
+
+  Kepler, Johann, 169.
+
+  Killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Kingbird, flight, 37;
+    and bees, 156.
+
+
+  Leaves, autumn, 1-3.
+
+  Lemmings, 152, 153.
+
+  Life, origin of, 194, 195.
+
+  Life, human, analogies, 25-27.
+
+  Lightning-bugs. _See_ Fireflies.
+
+  Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 5.
+
+  Lubbock, Sir John, quoted, 156.
+
+
+  McCarthy, Denis Aloysius, quoted, 157.
+
+  Maeterlinck, Maurice, quoted, 23, 162;
+    on the bee, 156-63.
+
+  Man, and Darwinism, 174;
+    a part of nature, 184-86;
+    interpretation of nature and of himself, 186-90;
+    mystery of his evolution, 216.
+
+  Maple, sugar, susceptibility to atmospheric changes, 72, 73.
+
+  Maples, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Marcus Aurelius, quoted, 185.
+
+  Meadowlark, song flight, 37.
+
+  Measuring-worm, 91, 92.
+
+  Mice, wild, 16;
+    barking trees, 27, 28.
+
+  Microphone, 170, 171.
+
+  Microseisms, 170.
+
+  Mind, community of, 152-55.
+
+  Mockingbird, 68.
+
+  Moose, 200.
+
+  Mosquitoes, 210.
+
+  Moth, luna, 97.
+
+  Mouse, jumping, 166, 167.
+
+  Mouse, white-footed, 166.
+
+  Mullets, 154.
+
+
+  Natural history about home, 39, 40.
+
+  Nature, her methods unlike ours, 179-81, 199;
+    interpreting, 186-90;
+    lavishness and parsimony, 195, 196, 209;
+    puzzling and contradictory, 201, 202;
+    all-seeing, 212-14;
+    her movements circular, 214-16.
+
+  Nighthawk, 104.
+
+  Nonpareil, _or_ painted bunting, 114.
+
+  North Carolina, a countryman of, 121.
+
+  Northern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+
+  Oak, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Odd and even numbers, 163-65.
+
+  Oriole, Baltimore, 30, 56;
+    nest, 48-52, 64.
+
+  Oriole, Bullock's, nest, 52.
+
+  Oriole, orchard, nest, 52.
+
+  Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on the origin of life, 194, 195.
+
+  Ostrich, 200.
+
+  Owl, screech, 45-47.
+
+
+  Pacific Ocean, 127.
+
+  Pain, 209.
+
+  Pear-trees, autumn color, 1.
+
+  Pelican, California brown, 131, 132.
+
+  Pennsylvania, motor trip through, 109-13.
+
+  Pewee, wood, nest, 52, 64;
+    its plaint, 87.
+
+  Phœbe, flight, 37;
+    nest, 52-54, 56, 59, 60, 64, 79, 80.
+
+  Pigeon, wild, 103, 104.
+
+  Pine Knot, Va., visit to, 101-08.
+
+  Pipit, American, 129;
+    nest, 129, 130.
+
+  Pittsburgh, 111.
+
+  Plover, killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Porcupine, 166.
+
+
+  Rabbit, its protection, 166;
+    caught by a weasel, 177, 178.
+
+  Rainbow tints, in dew, etc., 13, 14.
+
+  Rat, wood, 207 _note_.
+
+  Reasons, 165-67.
+
+  Redstart, 29.
+
+  Road-mending, 11.
+
+  Robin, young, 19;
+    nest, 53-55, 64, 176;
+    fear of man, 57, 58;
+    fittest to survive, 175, 176;
+    versatility, 176;
+    a hustler, 176;
+    danger of a plague of robins, 177;
+    a runner, 177.
+
+  Rocks, origin of the secondary, 200.
+
+  Roosevelt, Theodore, visit to Pine Knot, Va., with, 101-08;
+    knowledge of India, 101;
+    opinion of Taft, 105;
+    killing a mosquito, 105, 106;
+    protection of the President, 106;
+    bird-gazing, 107;
+    letter from, 107, 108.
+
+
+  Salamander, orange-colored, 95, 96.
+
+  San Diego, Cal., 210-12.
+
+  Sandstone, in the Catskills, 20.
+
+  Sap, 6-8.
+
+  Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Scorpion, 23.
+
+  Seals, hair, in California, 148-51.
+
+  Sex, the ruling, 140, 141.
+
+  Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, 169;
+    on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Shrew, 16.
+
+  Skunk, 206-08.
+
+  Snakes, 11.
+
+  Sources, original, 190, 191.
+
+  South, characteristics of the, 120, 121.
+
+  Southern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+  Sparrow, story of a nest, 98, 99.
+
+  Sparrow, chipping _or_ social, nest, 53, 54.
+
+  Sparrow, song, song flight, 37;
+    nesting, 54;
+    singing, 85, 86.
+
+  Sparrow, vesper, nesting, 80-84;
+    its names, 82;
+    appearance and habits, 82, 83;
+    courted by a skylark, 83.
+
+  Species, origin of, an insoluble problem, 167-69, 199.
+
+  Spider, trap-door, 132-43.
+
+  Spiders, 12, 23;
+    genius of, 136.
+
+  Spider-webs, rainbows in, 13, 14.
+
+  Squirrel, gray, caught by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Squirrel, red, chased by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Strawberry-vines, wild, 212-14.
+
+  Struggle, 203, 204.
+
+  Sunrise, 197, 198.
+
+  Survival of the fit, 201, 203.
+
+  Swallow, bank, 78.
+
+  Swallow, barn, 71;
+    parental anxiety, 76, 77;
+    notes, 76, 77;
+    pleasing qualities, 77, 78.
+
+  Swallow, cliff, 77.
+
+  Swallow, tree, 78.
+
+  Swallows, feeding, 15, 16;
+    hibernation, 78.
+
+  Swift, chimney, 36.
+
+  Sycamore, autumn color, 3.
+
+
+  Taft, William Howard, 105.
+
+  Telepathy, 155.
+
+  Thistle, Canada, 202.
+
+  Thorns, the use of, 143-48.
+
+  Thrasher, brown, 67, 68.
+
+  Thrush, Alaska hermit, 129.
+
+  Thrush, hermit, song, 87.
+
+  Thrush, olive-backed, 30.
+
+  Thrush, Wilson's. _See_ Veery.
+
+  Thrush, wood, 30, 64;
+    manners, 67, 68.
+
+  Tides, the, 169, 170, 193, 194.
+
+  Titlark. _See_ Pipit.
+
+  Trees, leaves, 1-3;
+    mechanism of growth, 4-8;
+    roots and rootlets, 4-6;
+    what man has in common with, 9, 10.
+
+  Tree-toad, 71.
+
+  Turnip, Indian, 196.
+
+  Turtle-dove. _See_ Dove, mourning.
+
+
+  Uniontown, Pa., 113.
+
+  Universe. _See_ Cosmos.
+
+
+  Van Dyke, John C., on desert plants, 145, 146.
+
+  Veery, nesting, 97, 98.
+
+  Vireo, nest, young, and mother, 99, 100.
+
+  Vireo, red-eyed, 86, 100.
+
+  Vireo, yellow-throated, 30.
+
+  Vital principle, 8, 9.
+
+
+  Warbler, Audubon's, 129.
+
+  Warbler, Canada, 29.
+
+  Warbler, mourning, 29, 31.
+
+  Wasp, a solitary, 12, 13.
+
+  Water-thrush, _or_ water accentor, 79.
+
+  Waxwing, Bohemian, 21.
+
+  Weasel, catching rabbits and squirrels, 177, 178;
+    an inspirer of terror, 178, 179.
+
+  Weather, prophesying the, 20-22.
+
+  West Virginia, motor trip through, 114-19.
+
+  Whitman, Walt, quoted, 9, 193.
+
+  Wolf Creek, 117.
+
+  Woodcock, flight song, 32, 37.
+
+  Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Woodpeckers, flight, 37.
+
+  World War, Darwinism a cause of the, 172-75.
+
+  Wren, Bewick's, 103.
+
+  Wren, house, 86;
+    and nesting-box, 29.
+
+  Wren, winter, nest, 79.
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+  CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
+  U · S · A
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 30246 ***
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+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+
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+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under the Maples
+
+Author: John  Burroughs
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2009 [EBook #30246]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE MAPLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Turgut Dincer, Joseph Cooper and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="tn">Transcriber's Note:<br />
+Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy
+has been retained as it appears in the original
+publication.</div>
+
+<h1>UNDER THE MAPLES</h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/photo.jpg" width="500" height="643" alt=
+"The last portrait of John Burroughs" title="" />
+
+<div class="caption">THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS<br />
+<small>(March 23, 1921; six days before his death)</small><br />
+Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time
+friend Charles F. Lummis</div></div>
+
+
+<h1>UNDER THE MAPLES</h1>
+
+<h3><small>BY</small><br />
+JOHN BURROUGHS<br /><br /></h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 100px;"><img src="images/printer.jpg" width="100" height="131" alt=
+"Printer's mark" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h4>
+<small>BOSTON AND NEW YORK</small><br />
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br />
+<b>The Riverside Press Cambridge</b></h4>
+
+<h6>COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY</h6>
+
+<h6>ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</h6>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">v</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the
+Catskills and looking out upon the maple woods of
+the old home farm, and under the maples at Riverby,
+that the most of these essays were written,
+during the last two years of the author's life. And it
+was to the familiar haunts near his Hudson River
+home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering
+in Southern California in 1921. As he pictured
+in his mind the ice breaking up on the river in the
+crystalline March days, the return of the birds, the
+first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he
+was there in spirit, gazing upon the river from the
+summer-house, or from the veranda of the Nest, or
+seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or
+busy with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.</p>
+
+<p>Casting about for a title for this volume, the
+vision of maple-trees and dripping sap and crisp
+March days playing constantly before his mind,
+one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his
+new book, he suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call
+it <i>Under the Maples</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>His love for the maple, and consequently his
+pleasure in having hit upon this title, can be gathered
+from the following fragment found among his
+miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">vi</a></span>
+the sugar maple grows It was paramount in the
+woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It
+looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple
+stick to put on my fire, I feel like caressing it a
+little. Its fiber is as white as a lily, and nearly as
+sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory
+wood to handle&mdash;a clean, docile, wholesome tree;
+burning without snapping or sputtering, easily
+worked up into stovewood, fine of grain, hard of
+texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as
+a shade tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness
+in summer, sugar in its veins, gold in its foliage,
+warmth in its fibers, and health in it the year
+round."</p>
+
+<p><span class="quotsig"><span class="smcap">Clara Barrus</span></span></p>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Nest at Riverby</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0em;"><i>West Park on the Hudson</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><i>New York</i></span><br />
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">vii</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">I.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">The Falling Leaves</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">II.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">The Pleasures of a Naturalist</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">III.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">The Flight of Birds</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">Bird Intimacies</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">V.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">A Midsummer Idyl</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_69">69</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">Near Views of Wild Life</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">With Roosevelt at Pine Knot</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">A Strenuous Holiday</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">IX.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">Under Genial Skies</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">A Sun-Blessed Land</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Lawn Birds</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Silken Chambers</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Desert Note</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_143">143</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Sea-Dogs</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">X.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">A Sheaf of Nature Notes</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Nature's Wireless</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Maeterlinck on the Bee</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Odd or Even</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Why and How</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">An Insoluble Problem</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">A Live World</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Darwinism and the War</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_172">172</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Robin</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IX.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Weasel</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">X.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Misinterpreting Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">XI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Natural Sculpture</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">XI.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">viii</a></span><span class="smcap">Ruminations</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_184">184</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Man a Part of Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_184">184</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Marcus Aurelius on Death</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Interpreter of Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Original Source</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Cosmic Harmony</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Cosmic Rhythms</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Beginnings of Life</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_194">194</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Spendthrift Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">XII.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">New Gleanings in Field and Wood</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Sunrise</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Nature's Methods</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_199">199</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Heads and Tails</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">An Unsavory Subject</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Chance in Animal Life</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_208">208</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Mosquitoes and Fleas</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle2"><p class="indent">The Change of Climate in Southern California</p></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">All-Seeing Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="middle" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Index</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_217">217</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>UNDER<br />
+THE MAPLES</h1>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">I</div>
+
+<div class="center">THE FALLING LEAVES</div>
+
+
+<p>The time of the falling of leaves has come again.
+Once more in our morning walk we tread upon
+carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and bronze,
+woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate
+textures while we slept.</p>
+
+<p>How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of
+light and color are their last days! There are
+exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of the
+fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously.
+They bequeath their heritage of color to their fruit.
+Upon it they lavish the hues which other trees
+lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often
+an exception. I have seen pear orchards in October
+painting a hillside in hues of mingled bronze
+and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, it
+is so chary of color upon its fruit.</p>
+
+<p>But in October what a feast to the eye our woods
+and groves present! The whole body of the air
+seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They
+are giving back the light they have been absorbing
+from the sun all summer.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so
+clean and delicate when it first covers the paths and
+the highways that one almost hesitates to walk
+upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw
+down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth to walk upon?
+See what a robe the maples have thrown down for
+you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to
+soil it! The summer robes of the groves and the
+forests&mdash;more than robes, a vital part of themselves,
+the myriad living nets with which they have captured,
+and through which they have absorbed, the
+energy of the solar rays. What a change when the
+leaves are gone, and what a change when they come
+again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The
+dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change
+but little from summer to winter. When the leaves
+come, what a transformation, what mobility, what
+sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand
+delicate veined hands reaching forth and waving
+a greeting to the air and light, making a union and
+compact with them, like a wedding ceremony.
+How young the old trees suddenly become! what
+suppleness and grace invest their branches! The
+leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the
+cambium layer beneath the bark is the girdle of
+perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial expression
+of the same quality. The leaves have their
+day and die, but the last leaf that comes to the
+branch is as young as the first. The leaves and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span>
+the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go,
+yet they age not; under the magic touch of spring
+the miracle is repeated over and over.</p>
+
+<p>The maples perhaps undergo the most complete
+transformation of all the forest trees. Their leaves
+fairly become luminous, as if they glowed with
+inward light. In October a maple-tree before
+your window lights up your room like a great lamp.
+Even on cloudy days its presence helps to dispel
+the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess
+in a much less degree that quality of luminosity,
+though certain species of oak at times are rich in
+shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees
+just named for the most part turn brown before
+they fall. The great leaves of the sycamore assume
+a rich tan-color like fine leather.</p>
+
+<p>The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals
+with which to capture her prey, but the net is not
+a part of herself as the leaf is a part of the tree.
+The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree
+never repairs its leaves. It may put forth new
+leaves, but it never essays to patch up the old ones.
+Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves
+that a few more or less or a few torn and bruised
+ones do not seem to matter. When the leaf
+surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some
+insect pest, or some form of leaf-blight, or by the
+ravages of a hail-storm, the growth of the tree and
+the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked. To<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
+denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession
+usually proves fatal. The vitality of the tree
+declines year by year till death ensues.</p>
+
+<p>To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable
+as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which
+it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets at the
+bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at
+the top. The rootlets absorb the water charged
+with mineral salts from the soil, and the leaves
+absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as
+if the tree were almost made of matter and spirit,
+like man; the ether with its vibrations, on the one
+hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds,
+on the other&mdash;earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy
+oak, the gigantic sequoia, are each equally finely
+organized in these parts that take hold upon nature.
+We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense
+they are; but all are delicate feeders in their
+mechanism of absorption from the earth and air.</p>
+
+<p>The tree touches the inorganic world at the two
+finest points of its structure&mdash;the rootlets and
+the leaves. These attack the great crude world
+of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only
+the microscope can fully reveal them to us. The
+animal world seizes its food in masses little and big,
+and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable,
+through the agency of the solvent power of water,
+absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.</p>
+
+<p>A tree does not live by its big roots&mdash;these are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>
+mainly for strength and to hold it to the ground.
+How they grip the rocks, fitting themselves to them,
+as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's life
+is in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the
+roots. Darwin says those rootlets behave as if
+they had minute brains in their extremities. They
+feel their way into the soil; they know the elements
+the plant wants; some select more lime, others
+more potash, others more magnesia. The wheat
+rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the
+pea rootlets select more lime: the pea does not
+need the silica. The individuality of plants and
+trees in this respect is most remarkable. The
+cells of each seem to know what particular elements
+they want from the soil, as of course they do.</p>
+
+<p>The vital activity of the tree goes on at three
+points&mdash;in the leaves, in the rootlets, and in the
+cambium layer. The activity of the leaf and rootlet
+furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this
+generative layer&mdash;the milky, mucilaginous girdle
+of matter between the outer bark and the wood
+through which the tree grows and increases in size.
+Generation and regeneration take place through
+this layer. I have called it the girdle of perpetual
+youth. It never grows old. It is annually renewed.
+The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and
+disappear, indeed the tree may be reduced to a
+mere shell and many of its branches may die and
+fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>
+the fact that its cambium layer, at least over a part
+of its surface, is still youthful and doing its work.
+It is this layer that the yellow-bellied woodpecker,
+known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours,
+thus drawing directly upon the vitality of the tree.
+But his ravages are rarely serious. Only in two
+instances have I seen dead branches on an apple-tree
+that appeared to be the result of his drilling.</p>
+
+<p>What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense
+the heart; it has no vital function, but only the
+mechanical one of strength and support. It adds
+to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms.
+The trunk of a tree is like a community where only
+one generation at a time is engaged in active business,
+the great mass of the population being retired
+and adding solidity and permanence to the social
+organism. The rootlets of a plant or a tree are
+like the laborers in the field that produce for us
+the raw material of our food, while the leaves are
+like our many devices for rendering it edible and
+nourishing. The rootlets continue their activity
+in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and
+thus gorge the tree with fluid against the needs of
+the spring. In the growing tree or vine the sap,
+charged with nourishment, flows down from the
+top to the roots. In the spring it evidently
+flows upward, seeking the air through the leaves.
+Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always
+flows upward, while the nutritive sap flows down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>ward,
+thus giving the tree a kind of double
+circulation.</p>
+
+<p>A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful
+when we have come to a knowledge of all its hidden
+processes, but it certainly is no less so. We do
+not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the
+bark, nor of the roots and rootlets, when we gaze
+upon a noble oak or an elm; we admire it for its
+form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin to ourselves;
+it is the work of a vast community of cells
+like those that build up our own bodies; it is a
+fountain of living matter rising up out of the earth
+and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a
+spray of leaves and flowers; and if we could see its
+hidden processes we should realize how truly like a
+fountain it is. While in full leaf a current of water
+is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward
+against gravity. This stream of water is truly its
+life current; it enters at the rootlets under the
+ground and escapes at the top through the leaves
+by a process called transpiration. All the mineral
+salts with which the tree builds up its woody tissues,&mdash;its
+osseous system, so to speak,&mdash;the instruments
+with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon
+which it obtains from the air, are borne in solution
+in this stream of water. Its function is analogous to
+that of the rivers which bring the produce and other
+material to the great cities situated upon their
+banks. A cloud of invisible vapor rises from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span>
+top of every tree and a thousand invisible rills
+enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The
+trees are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters
+from the earth to the clouds. Our own bodies and
+the bodies of all living things perform a similar
+function. Life cannot go on without water, but
+water is not a food; it makes the processes of
+metabolism possible; assimilation and elimination
+go on through its agency. Water and air are the
+two ties between the organic and the inorganic.
+The function of the one is mainly mechanical,
+that of the other is mainly chemical.</p>
+
+<p>As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows
+out at the top, to which point it rises by capillary
+attraction and a process called osmosis. Neither
+of them is a strictly vital process, since both are
+found in the inorganic world; but they are in the
+service of what we call a vital principle. Some
+physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a
+vital principle. Huxley thought we might as well
+talk about the principle of aqueosity in water.
+We are the victims of words. The sun does not
+shoot out beams or rays, though the eye reports
+such; but it certainly sends forth energy; and it
+is as certain that there is a new activity in matter&mdash;some
+matter&mdash;that we call vital.</p>
+
+<p>Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up
+new compounds and begets myriads of new forms
+not found in the inorganic world, till it finally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>
+builds up the body and mind of man. Death puts
+an end to this activity alike in man and tree, and
+a new kind of activity sets in&mdash;a disorganizing
+activity, still with the aid of water and air and
+living organisms. It is like the compositor distributing
+his type after the book is printed. The
+micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but they
+are of a different kind from those which build up
+the body in the first instance. But the living
+body as a whole, with its complex of co&ouml;rdinating
+organs and functions&mdash;what attended to that?
+The cells build the parts, but what builds the
+whole?</p>
+
+<p>How many things we have in common with the
+trees! The same mysterious gift of life, to begin
+with; the same primary elements&mdash;carbon, nitrogen,
+oxygen, and so on&mdash;in our bodies; and
+many of the same vital functions&mdash;respiration,
+circulation, absorption, assimilation, reproduction.
+Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell
+is the architect that builds up the bodies of both.
+Trees are rooted men and men are walking trees.
+The tree absorbs its earth materials through the
+minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrill&aelig;, and the
+animal body absorbs its nutriment through
+analogous organs in the intestines, called lacteals.</p>
+
+<p>Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid
+trees" often comes to my mind. They are the words
+of a poet who sees hidden relations and meanings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
+everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all
+animate nature is. The trees are wrapped in a
+kind of slumber in winter, and they are reservoirs
+of living currents in summer. If all living bodies
+came originally out of the sea, they brought a big
+dower of the sea with them. The human body
+is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held in
+solution by several gallons of water. The ashes
+of the living tree bulk small in comparison with
+the amount of water it holds. Yes, "the slumbering
+and liquid trees." They awaken from
+their slumber in the spring, the scales fall from
+their buds, the fountains within them are unsealed,
+and they again become streams of living
+energy, breaking into leaf and bloom and fruit
+under the magic of the sun's rays.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">II</div>
+
+<div class="center">THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST</div>
+
+<div class="center2">I</div>
+
+<p>How closely every crack and corner of nature is
+packed with life, especially in our northern temperate
+zone! I was impressed with this fact when
+during several June days I was occupied with
+road-mending on the farm where I was born. To
+open up the loosely piled and decaying laminated
+rocks was to open up a little biological and zo&ouml;logical
+museum, so many of our smaller forms of life
+harbored there. From chipmunks to ants and
+spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the
+chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more
+beneath the loosely piled rocks. There were two
+of them in a soft, warm nest of dry, shredded
+maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned
+out of doors, but when they heard the racket overhead
+bolted precipitately. Two living together
+surprised me, as heretofore I had never known
+but one in a den. Near them a milk snake had
+stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the little
+earthquake which we set up got badly crushed.
+Two little red-bellied snakes about one foot long
+had also found harbor there.</p>
+
+<p>The ants rushed about in great consternation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>
+when their eggs were suddenly exposed. In fact,
+there was live natural history under every stone
+about us. Some children brought me pieces of
+stone, which they picked up close by, which
+sheltered a variety of cocoon-building spiders.
+One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about
+its ball of eggs, the size of a large pea, attached
+to the hind part of its body. This became detached,
+when she seized it eagerly and bore it
+about held between her legs. Another fragment
+of stone, the size of one's hand, sheltered the
+chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was
+attached to it at its tail. It was surprising to
+see this enshrouded creature, blind and deaf,
+wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with
+its wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would
+about as soon expect to see an egg protest.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere.
+Every solitude to him is peopled. Every
+morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to
+eye or ear.</p>
+
+<p>The born naturalist is one of the most lucky
+men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or
+shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his
+pleasures are always near at hand. The great
+book of nature is open before him and he has only
+to turn the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory
+rocking-chair the other day was annoyed by one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>
+of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want
+to occupy the chair. It held a small worm in
+its legs. She would "shoo" it away, only to see
+it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it
+did not want to sting her, but that its nest was
+somewhere in the chair. And, sure enough, as
+soon as she quieted down, it entered a small
+opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and
+deposited its worm, and presently was back with
+another, and then a third and a fourth; and
+before the day was done it came with little pellets
+of mud and sealed up the opening.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II</div>
+
+<p>My morning walk up to the beech wood often
+brings me new knowledge and new glimpses of
+nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird
+taking its bath in the big dewdrops on a small
+ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe in the
+dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not
+before know that the hummer bathed at all.</p>
+
+<p>I also discovered that the webs of the little
+spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture,
+as they were from the early fog this morning,
+exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web
+was strung with minute spherules of moisture,
+and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow.
+In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny
+rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span>
+other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course
+I could not see the completed bow in so small an
+area. These fragments are as unapproachable as
+the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a
+suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays
+rainbow tints, you can see only one at a time&mdash;to
+the right or left of you. It also is a fragment of
+a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a
+great display of prismatic effects in the foliage
+of trees, or in the grass after a shower, are not
+to be credited. You may see the drops glistening
+in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit
+prismatic tints. In only one at a time will
+you see rainbow tints. Change your position, and
+you may see another, but never a great display of
+prismatic tints at one time.</p>
+
+<p>In my walk the other morning I turned over a
+stone, looking for spiders and ants. These I found,
+and in addition there were two cells of one of our
+solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called
+"sweat bees," because they came around us and
+would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if
+in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about
+the size of a honey bee, of lighter color, and its
+abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It carries
+its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs.
+These cells were of a greenish-brown color; each
+of them was like a miniature barrel in which the
+pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
+When the egg hatches, the grub finds a loaf of
+bread at hand for its nourishment. These little
+barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular
+bits of leaves cut as with a compass, exactly
+fitting the cylinder, one upon the other. The wall
+of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings
+from leaves, about half an inch wide, and three
+quarters of an inch long, a dozen of them lapped
+over one another, and fitted together in the most
+workmanlike manner.</p>
+
+<p>In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting
+out her nesting-material. Her mandibles
+worked like perfect shears. When she had cut out
+her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them
+up, and, holding them between her legs, flew away
+with them. I have seen her carry them into little
+openings in old rails, or old posts. About the period
+of hatching, I do not know.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III</div>
+
+<p>Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects,
+do not snap their game up as do the true flycatchers.
+Their mouths are little nets which they drive
+through the air with the speed of airplanes. A
+few mornings ago the air was cold, but it contained
+many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the size of mosquitoes
+down to gnats. They kept near the
+ground. I happened to be sitting on the sunny
+side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep past.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
+One came by within ten feet of me and drove
+straight on to a very conspicuous insect which
+disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How
+many hundreds or thousands of such insects they
+must devour each day! Then think of how many
+insects the flycatchers and warblers and other
+insect-eating birds must consume in the course of
+a season!</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV</div>
+
+<p>We little suspect how the woods and wayside
+places swarm with life. We see little of it unless
+we watch and wait. The wild creatures are
+cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies
+are on the lookout for them. Certain woods at
+night are alive with flying squirrels which, except
+for some accident, we never see by day. Then
+there are the night prowlers&mdash;skunks, foxes,
+coons, minks, and owls&mdash;yes, and mice.</p>
+
+<p>The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew
+mole, which I know is active at night, I have never
+seen but once. I once set a trap, called the delusion
+trap, in the woods by some rocks where I
+had no reason to suspect there were more mice
+than elsewhere, and two mornings later it was
+literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.</p>
+
+<p>Turn over a stone in the fields and behold
+the consternation among the small folk beneath
+it,&mdash;ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders,&mdash;all object<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>ing
+to the full light of day, not because their deeds
+are evil, but because the instinct of self-preservation
+prompts this course. As I write these sentences, a
+chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the roadside
+near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe
+currants which grew on a bush a few yards away.
+Of course the currants will ferment and rot, but
+that consideration does not disturb him; the
+seeds will keep, and they are what he is after. In
+the early summer, before any of the nuts and
+grains are ripened, the high cost of living among
+the lesser rodents is very great, and they resort to
+all sorts of makeshifts.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V</div>
+
+<p>In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden
+places of nature, Darwin says as much of the world
+as a whole:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean
+ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains&mdash;warm
+mineral springs&mdash;the wide expanse and depth of the
+ocean, the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even
+the surface of perpetual snow&mdash;all support organic
+beings.</p></div>
+
+<p>Never before was there such a lover of natural
+history as Darwin. In the earth, in the air, in the
+water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the mud&mdash;he
+scanned the great biological record of the globe as
+it was never scanned before. During the voyage of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>
+the Beagle he shirked no hardships to add to his
+stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the
+comfortable ship while it was making its surveys,
+and make journeys of hundreds of miles on horseback
+through rough and dangerous regions to glean
+new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology
+or botany or zo&ouml;logy or anthropology for himself,
+and he was happy. At a great altitude in the
+Andes the people had shortness of breath which
+they called "puna," and they ate onions to correct
+it. Darwin says, with a twinkle in his eye, "For my
+part I found nothing so good as the fossil shells."</p>
+
+<p>His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of
+natural-history knowledge. Was any country
+ever before so searched and sifted for its biological
+facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods,
+everywhere his insatiable eye penetrated. One
+re-reads him always with a different purpose in
+view. If you happen to be interested in insects,
+you read him for that; if in birds, you read him
+for that; if in mammals, in fossils, in reptiles, in
+volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with
+each of these subjects in mind. I recently had in
+mind the problem of the soaring condor, and I
+re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had
+studied and mastered that subject, too. If you
+are interested in seeing how the biological characteristics
+of the two continents, North and South
+America, agree or contrast with each other, you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span>
+will find what you wish to know. You will learn
+that in South America the lightning-bugs and glowworms
+of many kinds are the same as in North
+America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed
+upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls
+upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene
+fungus, or <i>Phallus</i>, taints the tropical forests, as a
+similar species at times taints our dooryards and
+pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps
+stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their
+young, just as in North America. Of course
+there are new species of animal and plant life, but
+not many. The influence of environment in modifying
+species is constantly in his mind.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI</div>
+
+<p>The naturalist can content himself with a day of
+little things. If he can read only a word of one syllable
+in the book of nature, he will make the most of
+that. I read such a word the other morning when
+I perceived, when watching a young but fully
+fledged junco, or snowbird, that its markings
+Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young
+of birds always for a brief period repeat the
+markings of the birds of the parent stem from which
+they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our
+robins have speckled breasts, betraying their
+thrush kinship. And the young junco shows, in
+its striped appearance of breast and back, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span>
+lateral white quills in the tail, its kinship to the
+grass finch or vesper sparrow. The slate-color
+soon obliterates most of these signs, but the white
+quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits
+of its forbears. The vesper sparrow nests
+upon the ground in the open fields, but the junco
+chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside,
+or in the woods, and constructs a very artistic
+nest of dry grass and hair which is so well hidden
+that the passer-by seldom detects it.</p>
+
+<p>Another small word I read about certain of the
+rocks in my native Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray
+sandstone, that when you have split them
+open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown
+them up with dynamite, instead of the gray fresh
+surface of the rock greeting you, it is often a surface
+of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled
+or electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from
+the first muddy day of creation. I have such
+a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It
+is amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of
+doorstones fall upon it with soap and hot water,
+and utterly fail to make any impression upon it.
+Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with
+primal mud. The fresh-water origin of the Catskill
+rocks no doubt in some way accounts for it.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII</div>
+
+<p>We are all interested students of the weather, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>
+the naturalist studies it for some insight into the
+laws which govern it. One season I made my reputation
+as a weather prophet by predicting on the
+first day of December a very severe winter. It
+was an easy guess. I saw in Detroit a bird from
+the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the
+Bohemian waxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above
+the Arctic Circle and is common to both hemispheres.
+I said, When the Arctic birds come down,
+be sure there is a cold wave behind them. And
+so it proved.</p>
+
+<p>When the birds fail to give one a hint of the
+probable character of the coming winter, what
+reliable signs remain? These remain: When
+December is marked by sudden and violent extremes
+of heat and cold, the winter will be broken;
+the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that
+the hum of the bee in December is the requiem of
+winter. But when the season is very evenly
+spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing
+through November and December, no hurry, no
+violence, then be prepared for a snug winter.</p>
+
+<p>As to wet and dry summers, one can always be
+guided by the rainfall on the Pacific coast; a
+shortage on the western coast means an excess on
+the eastern. For four or five years past California
+has been short of its rainfall; so much so that quite
+general alarm is felt over the gradual shrinkage of
+their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span>
+and during the summer seasons the parts of New
+England and New York with which I am acquainted
+have had very wet seasons&mdash;floods in
+midsummer, and full springs and wells at all times.
+The droughts have been temporary and local.</p>
+
+<p>We say, "As fickle as the weather," but the
+meteorological laws are pretty well defined. All
+signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail in a wet
+season. At one time the south wind brings no
+rain, at another time the north and northwest
+winds do bring rain. The complex of conditions
+over a continental area of rivers and lakes and
+mountain-chains is too vast for us to decipher; it
+inheres in the nature of things. It is one of the
+potencies and possibilities which matter possesses.
+We can take no step beyond that.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII</div>
+
+<p>There seems to me to be false reasoning in the
+argument from analogy which William James uses
+in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The
+brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but
+may only sustain the relation to it, he says, which
+the wire sustains to the electric current which
+it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water
+which it conveys.</p>
+
+<p>Now the source and origin of the electric current
+is outside the wire that transmits it, and it could
+sustain no other than a transient relation to any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span>
+outside material through which it passed. But
+if we know anything, we know that the human mind
+or spirit is a vital part of the human body; its
+source is in the brain and nervous system; hence,
+it and the organ through which it is manifested
+are essentially one.</p>
+
+<p>The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo
+in which the current originates is the only
+logical or permissible one.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IX</div>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb
+life, and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
+earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something,
+on the other hand, about the insect that does not
+belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our
+globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect
+comes from another planet, more monstrous, more
+energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal
+than our own.</p></div>
+
+<p>Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own.
+Among the spiders, for instance, the female eats
+the male and often devours her own young. The
+scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing
+like it among our land animals outside the insect
+world.</p>
+
+<p>The insects certainly live in a wonderland of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>
+which we have little conception. All our powers
+are tremendously exaggerated in these little people.
+Their power makes them acquainted with the inner
+molecular constitution of matter far more intimately
+than we can attain to by our coarse chemical
+analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations,
+coarse and fine, of which our senses can take in
+only the slower ones. If they exceed three
+thousand a second, they become too shrill for our
+ears. It is thought that the world of sound with
+the insects begins where ours leaves off. The
+drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute.
+What would to us be a continuous sound is to them
+a series of separate blows. We begin to hear
+blows as continuous sounds when they amount to
+about thirty a second. The house-fly has about
+four thousand eye-lenses; the cabbage butterfly,
+and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand;
+and some species of beetles have twenty-five
+thousand. We cannot begin to think in what an
+agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and vibrating
+to a degree that would drive us insane. If we
+possessed the same microscopic gifts, how would
+the aspect of the world be changed! We might
+see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies,
+or hear the hum of a mosquito as the
+blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so much
+that disturbs us must escape the insects, because
+their senses are too fine to take it in. Doubtless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>
+they do not hear the thunder or feel the earthquake.</p>
+
+<p>The insects are much more sensitive to heat and
+cold than we are, and for reasons. The number
+of waves in the ether that gives us the sensation of
+heat is three or four million millions a second. The
+number of tremors required to produce red light is
+estimated at four hundred and seventy-four million
+millions a second, and for the production of violet
+light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions
+a second. No doubt the insects react to all these
+different degrees of vibration. Those marvelous
+instruments called antenn&aelig; seem to put them in
+touch with a world of which we are quite oblivious.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">X</div>
+
+<p>To how many things our lives have been compared!&mdash;to
+a voyage, with its storms and adverse currents
+and safe haven at last; to a day with its morning,
+noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring,
+summer, autumn, and winter; to a game, a school,
+a battle.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley
+compared life to a game of chess. We must learn
+the names and the values and the moves of each
+piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope
+to play it successfully. The chessboard is the
+world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe,
+the rules of the game are what we call the laws of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>
+nature. But it may be questioned if the comparison
+is a happy one. Life is not a game in this sense,
+a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over
+an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and
+then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery
+of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the
+forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are
+much more vague and varied and intangible than
+are those of the chessboard. Life is co&ouml;peration
+with other lives. We win when we help others to
+win. I suppose business is more often like a game
+than is life&mdash;your gain is often the other man's
+loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
+rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal
+life there is little that suggests a game of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>We must all have money, or its equivalent.
+There are the three things&mdash;money, goods, labor&mdash;and
+the greatest of these is labor. Labor is the
+sum of all values. The value of things is the labor
+it requires to produce or to obtain them. Were
+gold plentiful and silver scarce, the latter would be
+the more precious. The men at the plough and
+the hoe and in the mines of coal and iron stand
+first. These men win from nature what we all must
+have, and these things are none of them in the hands
+or under the guardianship of some one who is
+trying to keep us from obtaining them, or is aiming
+to take our aids and resources from us.</p>
+
+<p>The chess simile has only a rhetorical value.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
+The London workingmen to whom Huxley spoke
+would look around them in vain to find in their
+problems of life anything akin to a game of chess,
+or for any fruitful suggestion in the idea. They
+were probably mechanics, tradesmen, artisans,
+teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew
+through experience the forces with which they had
+to deal. But how many persons who succeed in
+life have any such expert knowledge of the forces
+and conditions with which they have to deal, as
+two chess-players have of the pawns and knights
+and bishops and queens of the chessboard?</p>
+
+<p>Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing,
+and there was vastly more logical force in
+his figures than in those of most writers.</p>
+
+<p>Life may more truly be compared to a river that
+has its source in a mountain or hillside spring,
+with its pure and sparking or foaming and noisy
+youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger
+volume, and then its placid and gently moving current
+to the sea. Blessed is the life that is self-purifying,
+like the moving waters; that lends itself to
+many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and
+becoming a destructive force.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">XI</div>
+
+<p>I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted
+to know why the meadow, or field, mice gnawed or
+barked the apple-trees when there was a deep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span>
+coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because
+they found it difficult to get up through the deep,
+frozen snow to the surface to get seeds to eat? He
+did not seem to know that meadow mice are not
+seed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots
+and keep well hidden beneath the ground during the
+day, when there is a deep fall of snow coming up out
+of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday
+life beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats,
+foxes, owls, and hawks. Life then becomes a sort
+of picnic. They build new nests on the surface
+of the ground and form new runways, and disport
+themselves apparently in a festive mood. The
+snow is their protection. They bark the trees and
+take their time. When the snow is gone, their
+winter picnic is at an end, and they retreat to their
+dens in the ground and beneath flat stones, and lead
+once more the life of fear.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">XII</div>
+
+<p>Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my
+blanket, recovering from a slight indisposition, I
+was in a mood to be interested in the everyday
+aspects of nature before me&mdash;in the white and
+purple lilacs, in the maple-leaves nearly full grown,
+in the pendent fringe of the yellowish-white bloom
+of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of the
+grapevines, and so forth. All these things formed
+only a setting or background for the wild life near by.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The birds are the little people that peep out at
+me, or pause and regard me curiously in this great
+temple of trees,&mdash;wrens, chippies, robins, bluebirds,
+catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants.
+A few days earlier, for a moment, a mourning
+ground warbler suddenly appeared around the
+corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and
+glanced hastily up at me. When I arose and looked
+over the railing, it had gone. Then the speckled
+Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringa
+branches and gave me several good views. The
+bay-breasted warbler was reported in the evergreens
+up by the stone house, but he failed to report
+to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart,
+however, came several times to the gravel walk below
+me, evidently looking for material to begin her
+nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren,
+was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying
+nesting-material into the box on the corner of
+the veranda. How intense and emphatic she is!
+And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with
+song! Yesterday an interloper appeared. He or she
+climbed the post by the back way, as it were, and
+hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as
+if to see that the coast was clear. He acted as if
+he felt himself an intruder. Quick as a flash there
+was a brown streak from the branch of a maple
+thirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after
+him. The culprit did not stop to argue the case, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span>
+was off, hotly pursued. I must not forget the pair of
+wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maple
+fifty or more feet away. How I love to see them
+on the ground at my feet, every motion and gesture
+like music to the eye! The head and neck of the
+male fairly glows, and there is something fine and
+manly about his speckled breast.</p>
+
+<p>A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry
+bushes at the south end of the house, and are in
+evidence at all hours. But when the nest is completed,
+and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out
+of the public eye as much as possible. From the
+front of the stage they retreat behind the curtain.</p>
+
+<p>One day as I sat here I heard the song of the
+olive-backed thrush down in the currant-bushes
+below me. Instantly I was transported to the
+deep woods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills.
+I heard the murmuring water and felt the
+woodsy coolness of those retreats&mdash;such magic hath
+associative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated
+vireo sang briefly in the maple, a harsh
+note; and the oriole with its insistent call added to
+the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the
+oriole. He has not one musical note, and in grape
+time his bill is red, or purple, with the blood of our
+grapes.</p>
+
+<p>But the most of these little people are my benefactors,
+and add another ray of sunshine to the
+May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacle of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>
+that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of
+the porch, like a little fairy, and then vanishing.</p>
+
+<p>The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere
+knowledge of them, is not enough. You must live
+with the birds, so to speak; have daily and seasonal
+associations with them before they come to mean
+much to you. Then, as they linger about your
+house or your camp, or as you see them in your
+walks, they are a part of your life, and help give
+tone and color to your day.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">III</div>
+
+<div class="center">THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS</div>
+
+
+<p>To what widely different use birds put their power
+of flight! To the great mass of them it is simply a
+means of locomotion, of getting from one point to
+another. A small minority put their wing-power
+to more ideal uses, as the lark when he claps his
+wings at heaven's gate, and the ruffed grouse when
+he drums; even the woodcock has some other use
+for his wings than to get from one point to another.
+Listen to his flight song in the April twilight up
+against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Our small hawks use their power of flight mainly
+to catch their prey, as does the swallow skimming
+the air all day on tireless wing, but some of the other
+hawks, such as our red-tailed hawk, climb their
+great spirals apparently with other motives than
+those which relate to their daily fare. The crow
+has little other use for his wings than to gad about
+like a busy politician from one neighborhood to
+another. In Florida I have seen large flocks of
+the white ibis performing striking evolutions high
+up against the sky, evidently expressive of the
+gay and festive feeling begotten by the mating
+instinct.</p>
+
+<p>The most beautiful flyer we ever see against our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span>
+skies is the unsavory buzzard. He is the winged
+embodiment of grace, ease, and leisure. Judging
+from appearances alone, he is the most disinterested
+of all the winged creatures we see. He rides the
+airy billows as if only to enjoy his mastery over
+them. He is as calm and unhurried as the orbs in
+their courses. His great circles and spirals have
+a kind of astronomic completeness. That all
+this power of wing and grace of motion should be
+given to an unclean bird, to a repulsive scavenger,
+is one of the anomalies of nature. He does not need
+to hurry or conceal his approach; what he is after
+cannot flee or hide; he has no enemies; nothing
+wants him; and he is at peace with all the world.</p>
+
+<p>The great condor of South America, in rising from
+the ground, always faces the wind. It is often
+captured by tempting it to gorge itself in a comparatively
+narrow space. But if a strong enough wind
+were blowing at such times, it could quickly rise
+over the barrier. Darwin says he watched a
+condor high in the air describing its huge circles for
+six hours without once flapping its wings. He says
+that, if the bird wished to descend, the wings were
+for a moment collapsed; and when again expanded,
+with an altered inclination, the momentum gained
+by the rapid descent seemed to urge the bird upwards
+with the even and steady movement of a
+paper kite. In the case of any bird <i>soaring</i>, its
+motion must be sufficiently rapid for the action of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span>
+the inclined surface of its body on the atmosphere
+to counterbalance its gravity. The force to keep
+up the momentum of a body moving in a horizontal
+plane in the air (in which there is so little friction)
+cannot be great, and this force is all that is wanted.
+The movement of the neck and body of the condor,
+we must suppose, is sufficient for this. However
+this may be, it is truly wonderful and beautiful to
+see so great a bird, hour after hour, without any
+apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain
+and river.</p>
+
+<p>The airplane has a propelling power in its motor,
+and it shifts its wings to take advantage of the
+currents. The buzzard and condor do the same
+thing. They are living airplanes, and their power
+is so evenly and subtly distributed and applied,
+that the trick of it escapes the eye. But of course
+they avail themselves of the lifting power of the
+air-currents.</p>
+
+<p>All birds know how to use their wings to propel
+themselves through the air, but the mechanism of
+the act we may not be able to analyze. I do not
+know how a butterfly propels itself against a breeze
+with its quill-less wings, but we know that it does
+do it. As its wings are neither convex nor concave,
+like a bird's, one would think that the upward and
+downward strokes would neutralize each other;
+but they do not. Strong winds often carry them
+out over large bodies of water; but such a master<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>
+flyer as the monarch beats its way back to shore,
+and, indeed, the monarch habitually flies long distances
+over salt water when migrating along our
+seacoast in spring and fall.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment of writing these paragraphs, I
+saw a hen-hawk flap heavily by, pursued by a
+kingbird. The air was phenomenally still, not a
+leaf stirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat
+his wings vigorously. No soaring now, no mounting
+heavenward, as I have seen him mount till his
+petty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and
+returned to earth. But the next day, with a fairly
+good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks for
+many minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the
+skies, till they became very small objects against the
+clouds, and not once did they flap their wings!
+Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top
+and sailed straight into the face of the wind, till
+he was probably over his mate or young, when, with
+half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-tops
+like an arrow.</p>
+
+<p>In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the
+air may be divided into three grand classes: those
+which use their wings simply to transport themselves
+from one place to another,&mdash;the same use we
+put our legs to,&mdash;those which climb the heavens
+to attain a wide lookout, either for the pleasure of
+soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to
+scan a wide territory in search of food or prey,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>
+and those which feed as they fly. Most of our
+common birds are examples of the first class.
+Our hawks and buzzards are examples of the
+second class. Swallows, nighthawks, and some sea-birds
+are examples of the third class. A few of our
+birds use their wings to gain an elevation from which
+to deliver their songs&mdash;as the larks, and some of the
+finches; but the robins and the sparrows and the
+warblers and the woodpeckers are always going
+somewhere. The hawks and the buzzards are,
+comparatively speaking, birds of leisure.</p>
+
+<p>Every bird and beast is a master in the use of
+its own tools and weapons. We who look on from
+the outside marvel at their skill. Here is the
+carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about
+the verge-board of my porch-roof as I write this.
+It darts swiftly this way and that, and now and
+then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of
+whirring wings, as often does the hummingbird.
+How it does it, I do not know. I cannot count or
+distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At
+the same time, the chimney swifts sweep by me
+like black arrows, on wings apparently as stiff as
+if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air,
+now sailing. In some way they suggest winged
+gimlets. How thin and scimitar-like their wings
+are! They are certainly masters of their own craft.</p>
+
+<p>In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far
+below the body as they do above it. Note the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span>
+crow flapping his way through the air. He is a
+heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His
+wings probably move through an arc of about
+ninety degrees. The ph[oe]be flies with a peculiar
+snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird,
+with a mincing and hovering flight; it tiptoes
+through the air. The woodpeckers gallop, alternately
+closing and spreading their wings. The
+ordinary flight of the goldfinch is a very marked
+undulatory flight; a section of it, the rise and the
+fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The
+bird goes half that distance or more with wings
+closed. This is the flight the male indulges in
+within hearing distance of his brooding mate.
+During the love season he occasionally gives way
+to an ecstatic flight. This is a level flight, performed
+on round, open wings, which beat the air
+vertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song
+season is common to many of our birds. I have
+seen even the song sparrow indulge in it, rising fifty
+feet or more and delivering its simple song with
+obvious excitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock,
+inspired by the grand passion, rises upon
+whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and
+floats and circles at an altitude of a hundred feet
+or more, and in rapid smackering and chippering
+notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasy
+with our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight
+and is sharp and hurried, both flight and song differ<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>ing
+radically from its everyday performance. One
+thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually
+on the wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk
+of all our singing birds. His season is brief
+but hilarious. In his level flight he seems to use
+only the tips of his wings, and we see them always
+below the level of his back. Our common birds
+that have no flight-song, so far as I have observed,
+are the bluebird, the robin, the ph[oe]be, the social
+sparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the
+wood warblers, and most of the ground warblers.</p>
+
+<p>Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines
+had this to say about the flight of sea-gulls:
+"Sweeping around in circles, occasionally elevating
+themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide
+down and up the aerial inclines without apparently
+any effort whatever. But a close observation
+will show that at every turn the angle of inclination
+of the wings is changed to meet the new conditions.
+There is continual movement with power&mdash;by
+the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine
+only through mechanism obeying a mind not nearly
+so well instructed."</p>
+
+<p>The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing
+round and round, in a brisk breeze, on unbending
+wing, only now and then righting itself with a
+single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides
+upon the storm.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">IV</div>
+
+<div class="center">BIRD INTIMACIES</div>
+
+
+<p>When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination
+to seek out new lands in my own country, or in
+other countries, to see what Nature is doing there,
+and what guise she wears, something prompts me
+to pause, and after a while to say to myself:
+"Look a little closer into the nature right at your
+own door; do a little intensive observation at home,
+and see what that yields you. The enticement
+of the far-away is mostly in your imagination;
+let your eyes and your imagination play once more
+on the old familiar birds and objects."</p>
+
+<p>One season in my walks to the woods I was on
+the lookout for a natural bracket among the tree-branches,
+to be used in supporting a book-shelf. I
+did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree,
+within a few feet from the corner of my own house,
+I found what I was searching for, perfect in every
+particular&mdash;the right angle and the supporting
+brace, or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have
+not forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>I find that one has only to overcome a little of
+his obtuseness and indifference and look a little
+more closely upon the play of wild life about him
+to realize how much interesting natural history is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span>
+being enacted every day before his very eyes&mdash;in
+his own garden and dooryard and apple-orchard
+and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and
+sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one
+rides or walks or sits under the trees, or loiters
+about the fields or woods, the play of wild life is
+going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed
+with the seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available
+for his instruction and entertainment. On every
+farm in the land a volume of live natural history
+goes to waste every year because there is no historian
+to note the happenings.</p>
+
+<p>The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind
+screens&mdash;a screen of leaves or of grass, or of
+vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert and
+sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us
+see only a mere fraction of it. If one saw one tenth
+of the significant happenings that take place on his
+few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the
+course of the season, or even of a single week, what
+a harvest he would have! The drama of wild life
+is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the stage
+before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other
+stages.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing
+along the road between my place and the railway
+station one early May day became aware that
+a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees
+over their heads. It was the annual <i>s&auml;ngerfest</i> of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>
+the goldfinches&mdash;one of the prettiest episodes in
+the lives of any of our birds, a real musical reunion
+of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township,
+many hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops
+along the road and in the groves with a fine,
+sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to the
+surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails
+adequately to account for. It comes from everywhere,
+but from nowhere in particular. The birds
+sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it
+is difficult to identify the singers. It is a minor
+strain, but multitudinous, and fills all the air. The
+males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if
+to celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which,
+with the elm-trees, afford them their earliest food-supply.
+While they are singing they are busy cutting
+out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going
+down to the ground and tearing open the closed
+dandelion-heads that have shut up to ripen their
+seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal
+flowering when they become spheres of fragile silver
+down.</p>
+
+<p>Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches
+should be called a dandelion festival, or a new-coat
+festival, or whether it is to bring the sexes together
+preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss
+to decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and
+continues on wet days as well as on fair. It all
+has a decidedly festive air, like the f&ecirc;te-days of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>
+humans. I know of nothing like it among other
+birds. It is the manifestation of something different
+from the flocking instinct; it is the social and
+holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a
+brief season, as if in celebration of some special
+event or purpose. I have observed it in my vicinity
+every spring for many years, usually in April or early
+May, and it is the prettiest and most significant
+bird episode, involving a whole species, known
+to me.</p>
+
+<p>The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one
+of our most amiable birds. So far as my knowledge
+goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. His tones
+are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring
+reunions they are joyous. In the peculiar flight-song
+in which he indulges in the mating season,
+beating the air vertically with his round, open
+wings, his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to
+his mate when she is brooding, and when he circles
+about her in that long, billowy flight, the crests of
+his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling,
+"Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee," as if he were
+saying, "For love of thee, for love of thee," and she
+calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"&mdash;his tones
+at such times express contentment and reassurance.</p>
+
+<p>When any of his natural enemies appear&mdash;a
+hawk, a cat, a jay&mdash;his tones are plaintive and appealing.
+"Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and not
+in anger.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>When with his mate he leads their brood about
+the August thistles, the young call in a similar tone.
+When in July the nesting has begun, the female
+talks the prettiest "baby talk" to her mate as he
+feeds her. The nest-building rarely begins till
+thistledown can be had&mdash;so literally are all the
+ways of this darling bird ways of softness and
+gentleness. The nest is a thick, soft, warm structure,
+securely fastened in the fork of a maple or
+an apple-tree.</p>
+
+<p>None of our familiar birds endear themselves to
+us more than does the bluebird. The first bluebird
+in the spring is as welcome as the blue sky
+itself. The season seems softened and tempered
+as soon as we hear his note and see his warm breast
+and azure wing. His gentle manners, his soft, appealing
+voice, not less than his pleasing hues, seem
+born of the bright and genial skies. He is the spirit
+of the April days incarnated in a bird. He has
+the quality of winsomeness, like the violet and the
+speedwell among the flowers. Not strictly a songster,
+yet his every note and call is from out the
+soul of harmony. The bluebird is evidently an offshoot
+from the thrush family, and without the
+thrush's gift of song; still his voice affords us much
+of the same pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>How readily the bluebirds become our friends
+and neighbors when we offer them suitable nesting-retreats!
+Bring them something from nature,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span>
+something with the bark on&mdash;a section of a dry
+beech or maple limb in which the downy woodpecker
+has excavated his chamber and passed the
+winter or reared his brood; fasten it in early spring
+upon the corner of your porch, or on the trunk of
+a near-by tree, and see what interesting neighbors
+you will soon have. One summer I brought home
+from one of my walks to the woods a section, two
+or three feet long, of a large yellow birch limb
+which contained such a cavity as I speak of, and
+I wired it to one of the posts of the rustic porch at
+Woodchuck Lodge. The next season a pair of
+bluebirds reared two broods in it. The incubation
+of the eggs for the second brood was well under
+way when I appeared upon the scene in early July.
+My sudden presence so near their treasures, and my
+lingering there with books and newspapers, disturbed
+the birds a good deal. The first afternoon the
+mother bird did not enter the cavity for hours. I shall
+always remember the pretty and earnest manner in
+which the male tried to reassure her and persuade
+her that the danger was not so imminent as it
+appeared to be, probably encouraging a confidence
+in his mate which he did not himself share. The
+mother bird would alight at the entrance to the
+chamber, but, with her eye fixed upon the man
+with the newspaper, feared to enter. The male,
+perched upon the telegraph wire fifty feet away,
+would raise his wings and put all the love and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>
+assurance in his voice he was capable of, apparently
+trying to dispel her fears. He would warble and
+warble, and make those pretty wing gestures over
+and over, saying so plainly: "It is all right, my
+dear, the man is harmless&mdash;absorbed there in his
+newspaper. Go in, go in, and keep warm our
+precious eggs!" How long she hesitated! But as
+night grew near she grew more and more anxious,
+and he more and more eloquent. Finally she
+alighted upon the edge of the overhanging roof and
+peered down hesitatingly. Her mate applauded
+and encouraged till finally she made the plunge and
+entered the hole, but instantly came out again;
+her heart failed her for a moment; but she soon
+returned and remained inside. Then her mate flew
+away toward the orchard, uttering a cheery note
+which doubtless she understood.</p>
+
+<p>The birds soon became used to my presence and
+their household matters progressed satisfactorily.
+Both birds took a hand in feeding the young, which
+grew rapidly. When they were nearly ready to
+leave the nest, a cruel fate befell them: I slept
+upon the porch, and one night I was awakened by
+the cry of young bluebirds, and the sound of feet
+like those of a squirrel on the roof over me. Then
+I heard the cry of a young bird proceed from the
+butternut-tree across the road opposite the house.
+I said to myself, "A squirrel or an owl is after my
+birds." The cry coming so quickly from the but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>ternut-tree
+made me suspect an owl, and that the
+bird whose cry I heard was in his talons. I was
+out of my cot and up to the nest in a
+moment, but the tragedy was over; the birds were
+all gone, and the night was silent. In the
+morning I found that a piece of the brittle
+birch limb had been torn away, enlarging
+the entrance to the cavity so that the murderous
+talons of the owl could reach in and seize the young
+birds. I had been aroused in time to hear the
+marauder on the roof with one, and then hear its
+cry as he carried it to the tree. In the grass in
+front I found one of the young, unable to fly, but
+apparently unhurt. I put it back in the nest, but
+it would not stay. The spell of the nest was
+broken, and the young bird took to the grass
+again. The parent birds were on hand, much
+excited, and, when I tried to return the surviving
+bird to the nest, the male came at me
+fiercely, apparently charging the whole catastrophe
+to me.</p>
+
+<p>We had strong proof the previous season that
+an owl, probably the screech owl, prowled about
+the house at night. A statuette of myself in clay
+which a sculptor was modeling was left out one
+night on the porch, and in the morning its head
+was unusually bowed. The prints of a bird's
+talons upon the top told what had happened. In
+the bronze reproduction of that statuette the head<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>
+has more of a droop than the artist at first planned
+to give it.</p>
+
+<p>The next season the bluebirds occupied the cavity
+in the birch limb again, but before my arrival in
+July the owls had again cleaned them out. In so
+doing they had ripped the cavity open nearly to the
+bottom. For all that, early the following May
+bluebirds were occupying the cavity again. It
+held three eggs when I arrived. I looked over the
+situation and resolved to try to head off the owl
+this time, even at the risk of driving the bluebirds
+away. I took a strip of tin several inches wide
+and covered the slit with it and wired it fast.
+Then I obtained a broad strip of dry birch-bark,
+wrapped it about the limb over the tin, and wired
+it fast, leaving the entrance to the nest in its
+original form. I knew the owl could not slit the
+tin; the birch-bark would hide it and preserve in
+a measure the natural appearance of the branch.
+When the bluebirds saw what had happened to
+their abode, they were a good deal distressed; they
+could no longer see their eggs through the slit
+which the owl had made, and they refused to enter
+the cavity. They hung about all day, uttering
+despondent notes, approaching the nest at times,
+but hesitating even to alight upon the roof above
+it. Occasionally the female would fly away toward
+the distant woods or hills uttering that plaintive,
+homesick note which seemed to mean farewell.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>
+The male would follow her, calling in a more cheery
+and encouraging tone. Once the couple were
+gone three or four hours, and I concluded they had
+really deserted the place. But just before sundown
+they were back again, and the female alighted
+at the entrance to the nest and looked in. The
+male called to her cheerily; still she would not enter,
+but joined him on the telephone wire, where the two
+seemed to hold a little discussion. Presently the
+mother bird flew to the nest again, then to the
+roof above it, then back to the nest, and entered
+it till only her tail showed, then flew back to the
+wire beside her mate. She was evidently making
+up her mind that the case was not hopeless. After
+a little more maneuvering, and amid the happy,
+reassuring calls of her mate, she entered the nest
+cavity and remained, and I was as well pleased as
+was her mate.</p>
+
+<p>No owls disturbed them this time, and the brood
+of young birds was brought off in due season. In
+July a second brood of four was successfully reared
+and sent forth on their career.</p>
+
+<p>The oriole nests in many kinds of trees&mdash;oaks,
+maples, apple-trees, elms&mdash;but her favorite is the
+elm. She chooses the end of one of the long drooping
+branches where a group of small swaying twigs
+affords her suitable support. It is the most unlikely
+place imaginable for any but a pendent nest,
+woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>
+twigs, and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests
+are so secure, so hidden, and so completely sheltered
+from the rains by the drooping leaves above and
+around it. It is rarely discoverable except from
+directly beneath it. I think a well-built oriole's
+nest would sustain a weight of eight or ten pounds
+before it would be torn from its moorings. They
+are also very partial to the ends of branches that
+swing low over the highway. One May I saw two
+female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five
+feet above our State Road, where automobiles
+and other vehicles passed nearly every minute all
+the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far from
+highways and dwellings is a rare occurrence.</p>
+
+<p>Birds of different species differ as widely in skill
+in nest-building as they do in song. From the rude
+platform of dry twigs and other coarse material of
+the cuckoo, to the pendent, closely woven pouch of
+the oriole, the difference in the degree of skill displayed
+is analogous to the difference between the
+simple lisp of the cedar-bird, or the little tin whistle
+of the "chippie," and the golden notes of the wood
+thrush, or the hilarious song of the bobolink.</p>
+
+<p>Real castles in the air are the nests of the orioles;
+no other nests are better hidden or apparently more
+safe from the depredations of crows and squirrels.
+To start the oriole's nest successfully is quite an
+engineering feat. The birds inspect the branches
+many times before they make a decision. When<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>
+they have decided on the site, the mother bird
+brings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches
+it to a twig by winding it around and around many
+times, leaving one or both ends hanging free. I have
+nests where these foundation strings are wound
+around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings
+and tuckings and loopings the bird occasionally ties
+a substantial knot, but it is never the result of a
+deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but
+purely a matter of chance. When she uses only
+wild vegetable fibers, she fastens it to the twig by
+a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about the craziest
+kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has
+fastened many lines to opposite twigs, their ends
+hanging free, she proceeds to span the little gulf
+by weaving them together. She stands with her
+claws clasped one to each side, and uses her beak
+industriously, looping up and fastening the loose
+ends. I have stood in the road under the nest looking
+straight up till my head swam, trying to make out
+just how she did it, but all I could see was the bird
+standing astride the chasm she was trying to bridge,
+and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze
+of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom
+of the nest thickens, till some morning you see the
+movement of the bird inside it; her beak comes
+through the sides from within, like a needle or an
+awl, seizes a loose hair or thread, and jerks it back
+through the wall and tightens it. It is a regular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span>
+stitching or quilting process. The course of any
+particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard
+as if it were the work of the wind or the
+waves. There is plan, but no conscious method of
+procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It
+is not something builded as we build, in which
+judgment, design, forethought enter; it is the result
+of the blind groping of instinct which rarely errs,
+but which does not see the end from the beginning,
+as reason does. The oriole sometimes overhands
+the rim of her nest with strings and fibers to make
+it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perch
+upon, but it is like the pathetic work which an
+untaught blind child might do under similar conditions.
+The birds use fine, strong strings in their
+nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results
+from it. I have an oriole's nest sent me from
+Michigan on the outside of which is a bird's dried
+foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it.
+It would be difficult to tie so complicated a knot.
+The tragedy is easy to read. Another nest sent me
+from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of
+fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them.
+But there is no sign that the bird came to grief
+using this dangerous material. Where the lives of
+the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always
+a danger-line to them. They are partakers of our
+bounty in many ways, but they pay a tax to fate
+in others.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>The orioles in my part of the country always use
+the same material in the body of their nests&mdash;a
+kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which they apparently
+get from some species of everlasting flower.
+Woven together and quilted through with strings
+and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm, feltlike
+walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the
+walls are made of something that suggests brown
+human hair, except that it is too hard and brittle
+for hair.</p>
+
+<p>Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest,
+but not so deep and pocketlike as that of the
+Baltimore oriole, and showing no such elaborate
+use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of
+some sort of dried grass, very elaborately woven
+together.</p>
+
+<p>Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely
+of the long, strong threads which it draws out
+of the palm-leaves. The only one I have seen was
+suspended from the under side of one of those
+leaves.</p>
+
+<p>I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except
+the nest of the hummingbird, is that of the wood
+pewee. It is as smooth and compact and symmetrical
+as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike
+substance. Of course, the ph[oe]be's artistic masonry
+under the shelving rocks, covered with moss
+and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry grass
+and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>yond
+the reach of four-footed prowlers, is almost
+ideal. It certainly is a happy thought.</p>
+
+<p>The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird,
+the goldfinch, the indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders,
+each with a style of its own.</p>
+
+<p>About the most insecure nest in our trees is that
+of the little social sparrow, or "chippie." When
+the sudden summer storms come, making the tree-tops
+writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest
+amid the tossing branches. Pass through the grove
+or orchard after the tempest is over, and you are
+pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon the
+ground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of
+nest-building in trees. She is a poor architect.
+She should have kept to the ground or to the low
+bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their
+nests fast to the branches, but "Chippie" does not;
+she simply arranges her material loosely between
+them, where the nest is supported, but not secured.
+She seems pathetically ignorant of the fact that
+there are such things as wind and storm. Hence
+her frail structure is more frequently dislodged from
+the trees than that of any other bird.</p>
+
+<p>Recently, after a day of violent northwest wind,
+I found a wrecked robin's nest and eggs upon the
+lawn under a maple&mdash;not a frequent spectacle.
+The robin's firm masonry is usually proof against
+wind and rain, but in this case the nest was composed
+almost entirely of dry grass; there was hardly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>
+a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible and yielding,
+and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently
+the second nest of the pair this season, and
+the second nest in summer of any species of bird
+is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first
+nest in spring. Comparatively few of our birds
+attempt to bring off a second brood unless the first
+attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sure to
+bring off two, and may bring off three. But the
+robin is a hustler, probably the most enterprising
+of all our birds. I recall a mother robin that, in
+late June, repaired a nest in a climbing rosebush
+which her first brood had vacated only a week
+before. A brood of wood thrushes which left their
+nest about the same time was still being fed by
+their parents about the place.</p>
+
+<p>The song sparrow, the social sparrow, the ph[oe]be,
+the bluebird, all build a second nest. The first
+brood of the bluebird will be looked after by the
+father in some near-by grove or orchard, while the
+mother starts a new family in the old nest. If all
+goes well with them, those two bluebird families
+will unite and keep together in a loose flock till
+they migrate in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>So many of our birds nest about our houses and
+lawns and gardens and along our highways, that
+at first sight it seems as if they must be drawn
+there by a sense of greater security for their eggs
+and young. The robin has become almost a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span>
+domestic institution. It is rarely that one finds a
+robin's nest very far from a human habitation.
+One spring there were four robins' nests on my
+house and outbuildings&mdash;in the vines, on window-sills,
+or other coigns of vantage. There were at
+the same time at least fifteen robins' nests on my
+lot of sixteen acres, and I am quite certain
+that I have not seen all there were. They were in
+sheds and apple-trees and spruces and cedars, in
+the ends of piles of grape-posts, in rosebushes, in
+the summer-house, and on the porch. We did not
+expect to get one of the early cherries, and might
+count ourselves lucky if we got any of the later ones.</p>
+
+<p>A robin has built her nest in my summer-house.
+She abuses me so when I try to tarry there, after
+incubation has begun, that I take no comfort and
+presently withdraw. Until her brood has flown, I
+am practically a stranger in my open-air rest-house
+and study.</p>
+
+<p>When the fish crows come egging in the spruces
+and maples about the house, and I hear the screaming
+of the robins, I seize my gun and rush out to
+protect them, but am not always successful, as the
+mischief is often done before I get within reach;
+I am not sure but that the robins think&mdash;if they
+think at all&mdash;that I am in league with the crows
+to despoil them. I was not in time to save the eggs
+of the wood thrush the other morning, when I
+heard the alarm calls of the birds, but I had the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>
+satisfaction of seeing the black marauder go limping
+over the hill, dropping quills from his wings at
+nearly every stroke. I am sure he will not come
+back. The fish crow is one of the most active enemies
+of our small birds. Of course, he only obeys
+his instincts in hunting out and devouring their
+eggs and young, but I fancy I obey something
+higher than instinct when I protest with powder
+and shot.</p>
+
+<p>The birds do not mind the approach of the
+domestic animals, such as the cow, the horse, the
+sheep, the pig, and they are only a little suspicious
+of the dog, but the appearance of the cat fills them
+with sudden alarm. I think that birds that have
+never before seen a cat join in the hue and cry.
+What alarms one alarms all within hearing. The
+orioles are probably the most immune from the
+depredations of crows and jays and owls of all our
+birds, and yet they will join in the cry of "Thief,
+thief!" when a crow appears. (The alarm cry of
+birds will even arrest the attention of four-footed
+beasts, and often bring the sportsman's stalking to
+naught.)</p>
+
+<p>I fancy that Ph[oe]be selects our sheds and bridges
+and porticoes for her nesting-sites because they are
+so much more numerous than the overhanging
+rocks where her forbears built. For the same reason
+certain of the swallows and the swifts select
+our barns and chimneys.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>If the birds themselves are not afraid to draw
+near us, why should their instinct lead them to feel
+that their enemies will be afraid of us? How do
+they know that a jay or a crow or a red squirrel
+will be less timid than they are? And why also,
+if they have such confidence in us, do they raise
+such a hue and cry when we pass near their nests?
+The robin in my summer-house knew, if she knew
+anything, that I had never raised a finger against
+her. On the contrary, my hoe in the garden had
+unearthed many a worm and slug for her. Still
+she sees in me only a possible enemy, and tolerate
+me with my book or my newspaper near her nest
+she will not. Another robin has built her nest
+in a rosebush that has been trained to form
+an arch over the walk that leads to the kitchen
+door and only a few yards from it; but whenever
+we pass and repass she scurries away with
+loud, angry protests and keeps it up as long as
+we are in sight, so that we do not feel at all
+complimented by her settling down so near us. If
+one's appearance is so alarming, even when he
+is going to hoe the garden, why did the intolerant
+bird set up her household gods so near? If I
+keep away her enemies, why will she not be
+gracious enough to regard me as her friend?
+The robin that trusted her brood to the sheltering
+vines of the woodshed, and lined her nest with
+the hair of our old gray horse&mdash;why should she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>
+scream, "Murder!" whenever any of us go to the
+well a few feet away?</p>
+
+<p>What is the real explanation of the fact that so
+many of our birds nest so near our dwellings and
+yet show such unfriendliness when we come near
+them? Their apparent confidence, on the one
+hand, contradicts their suspicion on the other. Is
+it because we have here the workings of a new
+instinct which has not yet adjusted itself to the
+workings of the older instinct of solicitude for the
+safety of the nest and young? My own interpretation
+is that birds are not drawn near us by any
+sense of greater security in our vicinity. It is evident
+from the start that there is an initial fear of
+us to be overcome. How, then, could the sense of
+greater safety in our presence arise? Fear and
+trust do not spring from the same root. How
+should the robins and thrushes know that their
+enemies&mdash;the jays, the crows, and the like&mdash;are
+more afraid of human beings than they are themselves?
+Hunted animals pursued by wolves or
+hounds will at times take refuge in the haunts of
+men, not because they expect human protection,
+but because they are desperate, and oblivious to
+everything save some means of escape. If the
+hunted deer or fox rushes into an open shed or a
+barn door, it is because it is desperately hard-pressed,
+and sees and knows nothing but some object
+or situation that it may place between itself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span>
+and its deadly enemy. The great fear obliterates
+all minor fears.</p>
+
+<p>The key to the behavior of the birds in this
+respect may be found in the Darwinian theory of
+natural selection. From the first settlement of the
+country a few of the common birds, attracted by a
+more suitable or more abundant food-supply, or
+other conditions, must inevitably have nested near
+human dwellings. These birds would thrive better
+and succeed in bringing off more young than
+those that nested in more exposed places. Hence,
+their progeny would soon be in the ascendancy. All
+animals seem to have associated memory. These
+birds would naturally return to the scenes and conditions
+of their youth, and start their nests there.
+It would not be confidence in men that would draw
+them; rather would the truth be that the fear of
+man is inadequate to overcome or annul this home
+attraction.</p>
+
+<p>The catbird does not come to our vines on the
+veranda to nest from considerations of safety, but
+because her line of descent runs through such places.
+The catbirds and robins and ph[oe]be-birds that were
+reared far from human habitations doubtless return
+to such localities to rear their young. The home
+sense in birds is strong. I have positive proof in a
+few instances of robins and song sparrows returning
+successive years to the same neighborhood. It
+is very certain, I think, that the ph[oe]be-birds that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span>
+daub our porches with their mud, and in July leave
+a trail of minute creeping and crawling pests,
+were not themselves hatched and reared in the
+pretty, moss-covered structure under the shelving
+rocks in the woods, or on the hillsides.</p>
+
+<p>How different from the manners of the robins
+are the manners of a pair of catbirds that have a
+nest in the honeysuckle against the side of the first-floor
+sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from
+the nature of the catbird than the hue and cry
+which the robin at times sets up. The catbird is
+sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline
+<i>mew</i> is her characteristic note. She never raises
+her voice like the town-crier, as the robin does,
+perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold
+him. The catbird peers and utters her soft protest
+from her hiding-place in the bushes. This particular
+pair of catbirds appeared in early May and
+began slyly to look over the situation in the vines
+and bushes about the house. All their proceedings
+were very stealthy; they were like two dark shadows
+gliding about, avoiding observation&mdash;no tree-tops
+or house-tops for them, but coverts close to
+the ground. We hoped they would divine safety
+in the shadow of the cottage, but tried to act as
+if oblivious of their goings and comings. We saw
+them now and then stealthily inspecting the tangle
+of honeysuckle on the east side of the veranda,
+where a robin last season reared a brood, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>
+low hedge of barberry-bushes on the south side of
+the cottage, where a song sparrow had her nest.
+If they come, which will they take, we wondered.
+Several times in the early morning I heard the
+male singing vivaciously and confidently in the
+thick of the honeysuckle. I guessed that the
+honeysuckle was the choice of the male, and that
+his song was a p&aelig;an in praise of it, addressed to
+his mate. But it was nearly a week before his
+musical argument prevailed and the site was apparently
+agreed upon.</p>
+
+<p>When the nest-building actually began, the birds
+were so shy about it that, watch as I might, I failed
+to catch them in the act. One morning I saw the
+mother bird in the garden with nesting-material
+in her beak, but she failed to come to the honeysuckle
+with it while I watched from a near-by
+covert. At the same time robins were flying here
+and there with loaded beaks, and wood thrushes
+were going through the air trailing long strips of
+white paper behind them, but the catbird was an
+emblem of secrecy itself. She, too, brought fragments
+of white paper to her nest, but no one saw
+her do it. Like other nest-builders, she apparently
+put in her big strokes of work in the early morning
+before the sleepers on the veranda were stirring.
+A few times my inquisitive eye, cautiously peering
+over the railing, started her from the vine, but I
+never saw her enter it with leaf, stick, or straw;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>
+yet slowly the nest grew and came into shape, and
+finally received its finishing touches. So cautiously
+had the birds proceeded that, were they capable
+of concepts like us, I should fancy they flattered
+themselves that we had not the least suspicion of
+their little secret. The male ceased to sing near
+the house after the nest was begun. So much time
+elapsed after the finishing of the nest before the
+first egg appeared in it that some members of the
+household feared the birds had deserted it, especially
+as they were not seen about the premises for
+several days. But the weather was wet and cool,
+and the eggs ripened slowly. Then one morning
+the birds were seen again, and one blue-green egg
+was discovered in the nest. The next morning
+another egg was added, and a third egg on the
+third morning, and a fourth on the fourth morning.
+In due time incubation began, and thenceforth all
+went well with our dusky neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>It is an anxious moment for all birds when their
+young leave the nest. One noontime by the unusual
+mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure that
+the critical time had come. Sure enough, there
+sat one of the young on a twig a few inches above
+the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty response
+to the agitated cry of the mother, as is
+usually the case with the robin. "No publicity" is
+the watchword of the young catbirds as well as
+of the old. An hour or two later another young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>
+one was perched on a branch, and before night,
+when no one was looking, they both disappeared,
+leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The
+next morning early, without any signs of alarm
+or agitation on the part of the old birds, they took
+the important step. It could hardly have been
+much of a flight with any of them, as their wing-quills
+were only partially developed, and their tails
+were mere stubs. For several days afterward no
+sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard.
+They were probably keeping well concealed in the
+near-by trees or in the vines and currant-bushes in
+the vineyard. In about a week the whole family
+appeared briefly in upper branches of the maples
+near the house. The young were distinguishable
+from the old only by their shorter tails. A few
+days later the parent birds were seen moving
+stealthily through the vines and bushes about the
+house, or perching on the near-by stakes that supported
+the wire netting. Are they coming back
+for a second brood? was the question in our minds.</p>
+
+<p>Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the
+male, then one morning a regular old-time burst of
+joy from him in the vine that held the old nest.
+Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window
+on the south side of the cottage, and both birds
+were soon seen paying frequent visits to the bush.
+We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether
+or not the first brood were now shifting for them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span>selves,
+we did not know; they never again appeared
+upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of the
+Fourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was
+started in the syringa-bush three feet from the
+ground, and barely four feet from the window!</p>
+
+<p>We had a view of the proceedings that the first
+site did not afford us. The old nest appeared to be
+in perfect condition, but there was evidently no
+thought with the birds of using it again, as the
+robins sometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff
+swallows always do. A new nest, built of material
+almost identical with that of the old, and in a more
+exposed position, was decided upon. It progressed
+rapidly, and I was delighted to find that the male
+assisted in the building. Indeed, he was fully as
+active as the female. Very often they were both
+in the nest with material at the same moment.
+They seemed to agree perfectly. At first I got the
+impression that the male was not quite as decided
+as the female, and hesitated more, once or twice
+bringing material that he finally rejected. But he
+soon warmed up to the work and certainly did his
+share.</p>
+
+<p>With most species of our birds the nest is entirely
+built by the female. With the robin, the
+wood thrush, the ph[oe]be, the oriole, the hummingbird,
+the pewee, and many others, the male is only
+an interested spectator of the proceeding. He
+usually attends his mate in her quest for material,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>
+but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the
+cock wren assists in nest-building. I know the
+male cedar-bird does, and probably the male woodpeckers
+do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeak
+assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing
+upon the nest. It seems fair to infer that he assists
+in the nest-building also, but I am not certain that
+he does, and I have heard another observer state
+that in a nest which he watched the female apparently
+did it all.</p>
+
+<p>My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon
+at least, being on their job as late as seven o'clock.
+In three days the nest was done, all but touching
+up the interior. During the construction I laid
+out pieces of twine and bits of white paper on the
+bushes and wire netting, also some loose material
+from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly
+used. How much labor the birds would have saved
+themselves had they pulled the old nest to pieces
+and used the material a second time! I have
+known the oriole to start a nest, then change her
+mind, and then detach some of her strings and
+fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once
+saw a "chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull
+the old nest to pieces and rebuild it in a tree a
+hundred feet away.</p>
+
+<p>The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking
+than his mate, but we could easily tell her
+by her often simulating the actions of a young bird<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>
+when she came with material in her beak; she would
+alight on a near-by post and slightly spread and
+quiver her wings in a tender, beseeching kind of
+way. She would do this also when bringing food
+to her first brood. When one of the parent birds
+of any species simulates by voice or manner the
+young birds, it is always the female; her heart
+would naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation
+than that of the male.</p>
+
+<p>On the fifth day the nest was completed and
+received its first egg. There was considerable delay
+with the second egg, but it appeared on the
+second or third day, and the third egg the following
+day. Then incubation began. In twenty days
+from the day the nest was begun, the birds were
+hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly
+left the nest.</p>
+
+<p>A friend of mine who has a summer home on
+one of the trout-streams of the Catskills discovered
+that the catbird was fond of butter, and she soon
+had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room
+window for its lump of fresh butter, and
+finally entering the dining-room, perching on the
+back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter
+from a fork held in the mistress's hand. I think
+the butter was unsalted. My friend was convinced
+after three years that the same pair of
+birds returned to her each year, because each
+season the male came promptly for his butter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird
+contrast strongly with the frank, open manners of
+the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrasher goes
+skulking about in much the same way, flirting from
+bush to bush like a culprit escaping from justice.
+But he does love to sing from the April tree-tops
+where all the world may see and hear, if said world
+does not come too near. In the South and West
+the thrasher also nests in the vicinity of houses,
+but in New York and New England we must look
+for him in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of
+any bad traits that go with the thrasher's air of
+suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that
+goes with the catbird's&mdash;I have seen her perch on
+the rim of another bird's nest and deliberately
+devour the eggs. But only once. Whether or not
+she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If
+she does, she is doubtless so sly about it that she
+escapes observation.</p>
+
+<p>I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so
+attractive a neighbor as the wood thrush. She has
+none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace. She
+skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the
+wood thrush stands up before you or perches upon
+a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoat toward you
+in the most open and trusting manner. In fact,
+few birds have such good manners as the wood
+thrush, and few have so much the manner of a
+Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>
+flight of the wood thrush across the lawn is such a
+picture of grace and harmony, it is music to the eye.
+The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I
+told you so, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!"
+But the courteous thrush (just here I heard the
+excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry caw
+of a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow
+fly away from the maple in front of the Study,
+pursued by a mob of screeching robins. He took
+refuge in the spruces above the house where the
+collected robins abused him from surrounding
+branches. On my appearance he flew away, and
+the robins dispersed)&mdash;but the courteous thrush, I
+say, invites the good-breeding in you which he
+himself shows. The thrush never has the air of a
+culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other
+air. But I welcome them both. One shall stand
+for the harmony and repose of bird life, and the
+other for its restlessness and curiosity. The
+songs and the manners of birds correspond. The
+catbird, the brown thrasher, and the mockingbird
+are all theatrical in their manners&mdash;full of
+gestures of tail and wings, and their songs all
+imply an audience, while the serene melody of the
+thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of
+their behavior.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">V</div>
+
+<div class="center">A MIDSUMMER IDYL</div>
+
+
+<p>As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the
+wide-open doors of a big hay-barn, busy with my
+pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my
+farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I
+idly contrast his harvest with mine. I have to
+admit that he succeeds with his better than I do
+with mine, though he can make hay only while the
+sun shines, while I can reap and cure my light fancies
+nearly as well in the shade as in the sun. Yet his
+crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind.
+But I have this advantage over him&mdash;I
+might make literature out of his haymaking, or
+might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest
+he never dreamed of. What does Emerson say?</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One harvest from the field</span>
+<span class="i1">Homeward bring the oxen strong;</span>
+<span class="i0">A second crop thine acres yield,</span>
+<span class="i1">Which I gather in a song.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only
+where he has sown, and if Emerson had not scattered
+his own heart in the fields his Muse would not
+reap much there. Song is not one of the instruments
+with which I gather my harvest, but long
+ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span>
+the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself
+there, and whatever comes back to me now from
+that source is honestly my own. The second crop
+which I gather is not much more tangible than that
+which the poet gathers, but the farmer as little
+suspects its existence as he does that of the poet. I
+can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies,
+his buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow,
+his meadow-rue, serve my purpose better than they
+do his. They look better on the printed page than
+they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy
+and clover have their literary uses, and his new-mown
+hay may perfume a line in poetry. When
+one of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod
+round his quiet bed," he makes better use of this
+weed than the farmers can.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with
+all its sights and sounds, its singing birds, its
+skimming swallows, its grazing or ruminating cattle,
+its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes from
+the meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with
+his men and teams busy with the harvest, has
+material for the literary artist. A good hay day is
+a good day for the writer and the poet, because it
+has a certain crispness and pureness; it is positive;
+it is rich in sunshine; there is a potency in the blue
+sky which you feel; the high barometer raises your
+spirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You
+can sit in a circle of shade beneath a tree in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span>
+fields, or in front of the open hay-barn doors, as I
+do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature
+all about you. The brimming meadows seem fairly
+to purr as the breezes stroke them; the trees rustle
+their myriad leaves as if in gladness; the many-colored
+butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the
+swallows' backs glistens in the sun as they skim the
+fields; and the mellow boom of the passing bumble-bee
+but enhances the sense of repose and contentment
+that pervades the air. The hay cures; the
+oats and corn deepen their hue; the delicious
+fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the
+breeze; your mental skies are lucid, and life has
+the midsummer fullness and charm.</p>
+
+<p>As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of
+the scarlet tanager in the maple woods that crown
+a hill above me, and in the loft overhead two broods
+of swallows are chattering and lining up their
+light-colored breasts on the rims of their nests, or
+trying their newly fledged wings while clinging to
+its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound
+is the call of the cuckoo, which I hear and have
+heard at nearly all hours for many days, and which
+surely bodes rain. The countryman who first
+named this bird the "rain crow" hit the mark.
+The cuckoo is a devourer of worms and caterpillars,
+and why he should be interested in rain is hard to
+see. The tree-toad calls before and during a
+shower, mainly, I think, because he likes to have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span>
+his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like the
+cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a
+mystery, unless the rain and the shadows are congenial
+to the gloomy mood in which he usually
+seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery
+of our birds, and the part of doleful prophet in our
+bird drama suits him well.</p>
+
+<p>A high barometer is best for the haymakers and
+it is best for the human spirits. When the smoke
+goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likely to
+soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons
+who do not like to get up in the morning till the
+day has been well sunned and aired evidently
+thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do
+seem better ventilated, and our lungs take in fuller
+draughts of air. How curious it is that the air
+should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light
+when it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days
+when it is an effort to move, and the grasshopper
+is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the
+trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we
+are on its crest, and are buoyed up both in mind and
+in body, on the crisp, bright days when the air
+seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the
+heavier salt sea-water buoys us up more than the
+fresh river or pond water, but we do not feel in the
+same way the lift of the high barometric wave.
+Even the rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring
+are quickly susceptible to these atmospheric<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>
+changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine
+and crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as
+to make hay. Let the high blue-domed day with
+its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer,
+overcast, humid day from the south, and the
+flow of sap lessens at once. It would seem
+as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their
+dry bark, they respond to the change so quickly.
+There is no sap without warmth, and yet warmth,
+without any memory of the frost, stops the flow.</p>
+
+<p>The more the air presses upon us the lighter we
+feel, and the less it presses upon us the more "logy"
+we feel. Climb to the top of a mountain ten thousand
+feet high, and you breathe and move with an
+effort. The air is light, water boils at a low
+temperature, and our lungs and muscles seem inadequate
+to perform their usual functions. There is
+a kind of pressure that exhilarates us, and an
+absence of pressure that depresses us.</p>
+
+<p>The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy
+work, sets one up, while the idle, the unemployed,
+has a deficiency of h&aelig;moglobin in his blood.
+The Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the
+man so over-employed that the pressure upon him
+is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled
+with compressed air.</p>
+
+<p>Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in
+the drama of the harvest, and one likes to see it
+well staged, as it is to-day&mdash;the high blue dome,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>
+the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still
+white in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures
+and hill-slopes, the clover shedding its
+perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds
+of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the
+song-birds still vocal, and the tide of summer
+standing poised at its full. Very soon it will begin
+to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become
+dry and harsh, the clover will fade, the
+girlish daisies will become coarse and matronly,
+the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the
+pastures will turn brown, and the haymakers will
+find the hay half cured as it stands waiting for
+them in the meadows.</p>
+
+<p>What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common,
+so abundant, so various, a green summer snow that
+softens the outlines of the landscape, that makes a
+carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields,
+and that furnishes food to so many and such various
+creatures! More than the grazing animals live
+upon the grass. All our cereals&mdash;wheat, barley,
+rye, rice, oats, corn&mdash;belong to the great family of
+the grasses.</p>
+
+<p>Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment
+of the hills. It gives us the meadow, a
+feature in the northern landscape so common that
+we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once
+when we enter a tropical or semi-tropical country.
+In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw no mead<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span>ows
+and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the
+genial, mellow look which our landscape presents.
+Harshness, rawness, aridity, are the prevailing
+notes.</p>
+
+<p>From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows
+with their boundary line of stone fences that are
+like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover.
+They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in
+the breeze, the green inundation seems about to
+overwhelm its boundaries, all the surface inequalities
+of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and
+stones are hidden, the woodchucks make their
+roads through it, immersed like dolphins in the
+sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowing
+beneficence of our temperate zone it all presents!
+Nature in her kinder, gentler moods, dreaming of
+the tranquil herds and the bursting barns. Surely
+the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for
+the most part noiseless, peace-yielding victories
+that gladden the eye and tranquillize the heart.</p>
+
+<p>The meadow presents a pleasing picture before
+it is invaded by the haymakers, and a varied and
+animated one after it is thus invaded; the mowing-machine
+sending a shudder ahead of it through the
+grass, the hay-tedder kicking up the green locks
+like a giant, many-legged grasshopper, the horserake
+gathering the cured hay into windrows,
+the white-sleeved men with their forks pitching it
+into cocks, and, lastly, the huge, soft-cheeked loads<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span>
+of hay, towering above the teams that draw them,
+brushing against the bar-ways and the lower
+branches of the trees along their course, slowly
+winding their way toward the barn. Then the
+great mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the
+fields, and the battle is won. Milk and cream
+are stored up in well-cured hay, and when the
+snow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills
+them in summer, the tranquil cow can still rest
+and ruminate in contentment.</p>
+
+<p>As the swallows sweep out and in near my head
+they give out an angry "Sleet, sleet," as if my presence
+had suddenly become offensive to them. I
+know what makes the change in their temper. The
+young are leaving their nests, and at such eventful
+times the parent birds are always nervous and
+anxious. When any of our birds launch a family
+into the world they would rather not have spectators,
+and you are pretty sure to be abused if you
+intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a
+good deal of sharp emphasis into that "Sleet,
+sleet," though she is not armed to make any of
+her threats good. Who knows that all will go well
+with them when they first make the plunge into
+space with their untried wings? A careful parent
+should keep the coast clear.</p>
+
+<p>They have been testing their wings for several
+days, clinging to the sides of the nest and beating
+the wings rapidly. And now comes the crucial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>
+moment of letting go and attempting actual flight.
+Several of them have already done it, and I see
+them resting on the dead limbs of a plum-tree
+across the road. But more are to follow, and parental
+anxiety is still rife. I shall be sorry when the
+spacious hayloft becomes silent. That affectionate
+"Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing
+squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged
+companionship. The old barn is the abode of
+friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of them
+and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of
+poetry and romance to these familiar scenes.</p>
+
+<p>Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest
+of birds? Known to the poets and sages and
+prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless
+and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and
+masterful on the wing, the child and darling of the
+summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in the
+fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching
+no earthly food, drinking and bathing and
+mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly coursing the
+long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in
+the shape of a bird! Only in the free fields of the
+summer air could it have got that steel-blue of the
+wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of
+course I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff
+swallow seems less a child of the sky and sun,
+probably because its sheen and glow are less, and
+its shape and motions less arrowy. More varied in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span>
+color, its hues yet lack the intensity, and its flight
+the swiftness, of those of its brother of the haylofts.
+The tree swallows and the bank swallows
+are pleasing, but they are much more local and
+restricted in their ranges than the barn-frequenters.
+As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the
+barn swallows the summer always brought.</p>
+
+<p>After all, there is but one swallow; the others
+are particular kinds that we specify. How curious
+that men should ever have got the notion that this
+airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams,
+spends the winter hibernating in the mud of
+ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of newts and
+frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born
+of the blindness and superstition of earlier times.
+One knows that the rain of the rainbow may be
+gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the
+fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life.
+Yet one would as soon think of digging up a rainbow
+in the mud as a swallow. The swallow follows
+the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial
+regions, where it hibernates on the wing, buried
+in tropical sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the
+swallows, a good day for the haymakers, and a good
+day for him who sits before his open barn door and
+weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this
+slight literary fabric.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">VI</div>
+
+<div class="center">NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE</div>
+
+
+<p>The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive
+and goes its own way so quietly and furtively that
+we miss much of it unless we cultivate an interest
+in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase
+a line of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will
+seem worthy of his interest. One thing is linked
+to another or gives a clue to another. There is
+no surer way to find birds' nests than to go berrying
+or fishing. In the blackberry or raspberry bushes
+you may find the bush sparrow's nest or the indigobird's
+nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I
+missed my fish, and my hook caught on a branch
+over my head. When I pulled the branch down,
+there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's
+nest. I unwittingly caught more than I
+missed. On another occasion I stumbled upon the
+nest of the water accentor which I had never before
+found; on still another, upon the nest of the
+winter wren, a marvel of mossy softness and delicacy
+hidden under a mossy log.</p>
+
+<p>Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving
+ledges the fisherman often sees the nest of the
+ph[oe]be-bird, which does not cease to please for the
+hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>
+artistry. On the newly sawn timbers of your
+porch or woodshed it is far less pleasing, because
+the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
+the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper
+sparrow fly up and alight on the telephone wire with
+nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye upon
+her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy
+and weedy bank of the roadside in front of me and
+disappears. A few moments later I have her
+secret&mdash;a nest in a little recess in the bank. That
+straw gave the finishing touch. She kept her
+place on the nest until she had deposited her first
+egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this
+season. Some young vespers flitting about farther
+up the road are presumably her first brood. Each
+day thereafter for four consecutive days she added
+an egg. Incubation soon began and on the
+10th of July the young were out, the little sprawling,
+skinny things looking, as a city girl said
+when she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a
+nest, as if they were mildewed.</p>
+
+<p>These ground-builders among the birds, taking
+their chances in the great common of the open
+fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every hour&mdash;the
+hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes,
+weasels, coons by night, and crows and hawks by
+day&mdash;what bird-lover does not experience a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>
+thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
+nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt
+and the disorderly; he has found a thing of
+life and love amid the cold and the insensate. Yet
+all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw
+of it serves a purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies
+the little niche in which it is placed. What a center
+of solicitude and forethought.</p>
+
+<p>Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the
+other side of the road, is a junco's nest. You may
+know the junco's nest from that of any other
+ground-builder by its being more elaborate and
+more perfectly hidden. The nest is tucked far under
+the mossy and weedy bank, and only a nest-hunter
+passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a
+blind man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would
+have seen it. A little screen of leaves of the hawkweed
+permits only the rim of one edge of the nest
+to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached
+forth my hand did the mother bird come fluttering
+out and go down the road with drooping wings and
+spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly
+lighting up the whole performance.</p>
+
+<p>A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had
+had brief glimpses of the male many times about the
+place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
+one male spitefully pursuing another male along
+the top of the stone wall opposite, which fact,
+paralleled in a human case, would afford a hint for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span>
+detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a
+very successful bird. The swarms of them that
+one sees in the late fall and in the early winter going
+south is good evidence of this. They usually precede
+the white-throats north in the spring, but a few
+linger and breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.</p>
+
+<p>When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of
+my door makes herself into a sunshade to protect
+her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
+her young pant too; they would probably perish
+were not the direct rays of the sun kept from them.
+Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the hill
+pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk,
+might be considered in danger from a large herd of
+dairy cows, but it is wisely placed in view of such a
+contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of Canada
+thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a
+few square yards, the grazing is very poor. I do
+not think that the chances are one in fifty that the
+hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that
+the problem presented itself to the bird as it does to
+me, but her instinct was as sure a guide as my
+reason is to me&mdash;or a surer one.</p>
+
+<p>The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by
+a New England bird-lover, Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned
+writer on our birds, fifty or more years
+ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by
+our earlier writers. It haunts the hilly pastures
+and roadsides in the Catskill region. It is often<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>
+called the road-runner, from its habit of running
+along the road ahead when one is driving or walking&mdash;a
+very different bird, however, from the road-runner
+of the Western States. The vesper is
+larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and
+russet, and does not frequent our gardens and
+orchards as does the latter. In color it suggests
+the European skylark; the two lateral white
+quills in its tail enhance this impression. One
+season a stray skylark, probably from Long Island
+or some other place where larks had been liberated,
+appeared in a broad, low meadow near me, and not
+finding his own kind paid court to a female vesper
+sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt
+pestered her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately
+and seemed much embarrassed by the
+attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>When the young of any species appear, the solicitude
+and watchfulness of the mother bird are
+greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the
+vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of
+my harmless character now for several weeks and,
+one would think, must know that her precious secret
+is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in
+her beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards
+away, she maneuvers around for a minute or two,
+flying up to the telephone wire or a few yards up
+or down the road, and finally approaches the nest
+with much hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>
+in the act. When she comes again and again
+and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the
+half-fledged young were lying on the ground in
+front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous
+marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I
+could not divine.</p>
+
+<p>What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently
+so wise on some occasions and so absurd
+on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food
+to her young, going through the same tactics over
+and over, learns no more than a machine would.
+But, of course, the bird does not think; hence the
+folly of her behavior to a being that does. The
+wisdom of nature, which is so unerring under
+certain conditions, becomes to us sheer folly under
+changed conditions.</p>
+
+<p>When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better
+of her, she often devours the food she has in her
+beak, so fearful is she of betraying her precious
+secret. But the next time she comes she may only
+maneuver briefly before approaching the nest, and
+then again hesitate and parley with her fears and
+make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I
+had only just appeared upon the scene.</p>
+
+<p>One of the best things a bird-lover can have in
+front of his house or cabin is a small dead tree with
+numerous leafless branches. Many kinds of birds
+love to perch briefly where they can look around<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
+them. I would not exchange the old dead plum-tree
+that stands across the road in front of my lodge
+for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It
+bears a perpetual crop of birds. Of course the
+strictly sylvan birds, such as the warblers, the
+vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit
+thrushes, do not come, but many kinds of other
+birds pause there during the day and seem to enjoy
+the unobstructed view.</p>
+
+<p>All the field and orchard and grove birds come.
+In early summer the bobolink perches there, then
+tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows below,
+pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted
+grosbeak comes and shows his brilliant front. The
+purple finch, the goldfinch, the indigo bunting, the
+bluebird, the kingbird, the ph[oe]be-bird, the great
+crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee,
+the high-hole, the downy woodpecker, the
+vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy, pause
+there in the course of the day, and some of them
+several times during the day. Occasionally the
+scarlet tanager lights it up with his vivid color.</p>
+
+<p>But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song
+sparrow whose mate has a nest not far off. Here
+he perches and goes through his repertoire of three
+or four different songs from dawn till nightfall,
+pausing only long enough now and then to visit his
+mate or to refresh himself with a little food. He
+repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span>
+his plumage in the intervals. He sings several
+hundred times a day and has been doing so for many
+weeks. The house wren during the breeding-season
+repeats his song thousands of times a day, while
+the red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning
+till night for several months. How a conscious
+effort like that would weary our human singers and
+their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious,
+in our sense, of what they are doing.</p>
+
+<p>When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle
+this singing sparrow presents! A little wild bird
+sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its voice
+in song hour after hour, day after day, week after
+week.</p>
+
+<p>In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual
+characteristic, but viewed in the light of the spirit
+of the whole, what is it except a song of praise
+and thanksgiving&mdash;joy in life, joy in the day, joy
+in the mate and brood, joy in the paternal and
+maternal instincts and solicitudes, a voice from the
+heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving
+for the universal beneficence without which you
+and I and the little bird would not be here? In
+foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain and
+the cold do not silence him.</p>
+
+<p>There are few or no pessimists among the birds.
+One might think the call of the turtle-dove, which
+sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of
+despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>
+love." The plaint of the wood pewee, pensive and
+like a human sigh, is far from pessimistic, although
+in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to
+being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the
+catbird and the jay, with their peevish and complaining
+notes, might well be placed in that category,
+were it not for their songs when the love passion
+makes optimists even of them. The strain of
+the hermit thrush which floats down to me from the
+wooded heights above day after day at all hours,
+but more as the shades of night are falling&mdash;what
+does this pure, serene, exalted strain mean but
+that, in Browning's familiar words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">God's in his heaven&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">All's right with the world!</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone,
+but what puts it into his heart to do that?
+Certainly it is good to have a mate and a
+brood!</p>
+
+<p>A new season brings new experiences with the
+same old familiar birds, or new thoughts about
+them. This season I have had new impressions of
+our cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen.
+Of the two species, the black-billed and the yellow-billed,
+the former prevails in the latitude of New
+England, and the latter farther south. We
+cannot hail our black-billed as "blithe newcomer,"
+as Wordsworth does his cuckoo. "Doleful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>
+newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing
+cheery or animated in his note, and he is about
+as much a "wandering voice" as is the European
+bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of
+flowers. He is a prophet of the rain, and the
+country people call him the rain crow. All his
+notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His
+nesting-instincts seem to lead him, or rather her, to
+the thorn-bushes as inevitably as the grass finch's
+lead her to the grass.</p>
+
+<p>The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and
+inefficient bird that it is interesting to see it doing
+things. One of our young poets has a verse in which
+he sings of</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The solemn priestly bumble-bee</span>
+<span class="i0">That marries rose to rose.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>He might apply the same or similar adjectives to
+the cuckoo. Solemn and priestly, or at least
+monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and
+suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights,
+or is gay and cheerful like our other birds, I have
+yet to witness it.</p>
+
+<p>During the last summer, day after day I saw one
+of the birds going by my door toward the clump of
+thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill. One
+afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting
+on a branch very still and straight, with the worm
+still in its beak. I sat down on the tentlike thicket
+and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span>
+guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after
+a minute or two he began to shake and bruise the
+worm. I waited to see him disclose the nest, but
+he would not, and finally devoured the worm.
+Then he hopped or flitted about amid the branches
+above me, uttering his harsh note every minute or
+two.</p>
+
+<p>After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted
+the curtain of thorny branches which separated the
+thicket from the meadow and stepped outside. I
+had moved along only a few paces when I discovered
+the nest on an outer branch almost in the sunshine.
+The mother bird was covering her half-grown
+young. As I put up my hand toward her,
+she slipped off, withdrew a few feet into the
+branches, and uttered her guttural calls.</p>
+
+<p>In the nest were four young, one of them nearly
+ready to leave it, while another barely had its
+eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened, while
+the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth
+for food. The most mature one pointed its bill
+straight up and sat as still as if petrified. The whole
+impression one got from the nest and its contents
+was of something inept and fortuitous. But the
+cares of a family woke the parents up and they got
+down to real work in caring for their charge.</p>
+
+<p>The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with
+threadlike yellow stripes, and looked as if they were
+wet or just out of the shell.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>That strain of parasitism in the blood of the
+cuckoo&mdash;how long in the history of its race since
+it mastered it and became its own nest-builder?
+But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly
+is. Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the
+twigs of the thorn-tree, with all their sharp needle-like
+spines upon them, some of the twigs a foot long,
+bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking
+nest and nursery I ever beheld&mdash;a mere
+platform of twigs about four inches across, carpeted
+with a little shredded brown fibrous material, looking
+as if made from the inner bark of some tree,
+perhaps this very thorn.</p>
+
+<p>In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or
+apple-tree worm, which is their favorite food,
+cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green
+worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods
+they can find a forest worm that is riddling the
+leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in
+force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the
+destruction of the worms. It is interesting to see
+the cuckoo fly by several times a day with a big
+green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems,
+here it is doing things. It is like seeing a monk at
+the plough-handle. It is a solemn creature; its
+note is almost funereal.</p>
+
+<p>Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive
+about its nesting-habits as any of the sparrows.
+The male bird seems to know that his brilliant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>
+color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far
+away from the nest, singing at all hours of the day
+in a circle around it, the radius of which must be
+more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest
+was near the house, almost under the clothes-line,
+in a low blackberry-bush, partly masked by tall-growing
+daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass
+near it, when off went the little brown bird with her
+sharp, chiding manners. She is a very emphatic
+creature. It is yea and nay with her every time.</p>
+
+<p>The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is
+not a very pleasing singer, but an all-day one and
+an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer birds.
+In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows
+and goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds.
+Their range of food is probably very limited.
+I have never chanced to see them taking
+food of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>How crowded with life every square rod of the
+fields and woods is, if we look closely enough!
+Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
+woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot
+wave, reclining on a cushion of dry leaves or sitting
+with my back against a cool, smooth exposure of the
+outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give
+myself up to a day of little things. And the little
+things soon come trooping or looping along.</p>
+
+<p>I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions
+of the rim of my straw hat which lies on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span>
+the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
+an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and
+rearing up on its hind legs and feeling the vacant
+space around it as a blind man might hunt for a
+lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its
+travels looking for a place in which to go through
+that wonderful transformation of creeping worm
+into a winged creature. In its higher stage of
+being it is a little silvery moth, barely an inch
+across, and, like other moths, has a brief season of
+life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some
+suitable place and then dying or falling a victim
+to the wood pewee or some other bird. After some
+minutes of groping and humping about on my hat
+and on dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.</p>
+
+<p>A little later a large black worm comes along.
+It is an inch and a quarter long, and is engaged in
+the same quest as its lesser brother of the green,
+transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say,
+many thousand times, and what a terrible-looking
+monster we should have&mdash;a traveling arch of
+contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher
+than your head, and measuring off the ground a rod
+or more at a time, or standing twenty feet or more
+high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is
+a puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead
+would quickly dispose.</p>
+
+<p>With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by
+and watch it go looping up the trunk. Evidently it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span>
+doesn't know just where it wants to go, but it
+finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up
+that. By chance it strikes one of the branches six
+feet from the ground and goes looping up that.
+Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
+of three small branches and climbs that a foot or
+more, and a dry twig, six or eight inches long, is
+seized and explored. At the end of it the creature
+tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty
+space, then turns back and hits a smaller twig on
+this twig about an inch long. This it explores over
+and over and sounds the depths that surround it,
+then loops back again to the end of the main twig
+it has just explored, profiting nothing by experience;
+then retraces its steps and measures off another
+small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the
+leaves.</p>
+
+<p>Has the course of life up through geologic time
+been in any way like this? There has been the
+push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but has
+there been no more guiding principle than in the
+case of this worm? The singular thing about the
+worm is its incessant reachings forth into surrounding
+space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding,
+as if to be sure that no chance to make a new connection
+is missed.</p>
+
+<p>Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging
+by its hind feet, lets itself down and simulates
+a small dry twig, in which disguise it would deceive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>
+the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed
+the night posing as a twig.</p>
+
+<p>Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon
+the stage were a hummingbird, a little red newt,
+and a wood frog. The hummer makes short
+work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is
+gone. This one seemed to be exploring the dry
+twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs or
+bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a
+twig a few yards from me. My ardent wish could
+not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy bird, appearing
+and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the
+heart of all the flowers and taking no food grosser
+than their nectar, the winged jewel of the poets, the
+surprise and delight of all beholders&mdash;it came like
+a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and
+was gone as quickly.</p>
+
+<p>All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of
+their own, all except the woodchuck; wherever he
+is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is
+known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a
+real sylvan frog, as pretty as a bird, the color of the
+dry leaves, slender and elegant in form and quick
+and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one
+in the bed of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand
+toward him and stroked his back with a twig. If
+you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put
+a spell upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized.
+He was instantly responsive to my passes. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span>
+began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my
+finger instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly,
+rose up more upon his feet, and bowed his head.
+As I continued the titillation he began to give
+forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if
+he were going to break out in song. He did not,
+but he seemed loath to go his way. How different
+he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in
+large numbers make a multitudinous croaking and
+clucking in the little wild pools in spring! He
+wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in
+the pools celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice
+is off them, and then in two or three days he takes
+to the open woods and assumes the assimilative
+coloring of the dry leaves.</p>
+
+<p>The little orange-colored salamander, a most
+delicate and highly colored little creature, is as
+harmless as a baby, and about as slow and undecided
+in its movements. Its cold body seems
+to like the warmth of your hand. Yet in color
+it is as rich an orange as the petal of the cardinal
+flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an
+outside color; it is a glow, and renders the creature
+almost transparent, an effect as uniform as
+the radiance of a precious stone. Its little, innocent-looking,
+three-toed foot, or three and a half
+toed&mdash;how unreptilian it looks through my pocket
+glass! A baby's hand is not more so. Its throbbing
+throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>
+with a glint of gold above them&mdash;only a close view
+of these satisfies one.</p>
+
+<p>Here is another remarkable transformation
+among the small wild folk. In the spring he is a
+dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;
+now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the
+woods. This is said to be an immature form, which
+returns to the ponds and matures the next season;
+but whether it is the male or the female that assumes
+this bright hue, or both, I do not know.
+The coat seems to be its midsummer holiday uniform
+which is laid aside when it goes back to the
+marshes to hibernate in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means
+of protection that do not at once appear. In the
+case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or other
+disagreeable secretion, which would cause any
+animal to repent that took it in its mouth. It is
+even less concerned at being caught than is the
+skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.</p>
+
+<p>In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon
+the domain of another sylvan denizen, the chipmunk.
+One afternoon one suddenly came up from
+the open field below me with his pockets full of
+provender of some sort; just what sort I wondered,
+as there was no grain or seeds or any dry food that
+it would be safe to store underground for the winter.</p>
+
+<p>Beholding me sitting there within two yards of
+his den was a great surprise to him. He eyed me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>
+a long time&mdash;squirrel time&mdash;making little, spasmodic
+movements on the flat stone above his den.
+At a motion of my arm he darted into his hole with
+an exultant chip. He was soon out with empty
+pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little
+tocsin of distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan
+folk might hear. As I made no sign, he soon
+ceased and went about his affairs.</p>
+
+<p>All this time, behind and above me, concealed by
+a vase fern, reposed that lovely creature of the
+twilight, the luna moth, just out of her chrysalis,
+drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift
+the fern screen, and there was this marvel! Her
+body was as white and spotless as the snow, and
+her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and
+delicate as&mdash;well, as only those of a luna moth
+can be. It is as immaculate as an angel. With
+a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple
+sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her
+for the night.</p>
+
+<p>While I was loitering there on the threshold of
+the woods, observing the small sylvan folk, about
+a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was
+a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than
+a score of years, the nest of the veery, or Wilson's
+thrush. Some friends were camping there with
+their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech
+woods, and passed and repassed hourly within a
+few yards of the nest, and, although they each had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>
+sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen
+nor heard the birds during the two days they had
+been there.</p>
+
+<p>While calling upon them I chanced to see the
+hurried movements of a thrush in the low trees six
+or seven yards away. The bird had food in its
+beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it.
+It quickly flew down to a small clump of ferns that
+crowned a small knoll in the open, about ten feet
+from the border of the woods. As it did so, another
+thrush flew out of the ferns and disappeared in the
+woods. Their stealthy movements sent a little
+thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure.
+I parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of
+the small knoll was the nest with two half-fledged
+young.</p>
+
+<p>A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my
+door gave an unkind cut to a sparrow that had a
+nest in the clover near the wall. The mower
+chanced to see the nest before the sickle-bar had
+swept over it. It contained four young ones just
+out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
+carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The
+parent birds were not seen, but we naturally
+reasoned that they would come back and would
+alight upon the wall to make observations.</p>
+
+<p>But that afternoon and the next morning passed,
+and we saw no anxious bird parents. The young
+lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>
+the nest and seemed to be more contented than
+abandoned birds usually are. The next night was
+unseasonably cold, and I expected to find the nestlings
+dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
+strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather
+on a stone wall, they seemed to be doing well.
+Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them, I
+said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the
+road opposite to them and watched.</p>
+
+<p>I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow
+came slyly up and dropped some food into an open
+mouth and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in
+sauntering through the woods, his hat just brushes
+a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
+morning. The nest was like a natural growth,
+hanging there like a fairy basket in the fork of a
+beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery, brown
+and gray wood products, just high enough to escape
+prowling ground enemies and low enough to escape
+sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was in its
+artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the
+green-and-brown solitude. The weaver had bent
+down one of the green leaves and made it a part of
+the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist.
+Then the dabs of white here and there, given by
+the fragments of spiders' cocoons&mdash;all helped to
+blend it with the flickering light and shade.</p>
+
+<p>I gently bent down the branch and four con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>fident
+heads with open mouths instantly appeared
+above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
+flitting about in the branches overhead, peering
+down upon me and uttering her anxious "quay
+quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
+away!" This I soon did.</p>
+
+<p>Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is
+soon quickly over. But the red-eyed vireo sings
+on into September&mdash;not an ecstatic strain, but a
+quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at
+his work.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">VII</div>
+
+<div class="center">WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT</div>
+
+
+<p>It was in May during the last term of his Presidency
+that Roosevelt asked me to go with him down to
+Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him name his birds.
+I stayed with him at the White House the night
+before we started. I remember that at dinner<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">1</a>
+there was an officer from the British army stationed
+in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indian
+affairs. I did not take part in it because I knew
+nothing about India, but Roosevelt was so conversant
+with Indian affairs and Indian history that
+you would think he had just been cramming on it,
+which I knew very well he had not. But that
+British officer was put on his mettle to hold his
+own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India
+and England's relation to it than the officer seemed
+to know. It was amazing to see the thoroughness
+of his knowledge about India.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">1</span></a> Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The incident
+he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House, just
+before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;C. B.</p></div>
+
+<p>The next morning we started off for Virginia,
+taking an early train.</p>
+
+<p>Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from
+Washington. I think we left the train at Char<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>lottesville,
+Virginia, and drove about ten miles to
+Pine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on
+the edge of the woods, a mile from the nearest
+farmhouse.</p>
+
+<p>Before we reached there we got out of the wagon
+and walked, as there were a good many warblers in
+the trees&mdash;the spring migration was on. It was
+pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the
+President insisted on carrying it. We identified
+several warblers there, among them the black-poll,
+the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap.
+He knew them in the trees overhead as quickly as
+I did.</p>
+
+<p>We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but
+as he was eager for a walk we started off, he leading,
+as if walking for a wager. We went through fields
+and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile or
+more, when we stopped and mopped our brows and
+turned homeward without having seen many birds.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when
+she saw the heated condition in which we returned,
+for not long afterwards he came to me and said:
+"Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we
+were in too much of a hurry." I replied, "No, Mr.
+President, that isn't the way I usually go a-birding."
+His thirst for the wild and the woods, and
+his joy at returning to these after his winter in the
+White House, had evidently urged him on. He
+added, "We will try a different plan to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along
+the highways. Very soon we heard a wren which
+was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren," he said.
+We got out and watched it as it darted in and out
+of the fence and sang.</p>
+
+<p>I asked him if he knew whether the little gray
+gnatcatcher was to be seen there. I had not seen
+or heard it for thirty years. "Yes," he replied, "I
+saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run."</p>
+
+<p>We walked over to some plum-trees where there
+had been a house at one time. No sooner had we
+reached the spot than he cried, "There it is now!"
+And sure enough, there it was in full song&mdash;a little
+bird the shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine
+musical strain.</p>
+
+<p>As we were walking in a field we saw some birds
+that were new to me. Roosevelt also was puzzled
+to know what they were till we went among them
+and stirred them up, discovering that they were
+females of the blue grosbeak, with some sparrows
+which we did not identify.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of that walk he showed me a place
+where he had seen what he had thought at the time
+to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described how
+they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the
+tree where they alighted. I was skeptical, for it
+had long been thought that wild pigeons were extinct,
+but that fact had not impressed itself upon
+his mind. He said if he had known there could be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span>
+any doubt about it, he would have observed them
+more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as it
+was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable
+evidence. We talked with the colored coachman
+about the birds, as he also had seen them.
+His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had
+seen wild pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts.
+Subsequently Roosevelt wrote me that he had come
+to the conclusion that they had been mistaken
+about their being pigeons.</p>
+
+<p>One day while there, as we were walking through
+an old weedy field, I chanced to spy, out of the
+corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the
+ground only three or four yards away. I called
+Roosevelt's attention to it and said, "Now, Mr.
+President, I think with care you can drop your hat
+over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and
+crept up on the bird, and was almost in a position
+to let his hat drop over it when the bird flew to a
+near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this
+bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again
+cautiously and almost succeeded in putting his hand
+upon it; the bird flew just in time to save itself
+from his hand.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday after church he took me to a field
+where he had recently seen and heard Lincoln's
+sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the
+dry grass for an hour or more, waiting for the
+sparrow, but it did not appear.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span>During my visit there we named over seventy-five
+species of birds and fowl, he knowing all of
+them but two, and I knowing all but two. He
+taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler,
+and I taught him the swamp sparrow and one of
+the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine warbler.
+If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he
+would have been one ahead of me.</p>
+
+<p>I remember talking politics a little with him
+while we were waiting for the birds, and, knowing
+that he was expecting Taft to be his successor, I
+expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill
+his shoes.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you
+don't know him as well as I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is
+that, though Taft is an able and amiable man, he
+is not a born leader."</p>
+
+<p>(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course
+in support of the proposed League of Nations has
+quite brought me around to Roosevelt's estimate
+of him.)</p>
+
+<p>Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One
+evening as we sat in the lamplight, he reading Lord
+Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the man-eating
+lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting
+near with her needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's
+hand came down on the table with such a bang
+that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>
+exclaimed in a slightly nettled tone, "Why, my
+dear, what <i>is</i> the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would
+almost have demolished an African lion.</p>
+
+<p>It occurred to me later that evening how risky
+it was for the President of the United States to be
+so unprotected&mdash;without a guard of any kind&mdash;in
+that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something
+of this to him, suggesting that some one might
+"kidnap" him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his
+hip pocket, "I go armed, and they would have to
+be mighty quick to get the drop on me."</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and
+listen to the night sounds in the Virginia woods, I
+went out around the cabin and almost immediately
+heard some animal run heavily through the woods
+not far from the house. I thought perhaps it was
+a neighboring dog, but, on speaking of it to Mrs.
+Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men
+came every night at nine o'clock and stood on
+guard till morning, spending the day at a farmhouse
+in that vicinity. She did not let the President
+know of this because it would irritate him.</p>
+
+<p>The only flower we saw there which was new to
+me was the Indian pink. Roosevelt seemed to
+know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink
+moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were
+common in that locality.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span>On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being
+on the train, Roosevelt threw himself into the
+dictation of many letters, the wrens and the warblers
+already sidetracked for the business of the
+Administration.</p>
+
+<p>I passed another night at the White House, and
+in the morning early we went out on the White
+House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming
+to attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by.</p>
+
+<p>"They often stare at me as though they thought
+me crazy," he said, "when they see me gazing up
+into the trees."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now they will think I am your keeper,"
+I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.</p>
+
+<p>When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds
+that we had seen while at Pine Knot and hoped
+that I would sometime write up the trip; in fact,
+for years after, whenever we would meet, almost
+the first thing he would say was, "Have you written
+up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?" And his
+disappointment at my failure to do so was always
+unmistakable.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">2</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">2</span></a>
+The following letter may be of interest in this connection.<br />
+<span class="quotsig">C. B.</span><br />
+
+<span class="smcap">Dear Oom John:</span><br />
+
+
+Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration?
+If not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will include
+in your coming volume of sketches a little account of the time
+you visited us at Pine Knot, our little Virginia camp, while I
+was President. I am very proud of you, Oom John, and I want<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>
+the fact that you were my guest when I was President, and that
+you and I looked at birds together, recorded there&mdash;and don't
+forget that I showed you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's
+wren, and almost all the other birds I said I would!<br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 10em;">Ever yours,</span><br />
+<span class="quotsig"><span class="smcap">Theodore Roosevelt</span></span>
+</p></div>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<div class="center">VIII</div>
+
+<div class="center">A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY</div>
+
+
+<p>One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with
+some friends for a two weeks' automobile trip into
+the land of Dixie&mdash;joy-riders with a luxurious outfit
+calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.</p>
+
+<p>We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains
+in North Carolina. I confess that mountains and
+men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I can
+stand both, and I started out with the hope that the
+great Appalachian range held something new and
+interesting for me. Yet I knew it was a risky thing
+for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with
+younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red
+corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the
+things that moved one so deeply when one was
+younger. More than that, what did I need of an
+outing? All the latter half of my life has been an
+outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order.
+Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change,
+for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The
+old and familiar draw more strongly. Yet I was
+fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.</p>
+
+<p>Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so
+diversified, so forest-clad&mdash;the huge unbroken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span>
+Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys cutting
+across it from north to south; the world of fine
+farms and rural homesteads in the eastern half, and
+the great mining and manufacturing interests in
+the western, the source of noble rivers; and the
+storehouse of many of Nature's most useful gifts
+to man.</p>
+
+<p>The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows
+the line of least resistance, but it has some formidable
+obstacles to surmount, and it goes at them very
+deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a
+sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember
+persons with lighter cars standing beside them at
+the foot of those long, winding ascents, nursing
+and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing
+them for the heavy task before them. An almost
+perfect road, worthy of its great namesake, but an
+Alleghany range which you cannot get around or
+through gives the automobilist pause.</p>
+
+<p>As we were hurled along over the great highway
+the things I remember with the most satisfaction
+were the groups or processions of army trucks we
+met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was
+written large on that Lincoln Highway in that army
+of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb, khaki-colored
+fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking,
+a host of them, rolling eastward toward the
+seat of war, some loaded with soldiers, some with
+camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>
+resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon
+himself in this far-off land. On other highways
+the weapons and materials of war were converging
+toward the great seaports in the same way. The
+silent, grim, processions&mdash;how impressive they
+were!</p>
+
+<p>Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in
+or very near the lake of brimstone and fire, and
+its head in the sweet country air of the hill-tops.
+I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than
+I ever did in any other city in this country. One
+is fairly suffocated at times driving along the public
+highway on a bright, breezy August day. It
+might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such
+blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization.
+That weapons of war and of destructiveness
+should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire
+seemed fit and natural, but much more comes
+out of them&mdash;much that suggests the pond-lily
+rising out of the black slime and muck of the lake
+bottoms.</p>
+
+<p>We live in an age of iron and have all we can
+do to keep the iron from entering our souls. Our
+vast industries have their root in the geologic history
+of the globe as in no other past age. We delve
+for our power, and it is all barbarous and unhandsome.
+When the coal and oil are all gone and we
+come to the surface and above the surface for the
+white coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>
+the sunshine, how much more attractive life will be!
+Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may
+never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can
+hitch them to the mountain streams, and make
+the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the
+silver age will displace the iron age.</p>
+
+<p>The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast
+coal-mine. The farmer has only to dig into the
+side of the hill back of his house and take out his
+winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth
+and gentle and grassy the hills looked. It is a
+cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it
+seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and
+watched over with kindly care. Good crops of hay
+and grain were growing above their black remains,
+and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way.
+The shuffling and the deformation of the earth's
+surface which attended the laying down of the
+coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of
+that wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has
+smoothed it all out.</p>
+
+<p>Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or
+more miles southeast of Pittsburgh, an ideal place&mdash;a
+large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence well
+carpeted with grass, with wood and water in
+abundance. But the night was chilly. Folding
+camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily
+warmth, and until you get the hang of them and
+equip yourself with plenty of blankets, Sleep enters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>
+your tent very reluctantly. She tarried with me
+but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I
+got up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair
+beside it indulged in the "long, long thoughts"
+which belong to age much more than to youth.
+Youth was soundly and audibly sleeping in the
+tents with no thoughts at all.</p>
+
+<p>The talk that first night around the camp-fire
+gave us an inside view of many things about which
+we were much concerned. The ship question was
+the acute question of the hour and we had with us
+for a few days Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping
+Board, who could give us first-hand information,
+which he did to our great comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania,
+where for that night we slept indoors.</p>
+
+<p>On the following day one of the big cars had an
+accident&mdash;the fan broke, and the iron punctured
+the radiator. It looked as if we should be delayed
+until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh.
+We made our way slowly to Connellsville,
+where there was a good garage, but the best workmen
+there shook their heads; they said a new radiator
+was the only remedy. All four arms of the fan
+were broken off and there was no way to mend
+them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle.
+"Give me a chance," he said, and, pulling off his
+coat and rolling up his sleeves, he fell to work. In
+two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
+of drills and copper wire the master mechanic had
+stitched the severed arms to their stubs, soldered
+up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled car
+was again in running order.</p>
+
+<p>On August the 31st we made our camp on the
+banks of a large, clear creek in West Virginia called
+Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road
+from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the
+reluctant consent of the widow who owned it to
+pitch our camp there, though her patch of roasting-ears
+near by made her hesitate; she had probably
+had experiences with gypsy parties, and was not
+impressed in our favor even when I gave her the
+names of two well-known men in our party. But
+Edison was not attracted by the widow's open
+field; the rough, grassy margin of the creek suited
+him better, and its proximity to the murmuring,
+eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it
+necessitated our mess-tent being pitched astride a
+shallow gully, and our individual tents elbowing one
+another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
+But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what
+the camper-out wants. Pure elements&mdash;air, water,
+earth&mdash;these settle the question; Camp Horseshoe
+Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I
+got my first view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting&mdash;a
+bird rarely seen north of the Potomac.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting object near our camp was an old,
+unused grist-mill, with a huge, decaying overshot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span>
+oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the wheel
+and had our pictures taken.</p>
+
+<p>At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a
+twelve-year-old girl appeared in the road above us
+with a pail of apples for sale. We invited her into
+our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We
+took all of her apples. I can see her yet with her
+shining eyes as she crumpled the new one-dollar
+bill which one of the party placed in her hand.
+She did not look at it; the feel of it told the story
+to her. We quizzed her about many things and
+got straight, clear-cut answers&mdash;a very firm, level-headed
+little maid. Her home was on the hill
+above us. We told her the names of some of the
+members of the party, and after she had returned
+home we saw an aged man come out to the gate
+and look down upon us. An added interest was
+felt whenever we came in contact with any of the
+local population. Birds and flowers and trees and
+springs and mills were something, but human
+flowers and rills of human life were better. I do
+not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen
+years old, to whom we gave a lift of a few miles on
+her way. She had been on a train five times, and
+once had been forty miles from home. Her mother
+was dead and her father lived in Pennsylvania, and
+she was living with her grandfather. When asked
+how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and ever
+so many miles."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds
+of miles, in fact, all the way from Pennsylvania to
+North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or
+Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed&mdash;stately, hardy
+growths, and very pleasing to look upon, the ironweed
+with its crimson purple, and the eupatorium
+with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.</p>
+
+<p>August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West
+Virginia, a large, clear mountain trout-brook.
+It crossed our path many times that day. Every
+mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on
+the other side of it. It was flowing by a very
+devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We
+were working south and east.</p>
+
+<p>We made our camp that night on the grounds
+of the Cheat Mountain Club, on the banks of the
+river&mdash;an ideal spot. The people at the big clubhouse
+gave us a hospitable welcome and added
+much to our comfort. I found the forests and
+streams of this part of West Virginia much like
+those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and
+the climate even colder. That night the mercury
+dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they had
+a frost that killed all their garden truck. The
+paper outlines of big trout which covered the
+walls in the main room of the clubhouse told the
+story of the rare sport the club-members have there.
+Evidently Cheat River deserves a better name.</p>
+
+<p>The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>
+present a marked contrast to those of New York
+and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed down
+and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played
+such a part in shaping our northern landscapes.
+The valleys are markedly V-shaped, while ours are
+markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep
+that they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for
+the most part lies on the tops of the broad, rounded
+hills, though we passed through some broad, open
+river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful
+farms in which hay and oats were still being harvested.
+Everywhere were large fields of buckwheat,
+white with bloom, and, I presume, humming
+with bees.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders
+strewn over the landscape, I saw evidences of large
+local glaciers that had hatched in these mountains
+during the great Ice Age.</p>
+
+<p>We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the
+23d&mdash;a famous spring, and a beautiful spot. We
+pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and
+some of the party availed themselves of the
+public bathhouse that spanned the overflow of
+the great spring. The next night our camp was
+at Wolf Creek, not far from the Narrows&mdash;a beautiful
+spot, marred only by its proximity to the dusty
+highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of
+a broad, limpid creek in which the fish were jumping.
+Some grazing horses disturbed my sleep early<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>
+in the morning, but on the whole I have only pleasant
+memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.</p>
+
+<p>We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia,
+crossing many times the border between the
+two States, now in one, then in the other, all the
+time among the mountains, with a succession of
+glorious views from mountain-tops and along broad,
+fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm Springs,
+then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at
+Sweet Water Springs. Soft water and hard water,
+cold water and warm water, mineral water and
+trout-streams, companion one another in these
+mountains. This part of the continent got much
+folded and ruptured and mixed up in the building,
+and the elements are unevenly distributed.</p>
+
+<p>I think to most of us West Virginia had always
+been a rather hazy proposition, and we were glad
+to get a clear impression of it. We certainly
+became pretty intimate with the backbone of the
+continent&mdash;or with its many backbones, as its
+skeleton seems to be a very multiplex affair. The
+backbones of continents usually get broken in many
+places, but they serve their purpose just as well.
+In fact, our old Earth is more like an articulate
+than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many sections.</p>
+
+<p>One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name
+of the owner of the farm. One of the boys there,
+Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in bringing
+wood and doing other errands.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span>A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I
+felt more than did the others, was the scanty or
+delayed war news; the local papers, picked up here
+and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in
+the larger towns we could get some of the great
+dailies, the news was a day or two old. When one
+has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four
+exciting years, one is lost when cut off from them.</p>
+
+<p>Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a
+kind of a lark, especially to the younger members
+of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain, near
+Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats
+on a side-hill below the road. Our procession
+stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and Firestone
+were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with
+doubtful success. A photograph shows the farmer
+and Mr. Ford looking on with broad smiles, watching
+Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle
+tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face
+also, but decidedly an equivocal smile&mdash;the trick
+was not so easy as it looked. Evidently Mr. Ford
+had not forgotten his cradling days on the home
+farm in Michigan.</p>
+
+<p>Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how
+many conveniences you have, and things of the
+mind keep pretty well in the background. Occasionally
+around the camp-fire we drew Edison out
+on chemical problems, and heard formula after
+formula come from his lips as if he were reading<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>
+them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps
+has few, if any, equals in this country. It
+was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on mechanical
+problems. There is always pleasure and profit in
+hearing a master discuss his own art.</p>
+
+<p>A plunge into the South for a Northern man is
+in many ways a plunge into the Past. As soon as
+you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and
+people in the South are more local and provincial
+than in the North. For the most part, in certain
+sections, at least, the county builds the roads
+(macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass
+from a fine stone road in one county on to a rough
+dirt road in the next. Toll-gates appear. In one
+case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for
+the cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills
+are seen along the way, driven by overshot wheels,
+and they are usually at work. A man or a boy on
+horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind
+him, going to or returning from the mill, is a frequent
+sight; or a woman on horseback, on a sidesaddle,
+with a baby in her arms, attracts your
+attention. Thus my grandmother went to mill in
+pioneer days in the Catskills.</p>
+
+<p>The absence of bridges over the small streams
+was to us a novel feature. One of the party called
+these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are
+made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble.
+Another Southern feature, indicating how far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>
+behind our Northern and more scientific farming
+the South still is, are the groups of small haystacks
+in the meadows with poles sticking out of their
+tops, letting the rain and the destructive bacteria
+into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features
+of the South much to be commended are
+the large families. In a farmhouse near which we
+made camp one night there were thirteen children,
+the eldest of whom was at the front in France.
+The schools were in session in late August, and the
+schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt there are many peculiar local customs
+of which the hurrying tourist gets no inkling. At
+a station in the mountains of North Carolina a
+youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe,
+stood within a few feet of my friend and me and
+gazed at us with the simple, blank curiosity of a
+child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent
+interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it
+was the frank stare of a five-year-old boy. He
+belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain
+districts of the South&mdash;good human stuff, valiant
+as soldiers, and industrious as farmers, but so
+unacquainted with the great outside world, their
+unsophistication is shocking to see.</p>
+
+<p>It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously
+equipped expedition going forth to seek discomfort,
+for discomfort in several forms&mdash;dust, rough roads,
+heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents&mdash;is pretty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span>
+sure to come to those who go a-gypsying in the
+South. But discomfort, after all, is what the
+camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow
+weary of our luxuries and conveniences. We react
+against our complex civilization, and long to get
+back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully
+endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies,
+and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality
+once more.</p>
+
+<p>Our two chief characters presented many contrasts:
+Mr. Ford is more adaptive, more indifferent
+to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest in
+the stream is in its potential water-power. He
+races up and down its banks to see its fall, and
+where power could be developed. He never ceases
+to lament so much power going to waste, and points
+out that if the streams were all harnessed, as they
+could easily be, farm labor everywhere, indoors and
+out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon
+the benefit that would accrue to every country
+neighborhood if the water-power that is going to
+waste in its valley streams were set to work in
+some useful industry, furnishing employment to
+the farmers and others in the winter seasons when
+the farms need comparatively little attention. He
+is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to
+the greatest number. He aims to place his inventions
+within reach of the great mass of the people.
+As with his touring-car, so with his tractor engine,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>
+he has had the same end in view. Nor does he
+forget the housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing
+power into every household that will greatly
+lighten the burden of the women-folk.</p>
+
+<p>Partly owing to his more advanced age, but
+mainly, no doubt, to his meditative and introspective
+cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active than
+is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday
+lunch, or to make camp at the end of the day,
+Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or curl
+up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while
+Mr. Ford would inspect the stream or busy himself
+in getting wood for the fire. Mr. Ford is a runner
+and a high kicker, and frequently challenged
+some of the party to race with him. He is also a persistent
+walker, and from every camp, both morning
+and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk half-hour
+walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all
+occasions, and his optimism in regard to all the
+great questions, are remarkable. His good-will and
+tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his
+practical turn of mind, and his mastery of the
+mechanical arts and of business methods, he is
+through and through an idealist. As tender as a
+woman, he is much more tolerant. He looks like
+a poet, and conducts his life like a philosopher. No
+poet ever expressed himself through his work more
+completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself
+through his car and his tractor engine. They typify<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>
+him; not imposing, nor complex, less expressive of
+power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability,
+and universal service, they typify the combination
+of powers and qualities which make him a beneficent,
+a likable, and a unique personality. Those
+who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is
+a national figure, and the crowds that flock around
+the car in which he is riding, as we pause in the
+towns through which we pass, are not paying their
+homage merely to a successful car-builder or business
+man, but to a beneficent human force, a great
+practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of universal
+helpfulness they have all felt. He has not
+only brought pleasure and profit into their lives,
+but has illustrated and written large upon the pages
+of current history a new ideal of the business man&mdash;that
+of a man whose devotion to the public good
+has been a ruling passion, and whose wealth has
+inevitably flowed from the depth of his humanitarianism.
+He has taken the people into partnership
+with him, and has eagerly shared with them
+the benefits that are the fruit of his great enterprise&mdash;a
+liberator, an emancipator, through channels
+that are so often used to enslave or
+destroy.</p>
+
+<p>In one respect, essentially the same thing may
+be said of Mr. Edison: his first and leading thought
+has been, "What can I do to make life easier and
+more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>
+chemist, a trenchant and original thinker on all the
+great questions of life, though he has delved but
+little into the world of art and literature&mdash;a practical
+scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound
+insight. And his humor is delicious. We
+delighted in his wise and witty sayings. A good
+camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go
+with hair disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long
+as the best of us, and can rough it week in and week
+out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so little
+that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts
+or turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the
+cornfields and apple-orchards, as some of us were,
+but he is second to none in his love for the open
+and for wild nature.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different
+type&mdash;the clean, clear-headed, conscientious business
+type; always on his job, always ready for whatever
+comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always
+at the service of those around him; a man generous,
+kindly, appreciative, devoted to his family
+and his friends; sound in his ideas&mdash;a manufacturer
+who has faithfully and honestly served
+his countrymen.</p>
+
+<p>It is after he gets home that a meditative man
+really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features
+are strained out or transformed. In retrospect
+it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am
+aware that I was often irritable and ungracious, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>
+my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed
+to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at
+this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at
+Slabsides, I look upon the whole trip with unmixed
+pleasure.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<div class="center">IX</div>
+
+<div class="center">UNDER GENIAL SKIES</div>
+
+<div class="center2">I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND</div>
+
+
+<p>The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the
+East and West, differ from each other almost as
+much as day differs from night. On the coast of
+southern California the dominant impression made
+upon one is of a world made up of three elements&mdash;sun,
+sea, and sky. The Pacific stretches away to
+the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating
+floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly
+than they do upon the Atlantic coast. It
+justifies its name. The passion and fury of the
+Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its
+rocks, all that I saw of them, are soft and friable.
+The languid waves rapidly wear them down. They
+are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous
+sea. The mountains that tower four or
+five thousand feet along the coast are of the same
+character. They are young, and while they carry
+their heads very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated
+compared with the granite of our coast.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, young mountains always wear the look
+of age, from their deep lines and jagged and angular
+character, while the really old mountains wear the
+look of youth from their comparative smoothness,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>
+their unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing
+lines. Time has taken the conceit all out of them.</p>
+
+<p>The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about
+one third of what it is on the eastern side of the
+continent. And the soil is curiously adapted to the
+climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there
+under arid conditions that would kill every green
+thing on the Atlantic seaboard. The soil is clay
+tempered with a little sand, probably less than ten
+per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay
+out of a large lump of it and found the sand a
+curious heterogeneous mixture of small and large,
+light and dark grains of all possible forms. The
+soil does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps
+moist when ours would almost defy the plough.
+Under cultivation it works up into a good tillable
+condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable,
+as if it were made for a scant rainfall.
+As a crop-producing soil, it has virtues which I am
+at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown
+here have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness,
+of which we know nothing in the East. Much sunshine
+in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous
+and tough.</p>
+
+<p>I more than half believe that the wonderful
+sweetness of the bird songs here, such as that of
+the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of climate;
+the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected
+their vocal cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
+note of our meadowlark contrasts with that of the
+Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies contrast
+with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed
+land.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II. LAWN BIRDS</div>
+
+<p>To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house
+on the Pacific coast is to have spread out before
+you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty spectacle
+of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes,
+titlarks, and plovers flutter across it as thick as
+autumn leaves&mdash;not so highly colored, yet showing
+a pleasing variety of tints, while the black ph[oe]be
+flits about your porch and arbor vines.</p>
+
+<p>Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably
+ten to one of any other variety of birds. Then
+the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the
+tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of
+which I am not sure are next in number.</p>
+
+<p>Two species of birds from the Far North are
+usually represented by a solitary specimen of each,
+namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the American
+pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its
+usual trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker
+in the group. It walks about like our oven-bird
+with the same pretty movement of the head and a
+teetering motion of the hind part of the body.</p>
+
+<p>While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman
+Expedition, I found the nest of the pipit far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span>
+up on the side of a steep mountain. It was tucked
+in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of
+sea and mountain such as Alaska alone can afford.</p>
+
+<p>But the most conspicuous and interesting of all
+these lawn birds are the ring-necked plovers, or
+killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more of
+those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the
+shore and of the spirit of the tender, glancing April
+days, running over your lawn but a few yards from
+you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs,
+that curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down
+movement of their bodies, their shrill, disconsolate
+cries as they take flight, their beautiful and powerful
+wings and tail, and their mastery of the air&mdash;all
+arrest your attention or challenge your admiration.
+They bring the distant and the furtive to
+your very door. All climes and lands wait upon
+their wings. They fly around the world.</p>
+
+<p>The plovers are the favored among birds.
+Beauty, speed, and immunity from danger from
+birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial creatures!
+Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice?
+Is that the motion of the waves in its body? Is
+that the restlessness of the surf in its behavior?</p>
+
+<p>However high and far it may fly, it has to come
+back to earth as we all do. It comes to our lawn to
+feed upon earthworms. The other birds are all busy
+picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors
+in the grass, but the plover is here for game that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>
+harbors in the turf. His methods are like those of
+the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He
+scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about
+over it, making frequent drives into it with his bill,
+but only now and then seizing the prey of which he
+is in search. When he does so, he shows the same
+judgment which the robin does under like conditions.
+He pulls slowly and evenly, so as to make
+sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go its
+hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are
+wise about their food-supplies.</p>
+
+<p>On the beach the wild life that I see is all on
+wings. There are the tranquil, effortless gliding
+herring gulls, snow-white beneath and pearl-gray
+above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful
+to look upon&mdash;airplanes that put forth their powers
+so subtly and so silently as to elude both eye and
+ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white
+and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered
+rocks. Fresh water is at a premium on
+this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail themselves
+of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town,
+which discharge on the beach.</p>
+
+<p>There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged
+birds, the brown pelicans, usually in a line
+of five or six, skimming low over the waves, shaping
+their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set
+wings for a long distance, rising and falling to clear
+the water&mdash;coasting, at it were, on a horizontal sur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span>face,
+and only at intervals beating the air for more
+power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds
+with wings and forms that suggest none of the
+grace and beauty of the usual shore birds. They
+do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to
+part the water, but they do both very successfully.
+When the pelican dives for his prey, he is for the
+moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
+down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts
+the water in superb style. When he recovers
+himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
+creature as before.</p>
+
+<p>A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian
+ancestors&mdash;a bird that is at home under the
+water and hunts its prey there on the wing&mdash;is the
+black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred
+of them on the face of a sea-cliff a short
+distance above me.</p>
+
+<p>I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black
+lines they make above the foaming breakers as
+they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
+In diving, they disappear under the water like
+the loon, and penetrate to as great depths. One
+does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
+them, but they are interesting as a part of the
+multitudinous life of the shore.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III. SILKEN CHAMBERS</div>
+
+<p>The trap-door spider has furnished me with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>
+one of the most interesting bits of natural history
+I have found on the coast. An obliging
+sojourner near me from one of the Eastern States
+had discovered a large plot of uncultivated ground
+above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows
+of these curious animals. One afternoon he
+volunteered to conduct me to the place.</p>
+
+<p>The ground was scantily covered with low bushy
+and weedy growths. My guide warned me that
+the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed,
+found it so. It not only required an "eye
+as practiced as a blind man's touch," it required
+an eye practiced in this particular kind of detective
+work. My new friend conducted me down
+into the plot of ground and, stopping on the edge
+of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet of me."
+I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I
+knew how, fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went
+over the soil inch by inch with my eyes, but to
+no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and
+brown earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door,
+or any other device. I stooped low, but without
+avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long
+needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular
+bit of the gray soil nearly the size of a silver quarter
+of a dollar, which hinged on the straight
+side of it, and behold&mdash;the entrance to the spider's
+castle! I was not prepared for anything so novel
+and artistic&mdash;a long silken chamber, about three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>
+quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a
+silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter.
+The under side of the door, a dull white, the color
+of old ivory, is slightly convex, and its top
+is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings,
+and slightly concave. Its edges are beveled
+so that it fits into the flaring or beveled end
+of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner
+could have done it better. A faint semicircular
+raised line of clay as fine as a hair gave the only
+clue. The whole effect, when the door was held
+open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.</p>
+
+<p>Then we walked about the place, and, knowing
+exactly what to look for, I gave my eyes another
+chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My
+guide detected one after another, and when I
+failed, he would point them put to me. But presently
+I caught on, as they say, and began to find
+them unaided.</p>
+
+<p>We often found the lord of the manor on duty as
+doorkeeper, and in no mood to see strangers. He
+held his door down by inserting his fangs in two fine
+holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather,
+herself (as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree
+of resistance surprising in an insect. If one
+persists with a needle, there is often danger of
+breaking the door. But when one has made a crack
+wide enough to allow one to see the spider, she lets
+go her hold and rushes farther down in her burrow.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>Occasionally we found one about half the usual
+size, indicating a young spider, but no other sizes.
+My guide said they only emerge from their tunnel
+at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical
+device made of straws attached to the door. When
+the door was opened, the straws lifted up, but did
+not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he
+found the straw still up in the morning he knew
+the door had been opened in the night.</p>
+
+<p>As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless
+prey upon other insects, such as sow-bugs and
+crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright
+specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes,
+but they are so small they probably only serve to
+enable them to tell night from day. I think these
+spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute
+tactile sense. They probably feel the slightest
+vibration in the earth or air, unless they have a
+sixth sense of which we know nothing.</p>
+
+<p>All their work, the building and repairing of
+their nests, as well as all their hunting, is done by
+night. This habit, in connection with their extreme
+shyness, makes the task of getting at their
+life-histories a difficult one. The inside of the
+burrow seems coated with a finer and harder substance
+than the soil in which they are dug. It is
+made on the spot, the spider mixing some secretion
+of her own with the clay, and working it up into
+a finer product.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the
+hinge, and is then discarded and a new door manufactured.
+We saw many nests with the old door
+lying near the entrance. The door is made of
+several layers of silk and clay, and is a substantial
+affair.</p>
+
+<p>The spider families all have the gift of genius.
+Of what ingenious devices and arts are they masters!
+How wide their range! They spin, they
+delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original
+spinners. They have probably been on their job
+since carboniferous times, many millions of years
+before man took up the art. And they can spin a
+thread so fine that science makes the astonishing
+statement that it would take four millions of them
+to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of
+our head&mdash;a degree of delicacy to which man can
+never hope to attain.</p>
+
+<p>Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems,
+secrets and betrayals, and this species of the
+arachnids is proficient in all these things.</p>
+
+<p>The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted
+to the purposes of this spider as if it had been made
+for her special use. But, as in all such cases, the
+soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it.
+It is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast&mdash;the
+soil for ca&ntilde;ons and the rectangular watercourses,
+and for the trap-door spider. It is a tough,
+fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>
+not crumble or disintegrate; the cohesion of particles
+is such that sun-dried brick are easily made
+from it.</p>
+
+<p>This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona,
+California, and Jamaica. It belongs to the family
+of <i>Mygalidae</i>. It resembles in appearance the tarantula
+of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many
+of the same habits; but its habitation is a much
+more ingenious and artistic piece of workmanship
+than that of its European relative. The tarantula
+has no door to her burrow, but instead she builds
+about the entrance a kind of breastwork an inch
+high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from
+this fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks
+a deeper shaft than does our spider, but excavates
+it in the same way with similar tools, her fangs,
+and lines it with silk from her own body.</p>
+
+<p>Our spider is an artist, evidently the master
+builder and architect of her kind. Considering her
+soft and pussy-like appearance&mdash;no visible drills for
+such rough work&mdash;one wonders how she excavates
+a burrow six inches or more deep in this hard
+adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and how she removes
+the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has
+been surprised at her work; her tools are her two
+fangs, the same weapons with which she seizes and
+dispatches her prey, and the rake or the <i>chelicer&aelig;</i>.
+To use these delicate instruments in such coarse
+work, says Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span>
+to dig a pit with a surgeon's scalpel." And she
+carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet
+at a time, and drops it here and there at some
+distance from her nest. Her dooryard is never
+littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a
+hole the size of half an English walnut, and to
+remove the earth.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests
+and left them turned over, a few inches away.
+The next morning I found that the occupants of
+the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each
+started the construction of a new door, and had
+it about half finished. It seemed as if the soil
+on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put
+out a semicircular bit of its surface toward the
+opposite side of the orifice, each new door copying
+exactly the color of the ground that surrounded it,
+one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a
+light brick-red. I read somewhere of an experimenter
+who found a nest on a mossy bit of ground
+protectively colored in this way. He removed the
+lid and made the soil bare about. The spider made
+a new lid and covered it with moss like the old
+one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it
+had in the first case. This is typical of the working
+of the insect mind. It seems to know everything,
+and yet to know nothing, as we use the term
+"know."</p>
+
+<p>On the second morning, one of the doors had at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span>tained
+its normal size, but not yet its normal thickness
+and strength. It was much more artfully concealed
+than the old one had been. The builder
+had so completely covered it with small dry twigs
+about the size of an ordinary pin, and had so woven
+these into it, standing a few of them on end, that
+my eye was baffled. I knew to an inch where to
+look for the door, and yet it seemed to have vanished.
+By feeling the ground over with a small
+stick I found a yielding place which proved to be
+the new unfinished door. Day after day the door
+grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked
+at it on the under side, adding new layers of silk.
+There is always a layer of the soil worked into the
+door to give it weight and strength.</p>
+
+<p>Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without
+food. The young, according to Fabre, go seven
+months without eating. They do not grow, but
+they are very active; they expend energy without
+any apparent means of keeping up the supply.
+How do they do it? They absorb it directly from
+the sun, Fabre thinks, which means that here is
+an animal between which and the organic world
+the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which
+can take at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of
+life. If this is true, and it seems to be so, it is
+most extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I
+have been considering, it is interesting to remember<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span>
+that one difference between the insect world and
+the world of animal life to which we belong, which
+Maeterlinck has forgotten to point out, is this:</p>
+
+<p>In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female
+plays a secondary part. In the insect world
+the reverse is true. Here the female is supreme and
+often eats up the male after she has been fertilized
+by him. Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood
+the secondary. It is the female mosquito
+that torments the world. It is the female spider
+that spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft,
+and power go with the female. The female spider
+eats up the male after he has served her purpose;
+her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours
+the male in the same way. Among our wild
+bees it is the queen alone that survives the winter
+and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on
+the window-pane are females. With the honey
+bees the males are big and loud, but are without
+any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed
+by the female as is the male spider. The queen bee
+does not eat her mate, but she disembowels him.
+The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In the
+vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey
+that the female is the larger and bolder; the care of
+the young devolves largely upon her. Yes, there is
+another exception: Among the fishes, the females
+are, as a rule, larger than the males; the immense
+number of eggs which they carry brings this about.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>There are always exceptions to this dominance
+of the female in the insect world. We cannot corner
+Nature and keep her cornered. She would not
+be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the
+male that dominates; the female is a little soft,
+wingless worm on the ground, always in the larval
+state.</p>
+
+<p>In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant.
+Behold the showy catkins of the chestnuts,
+the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the willows, and
+other trees. The stamens of most flowers are
+numerous and conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries
+its panicle of pollen high above the silken tresses
+which mother the future ear.</p>
+
+<p>One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by
+a spider with her brood of young ones. I took up
+a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or more,
+and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I
+kept it in the house under observation for a week,
+hoping that at some hour of day or night the spider
+would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious
+friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance
+over the door which he had used successfully
+before. But the latch was never lifted.
+Madam Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at
+the bottom of her den. At the end of a week I
+broke open the nest and found her alone. She had
+evidently devoured all her little ones.</p>
+
+<p>I kept two nests with a spider in each in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>
+house for a week, and in neither case did the occupant
+ever leave its nest.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests
+of their own when they are about half-grown. As
+to where they stay, or how they live up to that
+time, I have no clue. The young we found in
+several nests were very small, not more than an
+eighth of an inch long. Of the size and appearance
+of the male spider, and where he keeps himself,
+I could get no clue.</p>
+
+<p>One morning I went with my guide down to
+the spider territory, and saw him try to entice or
+force a spider out of her den. The morning previous
+he had beguiled several of them to come up
+to the opening by thrusting a straw down the burrow
+and teasing them with it till in self-defense
+they seized it with their fangs and hung on to it
+till he drew them to the surface. But this morning
+the trick would not work. Not one spider would
+keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at
+the end in the shape of a hook, he finally lifted one
+out upon the ground. How bright and clean and
+untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of
+the thorax were as black as jet and shone as if they
+had just been polished. No lady in her parlor
+could have been freer from any touch of soil or
+earth-stain than was she. On the ground, in
+the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost. We
+turned her around and tried to induce her to enter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>
+the nest again; but over and over she ran across
+the open door without heeding it. In the novel
+situation in which she suddenly found herself, all
+her wits deserted her, and not till I took her between
+my thumb and finger and thrust her abdomen into
+the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of
+that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and
+she backed quickly into it and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider
+has I do not know. I never saw a nest that had
+been broken into or in any way disturbed, except
+those which we had disturbed in our observations.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. THE DESERT NOTE</div>
+
+<p>I often wonder what mood of Nature this world
+of cacti which we run against in the great Southwest
+expresses. Certainly something savage and
+merciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor.
+How well she tempers her daggers and bayonets!
+How hard and smooth and sharp they are! How
+they contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and
+leaves which bear them! It is a desert mood; heat
+and drought appear to be the exciting causes. The
+scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to
+store up water in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates
+men to build great dams and reservoirs.
+These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But why
+spines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly
+cannot be for protection or defense; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span>
+grass and other vegetation upon which the grazing
+animals feed are not armed with spines.</p>
+
+<p>If the cacti were created that grazing animals in
+the desert might have something to feed upon, as
+our fathers' way of looking at things might lead us
+to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated
+by the armor of needles and spines?</p>
+
+<p>Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures
+this broad, mittened hand like a cruel joke.
+It smites like a serpent and stings like a scorpion.
+The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert!
+Beware! Agonies are one of her garments.</p>
+
+<p>All we can say about it is that Nature has her
+prickly side which drought and heat aggravate. In
+the North our thistles and thorns and spines are
+a milder expression of this mood. The spines on
+the blackberry-bush tend against its propagation
+for the same reason. Among our wild gooseberries,
+there are smooth and prickly varieties, and one succeeds
+about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees
+in rough or barren places that have a severe
+struggle for life, often develop sharp, thorny
+branches. It is a struggle of some kind which
+begets something like ill-temper in vegetation&mdash;heat
+and drought in the desert, and browsing animals
+and poor soil in the temperate zones. The
+devil's club in Alaska is one mass of spines; why,
+I know not. It must just be original sin. Our
+raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span>
+large, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert
+expresses the belief that thorns and spines are
+given to the desert plants for protection; and
+that if no animal were there that would eat them,
+they would not have these defenses. But I believe
+if there had never been a browsing animal in the
+desert the cacti would have had their thorns just
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>Nature certainly arms her animal forms against
+one another. We know the quills of the porcupine
+are for defense, and that the skunk carries a weapon
+that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that
+any plant form is armed against any creature whose
+proper food it might become. Cacti carry formidable
+weapons in the shape of spines and thorns,
+but the desert conditions where they are found,
+heat and aridity, are no doubt their primary cause.
+The conditions are fierce and the living forms
+are fierce.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From
+our point of view she often seems partial and inconsistent.
+But I would just as soon think that
+Nature made the adobe soil in the arid regions
+that the human dwellers there might have material
+at hand with which to construct a shelter, as that
+she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable
+forms to secure their safety. One may confute
+Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth. He says:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of
+a family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive
+armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a
+thorn like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert
+to the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is
+plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas
+to thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the
+thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro
+and the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their
+cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a
+soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.</p></div>
+
+<p>But are they not just as much exposed to browsing
+animals in the high table-lands as in the desert,
+if not more so?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous
+about the species than about the individual.
+She is no more solicitous about the one than the
+other. The same conditions apply to all. But
+the species are numerous; a dozen units may be
+devoured while a thousand remain. A general will
+sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will
+sacrifice one man to save ten, but Nature's ways
+are entirely different. Both contending armies are
+hers, and she is equally solicitous about both. She
+wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the
+desert animals to survive, and she favors both
+equally. All she asks of them is that they breed
+and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according
+to Van Dyke, Nature has taken such pains to
+protect her desert plants, he yet confesses that,
+although it seems almost incredible, it is neverthe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span>less
+true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the
+cholla&mdash;fruit, stem, and trunk&mdash;though it bristle
+with spines that will draw blood from the human
+hand at the slightest touch."</p>
+
+<p>This question of spines and thorns in vegetation
+is a baffling one because Nature's ways are so
+unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in his
+theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded
+upon the idea that Nature selects as man
+selects. You cannot put Nature into a formula.</p>
+
+<p>Behold how every branch and twig of our red
+thorn bristles with cruel daggers! But if they are
+designed to keep away bird or beast from eating
+its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own
+ends! If no creature ate its little red apples and
+thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would rot on the
+ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red
+thorns would not increase. And increase alone is
+Nature's end.</p>
+
+<p>It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the
+animal kingdom is full of design. Every part and
+organ of our bodies has its purpose which serves
+the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any
+character of bird or beast, fish or insect, that does
+not show purpose, but in the plant world Nature
+seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not
+work on so economical a plan. What purpose do
+the spines on the prickly ash serve? or on the
+thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, goose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>berry
+bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering
+raspberry has no prickles, and thrives as well as
+any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry
+do not save them from browsing cattle, nor their
+fruit from the birds. In fact, as I have said, the
+service of the birds is needed to sow their seeds.
+The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so
+encased in a spiny armor; but what purpose the
+armor serves is a mystery. We know that hard
+conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns
+on seedling pear-trees and plum-trees, but we
+cannot know why.</p>
+
+<p>The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant,
+or American aloe (<i>Agave americana</i>), are
+thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and
+fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them.
+They are no more edible than cordwood or hemp
+ropes. This fact alone settles the defense question
+about spines.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. SEA-DOGS</div>
+
+<p>There is a bit of live natural history out here in
+the sea in front of me that is new and interesting.
+A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have their
+rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the
+breakers, and keep together there week after week.
+To the naked eye they seem like a group of children
+sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed
+by the waves that sweep over them. Their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>
+heads and shoulders seem to show above the
+water, and they appear to be having a happy
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then one may be seen swimming about
+or lifted up in a wall of green-blue transparent
+water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in
+the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them
+children of the sea, until I hear their loud barking,
+and then I think of them as dogs or hounds of the
+sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night
+when it has a half-muffled, smothered sound.</p>
+
+<p>They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals,
+and there seems something incongruous in their
+being at home there in the cold briny deep&mdash;badgers
+or marmots that burrow in the waves,
+wolves or coyotes that hunt their prey in the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Their progenitors were once land animals, but
+Darwinism does not tell us what they were. The
+whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony
+of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents.
+The origin of any new species is shrouded
+in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and
+the short span of human life, or of the whole
+human history, gives us no adequate vantage-ground
+from which to solve the problem.</p>
+
+<p>I can easily believe that these hair seals are close
+akin to the dog. They have five digits; they bolt
+their food like dogs; their sense of smell is said to
+be very acute, though how it could serve them in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>
+the sea does not appear. The young are born
+upon the land and enter the water very reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence
+of the dog and attaches itself to its master as does
+the dog. Its sense of direction and locality is very
+acute. This group of seals in front of me, day
+after day, and week after week, returns to the
+same spot in the ever-changing waters, without
+the variation of a single yard, so far as I can see.
+The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst,
+and it seems as if some sixth sense must guide
+them to it. Locality is as unreal in the sea as in
+the sky, but these few square yards of shifting
+waters seem as real to these seals as if they were
+a granite ledge. They keep massed there on the
+water at that particular point, with their flippers
+protruding above the surface, as if they were as
+free from danger as so many picnickers. Yet
+something attracts them to this particular place.
+I know of no other spot along the coast for a
+hundred miles or more where the seals congregate
+as they do here. What is the secret of it? Evidently
+it is a question of security from their
+enemies. At this point the waves break much
+farther out than usual, which indicates a hidden
+reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow
+water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks
+and killer whales, from stealing up beneath them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>
+and pulling them down. I do not hear their
+barking in the early part of the night, but long
+before morning their half-muffled baying begins.
+Old fishermen tell me that they retire for the night
+to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards
+or more out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp
+also afford them some protection from their enemies.
+The fishermen feel very bitter toward them
+on account of the fish they devour, and kill them
+whenever opportunity offers. Often when I lie
+half asleep in the small hours of the morning, I
+seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their
+quarry on the unstable hills and mountains of the
+sea, and giving tongue at short intervals, as did
+the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my
+youth.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<div class="center">X</div>
+
+<div class="center">A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES</div>
+
+<div class="center2">I. NATURE'S WIRELESS</div>
+
+
+<p>The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes
+so much of, seems to give us the key to the psychic
+life of all the lower orders. What one knows, all
+of that kind seem to know at the same instant.
+It seems as if they drew it in with the air they
+breathed. It is something like community of mind,
+or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
+process, but an emotional process; not a thought,
+as with us, but an impulse.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we know there is nothing like a council
+or advisory board in the hive. There are no decrees
+or orders. The swarm is a unit. The members
+act in concert without direction or rule. If
+anything happens to the queen, if she is lost or
+killed, every bee in the hive seems to know it at the
+same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly
+agitated. The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous:
+the bees function and co&ouml;perate as do the
+organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
+without scheme or direction.</p>
+
+<p>This community of mind is seen in such an instance
+as that of the migrating lemmings from the
+Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these little
+creatures are at times seized with an impulse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span>
+to migrate or to commit suicide, for it amounts to
+that. They leave their habitat in Norway and,
+without being deflected by any obstacle, march
+straight toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers
+that lie in their way. When the coast is reached,
+they enter the water and continue on their course.
+Ship captains report sailing for hours through
+waters literally alive with them. This suicidal
+act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of insanity.
+It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know
+of in animal life. But the migration of all animals
+on a large scale shows the same unity of purpose.
+The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The
+annual migration of the caribou in the North is an
+illustration. In the flocking birds this unity of
+mind is especially noticeable. The vast armies of
+passenger pigeons which we of an older generation
+saw in our youth moved like human armies under
+orders. They formed a unit. They came in countless
+hordes like an army of invasion, and they
+departed in the same way. Their orders were
+written upon the air; their leaders were as intangible
+as the shadows of their wings. The same is
+true of all our flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings,
+or of starlings, or of blackbirds, will act as
+one body, performing their evolutions in the air
+with astonishing precision.</p>
+
+<p>In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct
+is strong, I have seen a flock of white ibises waltz<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span>ing
+about the sky, going through various intricate
+movements, with the precision of dancers in a
+ballroom quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance
+whatever. Let a body of men try it under
+the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and
+the tumbling over one another! At one moment
+the birds would wheel so as to bring their backs
+in shadow, and then would flash out the white of
+their breasts and under parts. It was like the opening
+and shutting of a giant hand, or the alternate
+rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a
+tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock.
+When a hawk pursues a bird, the birds tack and
+turn as if linked together. When one robin dashes
+off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their
+movements exactly coincide! The hawk-hunted
+bird often escapes by reaching the cover of
+a tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer,
+as a rabbit or a squirrel will dodge a dog.
+Schools of fish act with the same machine-like
+unity.</p>
+
+<p>In the South, I have seen a large area of water,
+acres in extent, uniformly agitated by a school of
+mullets apparently feeding upon some infusoria on
+the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given
+signal, the fish would dive and the rippling cease.
+It showed a unity of action as of ten thousand
+spindles controlled by electricity.</p>
+
+<p>How quickly the emotion of fear is communi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span>cated
+among the wild animals! How wild and
+alarmed the deer become after the opening of the
+first day of the shooting season. Those who have
+not seen or heard a hunter seem to feel the impending
+danger.</p>
+
+<p>The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the
+monarch) illustrate the same law. In the fall they
+are all seized with this impulse to go South and
+thousands of them march in one body. At night
+they roost in the trees. I have seen photographs
+of them in which they appeared like a new kind of
+colored foliage covering the trees. In the return
+flight in the spring, the same massing again occurs.
+Recently the Imperial Valley in California was invaded
+by a vast army of worms moving from east
+to west. In countries that have been cursed with
+a plague of grasshoppers witnesses of the spectacle
+describe them as moving in the same way. They
+stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles,
+their crushed bodies making the rails
+and highways as slippery as grease would have
+made them. Ten million or ten billion behaving
+as one.</p>
+
+<p>This community of mind stands the lower orders
+in great stead. It makes up to them in a measure
+for the want of reason and judgment. In what
+we call telepathy we get hints of the same thing
+among ourselves. Telepathy is probably a survival
+from our earlier animal state.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center2">II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE</div>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the
+conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more
+intelligent than honey bees:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir
+John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle
+down horizontally with its base to the window, you will
+find that the bees will persist till they die of exhaustion
+or hunger in their endeavors to discover an issue through
+the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will
+all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite
+side.</p></div>
+
+<p>The flies are more intelligent than the bees
+because their problems of life are much more complicated;
+they are fraught with many more dangers;
+their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have
+very few natural enemies. There are no bee-catchers
+in the sense that there are scores of flycatchers.
+I know of no bird that preys upon the
+worker bees. The kingbird is sometimes called the
+"bee martin" because he occasionally snaps up
+the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon
+the flies; the swallows sweep them up in the air, the
+swifts scoop them in, while, besides the so-called
+flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the
+vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more
+or less upon them. Try to catch a big blow-fly
+upon the window-pane and see how difficult the
+trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>Or try to "swat" the ordinary house-fly with your
+hand. See how he squares himself and plants himself
+as your threatening hand approaches! He is
+ready for a trial of speed. He seems to know that
+your hand is slower than he is, and he is right in
+most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is
+reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows
+no fear; and to crush it is as easy as to crush a
+beetle.</p>
+
+<p>The wit and cunning of all animals are developed
+by their struggle for existence. The harder the
+struggle, the more their intelligence. Our skunk
+and porcupine are very stupid because they do not
+have to take thought about their own safety;
+Nature has done that for them.</p>
+
+<p>To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that
+"the capacity for folly so great in itself argues
+intelligence," which amounts to saying that the
+more fool you are, the more you know.</p>
+
+<p>Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion
+of the intelligence of the bee; he thought the dog,
+the monkey, and the majority of other animals
+possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed,
+of free intelligence the bee possesses very little.
+The slave of an overmastering instinct, as our
+new nature poet, McCarthy, says,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She makes of labor an eternal lust.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>
+They work as well (or better) in the darkness as
+in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows and
+directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the
+individual bee.</p>
+
+<p>The bee does not know fear; she does not know
+love. She will defend the swarm with her life,
+but her fellows she heeds not.</p>
+
+<p>It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the
+same hive recognize one another at all outside the
+hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees from
+the same tree will clip and strike at one another
+around his box, when they are first attracted to it.
+After they are seriously engaged in carrying away
+his honey, they pay no attention to one another or
+to bees from other swarms. That bees tell one
+another of the store of honey they have found is
+absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he
+once experimented upon during an afternoon, the
+results showing that this bee had told the news of
+her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood
+it in good stead!</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive
+was an inspiration, and furnishes us with the key
+to all that happens in the hive. The secret of all
+its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon
+this solution, he should have had the courage to
+stand by it. But he did not. He is continually
+forgetting it and applying to his problem the explanations
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>
+we apply in our dealings with one
+another. He talks of the power of the bees to give
+"expression to their thoughts and feelings"; of
+their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says
+that the "extraordinary also has a name and place
+in their language"; that they are able to "communicate
+to each other news of an event occurring outside
+the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of
+the Hive superfluous. He quotes from a French
+apiarist who says that the explorer of the dawn,&mdash;the
+early bee,&mdash;like the early bird that catches the
+worm, returns to the hive with the news that "the
+lime-trees are blooming to-day on the banks of the
+canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay with white
+clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open";
+"the mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with
+pollen." Whereupon the bees must organize quickly
+and arrange to divide the work. They probably
+call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion
+and formalities proceed to send out their
+working expeditions. "Five thousand of the sturdiest
+will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three
+thousand juniors go and refresh the white clover."
+"They make daily calculations as to the means of
+obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine
+liquid."</p>
+
+<p>When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius
+of the hive issuing its commands," or recognizes
+the existence among the bees of spiritual communications
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span>
+that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he
+is true to his own conception.</p>
+
+<p>The division of labor among hive bees is of course
+spontaneous, like all their other economies&mdash;not a
+matter of thought, but of instinct.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee
+make the mistake of humanizing the bee, thus
+making them communicate with one another as we
+communicate. Bees have a language, they say;
+they tell one another this and that; if one finds
+honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters, and
+so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is
+nothing analogous to verbal communication among
+the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the Spirit
+of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and
+co&ouml;perate with one another as the cells of the body
+communicate and co&ouml;perate in building up the
+various organs. The spirit of the body co&ouml;rdinates
+all the different organs and tissues, making a unit
+of the body.</p>
+
+<p>If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a
+snail, penetrates into the hive, and dies there, the
+bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it lies, so
+that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign
+object in the body, such as a bullet in the lungs,
+or in the muscles, becomes encysted in an analogous
+manner, and is thus rendered harmless.</p>
+
+<p>Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of
+its crushed body will infuriate the other bees. But
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>
+crush a bee in the fields or by the bee-hunter's box
+which is swarming with bees, and the units from
+the same hive heed it not.</p>
+
+<p>Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment
+for one another as animals have. If one of
+their number is wounded or disabled, they ruthlessly
+expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong
+to another world of beings that is absolutely
+oblivious of the world of which we form a part.
+They murder or expel the drones, after they have
+done their work of fertilizing the queen, in the most
+cruel and summary manner. Their apparent attachment
+to the queen, and their loyalty to her,
+are not personal. They do not love her. It is
+the Spirit of the Hive, or the cult of the swarm
+solicitous about itself. There are no brothers, sisters,
+fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are
+only co-workers, working not for the present, but
+for the future. When we enter the kingdom of the
+bee, we must leave all our human standards behind.
+These little people have no red blood, no organs
+of sense, as we have; they breathe and hear through
+their legs, their antenn&aelig;.</p>
+
+<p>The drones do not know the queen as such in
+the hive. Their instincts lead them to search for
+her in the air during her nuptial flight, and they
+know her only there. The drones have thirteen
+thousand eyes, while the workers have only six
+thousand. This double measure of the power of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span>
+vision is evidently to make sure that the males
+discover the queen in her course through the air.</p>
+
+<p>The guards that take their stand at the gate,
+the bees that become fans at the entrance to ventilate
+the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring the
+bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the
+bees that go forth to find a home for the new swarm,
+the sweepers and cleaners of the hive, the workers
+that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and crevices&mdash;all
+act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of
+the Hive.</p>
+
+<p>After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as
+the facts will bear us out in doing, it remains to
+be said that he is the philosopher of the insect
+world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has
+said, Maeterlinck is the Plato of that realm. How
+wisely he speaks of the insect world in his latest
+volume, "Mountain Paths":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb
+life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain
+earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise
+and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it.
+There is something, on the other hand, about the insect
+that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology
+of our globe. One would be inclined to say that
+the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous,
+more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more
+infernal than our own. One would think that it was
+born of some comet that had lost its course and died
+demented in space.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me
+of a well-known woodsman and camp-fire man who
+recently extolled in print the intelligence of hornets,
+saying that they have the ability to differentiate
+friends from foes. "They know us and we talk to
+them and they are made to feel as welcome as any
+of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp,
+they attract the attention of one they know <i>who
+recognizes their signal by thought or gesture and leaves
+immediately, returning only when the stranger has
+departed</i>." (The italics are mine.) He says the
+same hornets apparently come to them year after
+year, greeting them on their arrival, and, should
+they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
+with the same deference as "when they visit us
+after we have been in camp some time."</p>
+
+<p>Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and
+well-mannered bees? What would Maeterlinck
+say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent
+when we remember that hornets live but a single
+season, that none of them lives over the winter,
+save the queen, and that she never leaves the nest
+in summer after she has got her family of workers
+around her.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III. ODD OR EVEN</div>
+
+<p>One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have
+you observed that in the inorganic world things go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span>
+by even numbers, and in the organic world by
+odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of
+a bushy and swampy meadow below our camp and
+brought him a four-petaled flower of galium, and
+a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In
+another locality I might have brought him dwarf
+cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel, or the
+evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly
+more suggestive of mechanics than of life, while
+odd numbers seem to go more with the freedom
+and irregularity of growing things.</p>
+
+<p>One may make pretty positive assertions about
+non-living things. Crystals, so far as I know, are
+all even-sided, some are six and some eight-sided;
+snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but
+the number six rules them. In the world of living
+things we cannot be so sure of ourselves. Life
+introduces something indeterminate and incommensurable.
+It makes use of both odd and even,
+though undoubtedly odd numbers generally prevail.
+Leaves that are in lobes usually have three or five
+lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square,
+and the cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We
+have five fingers and five toes, though only four
+limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers
+serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged
+insects. In the inorganic world things attain a
+stable equilibrium, but in the living world the
+equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>typed,
+hence the danger of dogmatizing about living
+things. Growing Nature will not be driven into
+a corner.</p>
+
+<p>Well may Emerson ask&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Why Nature loves the number five,</span>
+<span class="i0">And why the star form she repeats?</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The number five rules in all the largest floral
+families, as in the crowfoot family, the rose family
+(which embraces all our fruit trees), the geranium
+family, the flax family, the campanula family, the
+convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then
+there is a large number of flowers the parts of
+which go in threes, one of the best known of which
+is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the
+only form I recall based on the number five.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. WHY AND HOW</div>
+
+<p>One may always expect in living nature variations
+and modifications. It is useless to ask why.
+Nature is silent when interrogated in this way.
+Ask her how, and you get some results. If we
+ask, for instance, why the sting of the honey bee
+is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and
+bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth
+like a needle, so that they can sting and sting again,
+and live to sting another day, while the honey bee
+stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one
+species of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
+a powerful electric battery; or why the porcupine
+has an armor of quills while his brother rodent the
+woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on&mdash;we
+make no addition to our knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and
+defenseless an animal as the rabbit manages to survive
+and multiply, we extend our knowledge of
+natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of
+its wakefulness&mdash;by never closing its eyes&mdash;and by
+its speed; also by making its home where it can
+command all approaches, and so flee in any direction.
+Or if we ask how our ruffed grouse survives
+and prospers in a climate where its cousin the
+quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of
+certain trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder
+and is often cut off by a deep fall of snow.</p>
+
+<p>If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get
+no answer; but if we ask how he does it, we find
+out that he stores up food in his den, hence must
+take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck
+hibernates, also, but he stores up fuel in the shape
+of fat in his own body. The porcupine is above
+ground and active all winter. He survives by
+gnawing the bark of certain trees, probably the
+hemlock. We have two species of native mice that
+look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the
+jumping, or kangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is
+active the season through, over and under the snow;
+the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>
+accomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely
+keeping the spark of life burning. His fires are
+banked, so to speak; his temperature is very low,
+and he breathes only at long intervals.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, we ask with Emerson, "<i>why</i> Nature loves
+the number five," and "<i>why</i> the star form she repeats,"
+we shall be put to it for an answer. We can
+only say that with living things odd numbers are
+more likely to prevail, and with non-living, even
+numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Some seeds have wings and some have not. To
+ask why, is a blind question, but if we ask <i>how</i> the
+wingless seeds get sown, we may add to our knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>In our own practical lives, in which experimentation
+plays such a part, we are often compelled
+to ask why this result and not that, why this
+thing behaves this way and that thing that way.
+We are looking for reasons or causes. The farmer
+asks why his planting in this field was a failure,
+while it was a success in the next field, and so on.
+An analysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture
+will give him the answer.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM</div>
+
+<p>That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and
+a good and wise man admits of no question, but
+to us, at this distance, it seems strange enough that
+he should have thought that he had hit upon the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>
+key to the origin of species in the slow and insensible
+changes which he fancied species underwent during
+the course of the geologic ages, and should thus
+have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had
+he called his work the "Variability of Species," or
+the "Modification of Species," it would not have
+been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us
+new varieties, but not new species. In fact, of the
+origin of species we know absolutely nothing, no
+more than we do about the origin of life itself.</p>
+
+<p>Of the development of species we know some of
+the factors that play a part, as the influence of
+environment, the struggle for existence, and the
+competitions of life. But do we not have to assume
+an inherent tendency to development, an original
+impulse as the key to evolution? Accidental conditions
+and circumstances modify, but do not originate
+species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding
+or hastening a species, and in its extinction, but
+not in its origin. The record of the rocks reveals
+to us the relation of species, and their succession
+in geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.</p>
+
+<p>Agassiz believed that every species of animal and
+plant was the result of a direct and separate act of
+the Creator. But the naturalist sees the creative
+energy immanent in matter. Does not one have
+to believe in something like this to account for the
+world as we see it? And to account for us also?&mdash;a
+universal mind or intelligence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,</span>
+<span class="i0">And the round ocean and the living air,</span>
+<span class="i0">And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to
+the Infinite Mystery in terms of our own wills and
+acts. When we think of a Creator and the thing
+created as two, we are in trouble at once. They
+are one, as fire and light are one, as soul and body
+are one. Darwin said he could not look upon the
+world as the result of chance, and yet his theory
+of the origin of species ushers us into a chance
+world. But when he said, speaking of the infinite
+variety of living forms about us, that they "have
+all been produced by laws acting around us," he
+spoke as a great philosopher. These laws are
+not fortuitous, or the result of the blind grouping
+of irrational forces.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI. A LIVE WORLD</div>
+
+<p>It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler
+calls him, who looked upon the earth as animated
+in the fashion of an animal. "To him this world
+is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted
+alive." But his critics looked upon this
+fancy of Kepler's as proof of a disordered mind.</p>
+
+<p>Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son
+of the great naturalist) on the tides that the earth
+in many ways behaves more like a living organism<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span>
+than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface
+throbs and palpitates and quivers and yields to
+pressure as only living organisms do. The tides can
+hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
+Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of
+how closely it is held in the clasp of the heavenly
+forces. It is like an apple on the vast sidereal tree,
+that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon
+is no doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to
+fancy its surface yielding to our tread as does that
+of the earth. Then we know that the absence of
+air and water on it is proof that it cannot be
+endowed with what we call life. George Darwin
+tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp
+and bend the surface very much as we might bend
+or dent the epidermis of a colossal pachyderm.
+He and his brother devised an instrument by which
+the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move
+over it, could be measured. The instrument was
+so delicate that it revealed the difference of effect
+produced by the same pressure at seven feet and
+at six feet from the instrument! More than that,
+the instrument revealed the throbbing and agitations
+which the ground is undergoing at all times.
+They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms,
+as the Italians call them, are occurring constantly.</p>
+
+<p>Another instrument has been invented called the
+microphone, which translates this earth's move<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>ments
+into sound&mdash;its tremors and agitations become
+audible. This microphone, when placed in a
+cave twenty feet below the surface, and carefully
+protected by means of a carpet from any accidental
+disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed
+what is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as
+roarings, explosions, occurring isolated or in volleys,
+and metallic or bell-like sounds." "The noises
+sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on
+one occasion in the middle of the night, half an
+hour before a sensible earthquake.</p>
+
+<p>Our apparently impassive and slumbering old
+planet evidently has dreams we know little of.</p>
+
+<p>From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in
+America" I get an impression which again deepens
+my feeling of something half human about
+our lucky planet, at least something progressive
+and unequal, like life itself. Shaler finds that
+organic development in the Northern Hemisphere
+is more advanced, by a whole geologic period, than
+in the Southern, with Europe at the head and
+Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life
+of Australia is much like that of Europe in
+the Jurassic period, while both Asia and Africa
+possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and
+lions, which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times.
+Hence the Northern Hemisphere is more like the
+head of the beast, and the Southern more like the
+viscera. The Northern races easily dominate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span>
+the Southern. The flowering of civilization is in
+the North. It is very certain that man originated
+north of the equator. I think that one need not
+expect that the achievements of man in Australia,
+or in South America, will rival the achievements
+of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR</div>
+
+<p>That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes
+of the World War seems to me quite obvious.
+Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has
+more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His
+biological doctrine of the struggle for existence,
+natural selection, and the survival of the fittest,
+fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first.
+These theories fell in well with their militarism
+and their natural cruelty and greediness. Their
+philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann
+fairly made a god of natural selection, as did other
+German thinkers. And when they were ready for
+war, the Germans at once applied the law of the
+jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution,
+the triumph of the strong, the supremacy of
+the fit, became the foundation of their political
+and national ideals. They looked for no higher
+proof of the divinity of this law, as applied to
+races and nations, than the fact that the organic
+world had reached its present stage of development
+through the operation of this law. Darwin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span>
+had given currency to these ideas. He had
+denied that there was any inherent tendency to
+development, affirming that we lived in a world of
+chance, and that power comes only to him who exerts
+power&mdash;half truths, all of them.</p>
+
+<p>The Germans as a people have never been born
+again into the light of our higher civilization.
+They are morally blind and politically treacherous.
+Their biological condition is that of the lower
+orders, and the Darwinian law of progress came
+to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its
+absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German
+mind. In his plodding patience, his devotion to details,
+and in many other ways, his mind was German.
+But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility,
+his simplicity, he was anything but German.
+Undoubtedly his teachings bore fruit of a political
+and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.
+The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle
+in their ethical code. Had not they the same
+right to expansion and to the usurpation of the
+territory and to the treasures of their neighbors
+that every weed in the fields and even the vermin
+of the soil and the air have? If they had the
+sanction of natural law, that was enough; they
+were quite oblivious to the fact that with man's
+moral nature had come in a new biological law
+which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with,
+but which has tremendous authority and survival<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span>
+value&mdash;the law of right, justice, mercy, honor, love.</p>
+
+<p>We do not look for the Golden Rule among
+swine and cattle, or among wolves and sharks;
+we look for it among men; we look for honor, for
+heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of
+these things are involved in the Darwinian hypothesis.
+There is no such thing as right or
+wrong in the orders below man. These are purely
+human distinctions. It is not wrong for the wolf
+to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass, but
+an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the
+farthest star. Germany's assault upon the peace
+and prosperity of the world was a crime against
+the very heavens.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin occupied himself only with the natural
+evolution of organic forms, and not with the
+evolution of human communities. He treated
+man as an animal, and fitted him into the zo&ouml;logical
+scheme. He removed him from the realm
+of the miraculous into the plane of the natural.
+For all purposes of biological discussion, man is
+an animal, but that is not saying he is only an
+animal, and still under the law of animal evolution.
+The European man is supposed to have
+passed the stage of savagery, in which the only
+rule of right is the rule of might. To have made
+Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is
+to have debased a sound natural philosophy to a
+selfish and ignoble end.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>Germany lifted the law to the human realm and
+staked her all upon it, and failed. The moral
+sense of the world&mdash;the sense of justice, of fair
+play&mdash;was against her, and inevitably she went
+down. Her leaders were morally blind. When
+the rest of the world talked of moral standards,
+the German leaders said, "We think you are fools."
+But these standards brought England into the
+war&mdash;the sacredness of treaties. They brought the
+United States in. We saw a common enemy in
+Germany, an enemy of mankind. We sent millions
+of men to France for an ideal&mdash;for justice
+and fair play. To see our standards of right and
+justice ignored and trampled upon in this way
+was intolerable. The thought of the world being
+swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said
+to myself from the first, "The Allies have got to
+win; there is no alternative." And what astonishes
+me is that certain prominent Englishmen,
+such as Lord Morley, and others, did not see
+it. Would they have sat still and watched Germany
+destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel
+and make ready to destroy England? The very
+framework of our moral civilization would have
+been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his
+natural selection theory was to lead.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII. THE ROBIN</div>
+
+<p>Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span>
+measure, or best stands the Darwinian test of the
+fittest to survive. His versatility, adaptiveness,
+and fecundity are remarkable. While not an
+omnivorous feeder, he yet has a very wide range
+among fruits and insects. From cherries to currants
+and strawberries he ranges freely, while he
+is the only thrush that makes angle-worms one
+of his dietetic staples and looks upon a fat grub
+as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the
+most diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in
+the fork of a trunk or on a horizontal branch,
+then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your
+porch, then on some coign of vantage about
+your house or barn, or under the shed, or under a
+bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground above
+a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and
+build there on a projecting stone. He even nests
+beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said he never
+sings sweeter than when singing during those
+long Arctic days.</p>
+
+<p>He brings off his first brood in May, and the
+second in June, and if a dry season does not
+seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in
+September. He is a hustler in every sense of the
+word&mdash;a typical American in his enterprise and
+versatility. His voice is the first I hear in the
+morning, and the last at night. Little wonder
+that there are twenty robins to one bluebird, or
+wood thrush, or catbird. The song sparrow is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>
+probably our next most successful bird, but she
+is far behind the robin. We could never have
+a plague of song sparrows or bluebirds, but since
+the robins are now protected in the South as well
+as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a
+plague of robins. Since they may no longer have
+robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is near at
+hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies
+in New York or New England. Yet who does not
+cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a plebeian
+bird, but he adds a touch to life in the
+country that one would not like to miss.</p>
+
+<p>The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper;
+he is doomed always to be a runner. Go slow he
+cannot; his engine is always "in high"&mdash;it starts
+"in high" and stops "in high."</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IX. THE WEASEL</div>
+
+<p>In wild life the race is not always to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong. For instance, the
+weasel catches the rabbit and the red squirrel,
+both of which are much more fleet of foot than
+is he. The red squirrel can fairly fly through the
+tops of the trees, where the weasel would be entirely
+out of its element, and the rabbit can easily
+leave him behind, and yet the weasel captures
+and sucks the blood of both. Recently, when the
+ground was covered with our first snow, some men
+at work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span>
+slope below them. Their dog rushed down and
+found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it released
+on the approach of the dog and took to the cover
+of a near-by stone wall. The whole story was
+written there on the snow. The bloodsucker had
+pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for
+many yards and then had pulled it down.</p>
+
+<p>Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods
+when they came upon a weasel chasing a red squirrel
+around the trunk of a big oak; round and round
+they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The
+men stood and looked on. It soon became apparent
+that the weasel was going to get the squirrel, so
+they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker.
+Why the squirrel did not take to the tree-tops,
+where the weasel probably would not have
+followed him, and thus make his escape&mdash;who
+knows? One of my neighbors, however, says he
+has seen where a weasel went up a tree and took a
+gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the
+snow, then dragged it to cover and left it dead.
+The weasel seems to inspire such terror in its victim
+that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an
+easy prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes,
+that gliding snakelike form, that fearless, fatelike
+pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell upon
+the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel
+once pursued a hen to my very feet and seized it
+and would not let it go until I put my foot upon it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>
+and gripped it by the back of the neck with my
+hand. Its methods are a kind of <i>Schrecklichkeit</i> in
+the animal world. It is the incarnation of the
+devil among our lesser animals.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE</div>
+
+<p>We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start
+with the assumption that her methods are at all
+like our methods. We pick out our favorites
+among plants and animals, those that best suit our
+purposes. If we want wool from the sheep, we
+select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If
+we want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want
+cows for quantity of milk, irrespective of quality,
+we select with that end in view; if we want butter-fat,
+we breed for that end, and so on. With our
+fruits and grains and vegetables we follow the same
+course. We go straight to our object with as little
+waste and delay as possible.</p>
+
+<p>Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of
+those qualities in her fruits and grains which best
+enable them to survive. In like manner she subordinates
+her wool and fur and milk to the same
+general purpose. Her one end is to increase and
+multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will be no
+great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there
+will be no prize fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay
+eggs for market.</p>
+
+<p>Those powers and qualities are dominant in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span>
+wild creatures that are necessary for the survival
+of the species&mdash;strength, speed, sharpness of eye
+and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival
+value.</p>
+
+<p>Our hawks could not survive without wing-power
+or great speed, but the crow survives without this
+power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and can
+thrive where the hawk would starve, and also
+because no bird of prey wants him, and, more than
+that, because he is dependent upon nothing that
+requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious
+for reasons that are not obvious. The fox
+in this country requires both speed and cunning,
+but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent
+and unafraid that he walked up to it and killed
+it with his geologist's hammer. Has it no enemies
+in that country?</p>
+
+<p>Nature's course is always a roundabout one.
+Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Man
+wants specific results at once. Nature works
+slowly to general results. Her army is drilled only
+in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using.
+The strength of her species is the strength of the
+obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin
+when we assume that Nature selects as man selects.
+Nature selects solely upon the principle of power of
+survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility.
+He wants some particular good&mdash;a race-horse, a
+draft-horse&mdash;better quality or greater quantity of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span>
+this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with her
+progeny. Only power to win in the competition of
+life counts with her. As I have so often said, she
+plays one hand against the other. The stakes are
+hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one
+to her. She pits one species of plant or animal
+against another&mdash;heads I win, tails you lose. Some
+plants spread both by seed and runners, this
+doubles their chances; they are kept in check
+because certain localities are unfavorable to them.
+I know a section of the country where a species
+of mint has completely usurped the pastures. It
+makes good bee pasturage, but poor cattle pasturage.
+Quack grass will run out other grass
+because it travels under ground in the root as well
+as above ground in the seed.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE</div>
+
+<p>We may say that all the forms in the non-living
+world come by chance, or by the action of the undirected
+irrational physical forces, mechanical or
+mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of
+forces shaping the earth's surface, but the same
+forces are doing two kinds of work, piling up and
+pulling down&mdash;aggregating and accumulating, and
+separating and disintegrating.</p>
+
+<p>It is to me an interesting fact that the striking
+and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as
+a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span>
+pulling-down or degradation process. A natural
+bridge, an obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the
+rocks, the architectural and monumental rock
+forms, such as those in the Grand Ca&ntilde;on and in
+the Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion.
+Water and other aerial forces are the builders
+and sculptors, and the nature and structure of
+the material determine the form. It is as if these
+striking forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting
+for the erosive forces to liberate them. The stratified
+rocks out of which they are carved were not
+laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon
+layer, like the leaves of a book; neither has the
+crumpling and deformation of the earth's crust
+piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic
+and suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible
+workmen have carved out of them in the Grand
+Ca&ntilde;on! It looks as though titanic architects and
+sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only
+little grains of sand and a vast multitude of little
+drops of water, active through geologic ages, were
+the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle.
+If the river could have builded something equally
+grand and beautiful with the material it took out
+of this chasm! But it could not&mdash;poetry at one
+end of the series and dull prose at the other. The
+deposition took the form of broad, featureless,
+uninteresting plains&mdash;material for a new series of
+stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span>
+Ca&ntilde;ons may be carved. Thus the gods of erosion
+are the artists, while the builders of the mountains
+are only ordinary workmen.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">XI</div>
+
+<div class="center">RUMINATIONS</div>
+
+<div class="center">I. MAN A PART OF NATURE</div>
+
+
+<p>This bit of nature which I call myself, and which
+I habitually think of as entirely apart from the
+nature by which I am surrounded, going its own
+way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of
+the nature external to it, is yet as strictly a part of
+the total energy we call nature as is each wave in
+the ocean, no matter how high it raises its crest, a
+part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but
+a little way in separating us from the totality of
+things. Outside of the very limited sphere of what
+we call our spontaneous activities, we too are things
+and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know
+not of.</p>
+
+<p>It is only in action, or in the act of living, that
+we view ourselves as distinct from nature. When
+we think, we see that we are a part of the world in
+which we live, as much so as the trees and the other
+animals are a part. Intellect unites what life separates.
+Our whole civilization is the separating of
+one thing from another and classifying and organizing
+them. We work ourselves away from rude
+Nature while we are absolutely dependent upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>
+her for health and strength. We cease to be savages
+while we strive to retain the savage health and
+virility. We improve Nature while we make war
+upon her. We improve her for our own purposes.
+All the forces we use&mdash;wind, water, gravity, electricity&mdash;are
+still those of rude Nature. Is it not
+by gravity that the water rises to the top stories of
+our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane
+soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns
+hurl a ton of iron twenty miles they pit the greater
+weight against the lesser. The lighter projectile
+goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete
+hurls the hammer because he greatly outweighs it.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH</div>
+
+<p>Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing
+else than a dissolution of the elements of which
+every human being is composed." May we say it is
+like a redistribution of the type after the page is
+printed? The type is unchanged, only the order of
+arrangement is broken up. In the death of the
+body the component elements&mdash;water, lime, iron,
+phosphorus, magnesia, and so on&mdash;remain the
+same, but their organization is changed. Is that
+all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the
+printed page, the idea embodied, is the main matter.
+Can this idea be said to exist independent of the
+type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and
+then not permanently. Then it is only an arrange<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span>ment
+of molecules of matter in the brain, which is
+certainly only temporary. On the printed page it
+is a certain combination of white and black that
+moves the cells of the brain through the eye to
+create the idea. So the conception in our minds
+of our neighbor or friend&mdash;his character, his personality&mdash;exists
+after he is dead, but when our own
+brain ceases to function, where is it then?</p>
+
+<p>We rather resent being summed up in this way
+in terms of physics, or even of psychology. Can
+you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its
+ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology
+describe all men in the same terms; our component
+parts are all the same; but character, personality,
+mentality&mdash;do not these escape your analysis? and
+are they not also real?</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE</div>
+
+<p>Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the
+minister and interpreter of Nature. But man has
+been very slow to see that he is a part of that same
+Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter.
+His interpretation is not complete until he has
+learned to interpret himself also. This he has done
+all unconsciously through his art, his literature, his
+religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one
+phase of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture
+another, his civic orders another, his creeds and
+beliefs and superstitions another, so that at this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span>
+day and age of the world he has been pretty well
+interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far
+off as ever, because the condition of man is not
+static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew into
+the world and experiences new wonder, new joy,
+new loves, new enthusiasms. Nature is infinite,
+and the soul of man is infinite, and the action and
+reaction between the two which gives us our culture
+and our civilization can never cease. When
+man thinks he is interpreting Nature, he is really
+interpreting himself&mdash;reading his own heart and
+mind through the forms and movements that surround
+him. In his art and his literature he bodies
+forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives the
+measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations
+toward the perfect good; in his science he
+illustrates his capacity for logical order and for
+weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the
+night prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck
+or the ground mole, there is no biology to the dog
+or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and
+the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the
+mind of man; they are the order and the logic which
+he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to
+himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony,
+her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions
+he experiences in her presence. The midnight
+skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
+emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span>
+landscape reveals to him his susceptibility to
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the
+statue as existing in the block of marble before the
+sculptor touches it. How easy to fall into such
+false analogies! Can we say that the music existed
+in the flute or in the violin before the musician
+touches them? The statue in the form of an idea
+or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
+and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the
+book exist in the pot of printer's ink? Living
+things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn, the
+chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter
+there is no resurrection or evolution. Life alone
+puts a particular stamp upon it. We may say that
+the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of
+the laws of crystallization, but the house does not
+exist in a thousand of brick in the same sense. It
+exists in the mind of the builder.</p>
+
+<p>The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he
+interprets his own soul through the medium of the
+marble&mdash;the picture is not in the painter's color
+tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in
+the bud; it is in the artist's imagination. The
+apple and the peach and the wheat and the corn
+exist in the soil potentially; life working through
+the laws of physics and chemistry draws their
+materials out and builds up the perfect fruit. To
+decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>
+apply to human things, and not to universal nature.
+We do not interpret the stars when we form the
+constellations. The grouping of the stars in the
+heavens is accidental&mdash;the chair, the dipper, the
+harp, the huntsman, are our fabrications. Does
+Shelley interpret the skylark, or Wordsworth the
+cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
+mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets
+his own heart. Each poet's mind is the die or seal
+that gives the impression to this wax.</p>
+
+<p>All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own
+creation. Out of an unfailing sequence of events
+we frame laws&mdash;the law of gravity, of chemical
+affinity, of magnetism, of electricity&mdash;and refer to
+them as if they had an objective reality, when they
+are only concepts in our own minds. Nature has
+no statute books and no legislators, though we
+habitually think of her processes under these symbols.
+Human laws can be annulled, but Nature's
+laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though
+theology revokes or suspends them in its own
+behalf. It was Joshua's mind that stopped while
+he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers;
+fire and flood, famine and pestilence, are deaf to our
+appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines of Emerson
+was that all true prayers are self-answered&mdash;the
+spirit which the act of prayer begets in the suppliant
+is the answer. A heartfelt prayer for faith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span>
+or courage or humility is already answered in the
+attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know
+that the official prayers in the churches for victory
+to the armies in the field are of no avail&mdash;and how
+absurd to expect them to be&mdash;but who shall say that
+the prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may
+not steady his hand and clinch his courage? But
+the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for the
+stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is
+as vain as to reach one's hands for the moon.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES</div>
+
+<p>The writers who go directly to life and Nature for
+their material are, in every age, few compared with
+the great number that go to the libraries and
+lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation
+to the primary sources of inspiration. They
+cannot go directly to the fountain-head, but depend
+upon those who can and do. They are like
+those forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that
+have no chlorophyll, and hence cannot get their
+food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid
+in the air; they must draw it from the remains of
+plants that did get it at first-hand from Nature.
+Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the vegetable
+world; it makes the solar power available for life.
+It is in direct and original relation to the sun. It
+also makes animal life possible. The plant can go
+to inorganic nature and through its chlorophyll can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span>
+draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the
+plant, or to the animal that went to the plant, for
+our sustenance.</p>
+
+<p>The secondary men go to books and creeds and
+institutions for their religion, but the original men,
+having the divine chlorophyll, go to Nature herself.
+The stars in their courses teach them. The earth
+inspires them.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. THE COSMIC HARMONY</div>
+
+<p>The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not
+like that which man produces or aims to produce
+in his work&mdash;the order and harmony that will give
+him the best and the quickest results; but it is an
+astronomic order and harmony which flows inevitably
+from the circular movements and circular
+forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and
+evolution are the two feet upon which creation goes.
+All natural forms strive for the spherical. The
+waves on the beach curve and roll and make the
+pebbles round. From the drops of rain and dew to
+the mighty celestial orbs one law prevails. Nature
+works to no special ends; she works to all ends; and
+her harmony results from her universality. The
+comets are apparently celestial outlaws, but they
+all have their periodic movements, and make their
+rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space,
+which undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies
+and failures of order, as they undoubtedly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span>
+are. What else can we call them? When a new
+star suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one
+blazes up, and from a star of the tenth magnitude
+becomes one of the first, and then slowly grows
+dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe,
+an astronomic accident on a cosmic scale. Had
+such things occurred frequently enough, would not
+the whole solar system have been finally wrecked,
+or could it even have begun? For the disharmonies
+in Nature we must look to the world of the
+living things, but even here the defeats and failures
+are the exception&mdash;else there would be no living
+world. Organic evolution reaches its goal despite
+the delays and suffering and its devious course.
+The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last,
+though its course double and redouble upon itself
+scores of times, and it travels ten miles to advance
+one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable
+life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a
+thunderbolt that shatters a living tree, are all disharmonies
+of Nature. In fact, one may say that
+disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and
+all forms of what we call evil are disharmonies, because
+their tendency is to defeat the orderly development
+of life.</p>
+
+<p>The disharmonies in Nature in both the living
+and the non-living worlds tend to correct themselves.
+When Nature cannot make both ends meet,
+she diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span>
+for her creatures, she lessens the number of mouths
+to be fed. A surplus of food, on the other hand,
+tends to multiply the mouths.</p>
+
+<p>Man often introduces an element of disorder into
+Nature. His work in deforesting the land brings
+on floods and the opposite conditions of drought.
+He destroys the natural checks and compensations.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS</div>
+
+<p>The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean
+are not merely the result of a local agitation of the
+waters. The pulse of the earth is in them. The
+pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They
+are more cosmic than terrestrial. The earth wears
+her seas like a loose garment which the sun and
+moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to
+side. Only the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the
+heavenly influences. The great inland bodies of
+water are unresponsive to them&mdash;they are too small
+for the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not
+equally true that only great souls are moved by the
+great fundamental questions of life? What a
+puzzle the tides must have been to early man!
+What proof they afford of the cosmic forces that
+play upon us at all times and hold us in their net!
+Without the proof they afford, we should not know
+how we are tied to the solar system. The lazy,
+reluctant waters&mdash;how they follow the sun and
+moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span>
+the world"! The land feels the pull also and
+would follow if it could. But the mobile clouds
+go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign.
+The pull of the sun and the moon is upon you and
+me also, but we are all unconscious of it. We are
+bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE</div>
+
+<p>It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn,
+in his "Origin and Evolution of Life," makes no
+account of the micro-organisms or unicellular lives
+that are older than the continents, older than the
+Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged
+even to our times. I saw in the Grand Ca&ntilde;on of
+the Colorado where they were laid down horizontally
+on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the
+hand of a mason building the foundation of a
+superstructure. All the vast series of limestone
+rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute
+living bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up
+of the skeletons of diatoms. Some of our polishing
+powders are made from these rocks. Formed of
+pure silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons
+of organisms of many exquisite forms, <i>Foraminifer&aelig;</i>.
+The Pyramids are said to be built of rocks
+formed by these organisms. "No single group of
+the animal kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter,
+"has contributed, or is at present contributing, so
+largely as has the <i>Foraminifer&aelig;</i> to the formation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span>
+of the earth's crust." In the face of these facts,
+how unsatisfactory seem Professor Osborn's statements
+that life probably originated on the continents,
+either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils,
+in the fresh waters of continental pools, or in the
+slightly saline waters of the "bordering primordial
+seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the
+mark. There is no variation during geologic time
+of these primordial living organisms. All conceivable
+changes of environment have passed over
+them, but they change not. Bacteria struggle
+together, one form devouring another form. Unicellular
+life long precedes multicellular. Biologists
+usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed;
+with the latter begins development or evolution,
+and the peopling of the world with myriads of
+animal forms.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE</div>
+
+<p>Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes
+the shortest way to her ends." She is like ourselves,
+she is ourselves written large&mdash;written in
+animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of
+that of which she has the most. She is lavish of
+her leaves, but less so of her flowers, still less of
+her fruit, and less yet of her germinal parts. The
+production of seed is a costly process to the plant.
+Many trees yield fruit only every other year.</p>
+
+<p>I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span>
+she has the most. Behold the clouds of pollen from
+the blooming pines and from the grasses in the
+meadow. She is less parsimonious with her
+winged seeds, such as of the maple and the elm, than
+with her heavy nuts&mdash;butternuts, hickory-nuts,
+acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend
+upon the agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter
+them. She offers them the wage of the sweet
+kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than
+they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds
+of her berries she offers the delectable pulp: "Do
+this chore for me, and you will find the service its
+own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and
+woods hold seeds that must be distributed by animal
+agency. Even the fiery arum or Indian
+turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red
+berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds.
+The mice and the squirrels doubtless give them a
+wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds
+have the sting taken out of them. You cannot
+poison a hen with strychnine.</p>
+
+<p>We ourselves are covetous of those things of
+which we have but few, extravagant with those of
+which we have an abundance. When the Western
+farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he
+sees his own account in it. We husband our white
+pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are stingy
+with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech
+and chestnut.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">XII</div>
+
+<div class="center">NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD</div>
+
+
+<p>As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover
+new acts in Nature's drama. They are,
+however, the old acts, played again and again,
+which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed
+have I been in the rise and fall of the curtain,
+and in the entrances and exits of the more
+familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during
+each season, I detect a few new acts on the vast
+stage; and as long as I live I expect to cogitate and
+speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest
+in the whole performance.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">I. SUNRISE</div>
+
+<p>The most impressive moment of the day here in
+the Catskills is the rising of the sun. From my
+cot on the porch I see the first flash of his coming.
+Before that I see his rays glint here and there
+through the forest trees which give a mane to the
+mountain crest. The dawn comes very gently.
+I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually
+become conscious of a faint luminousness in the
+eastern sky. This slowly increases and changes to
+a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten minutes
+that fades into a light bluish tinge&mdash;the gold turns<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span>
+to silver. After some minutes the sky, just at the
+point where the sun is to appear, begins to glow
+again, as if the silver were getting warm; a minute
+or two more and the brow of the great god is above
+the horizon line. His mere brow, as I try to fix
+my eye upon it, fairly smites me blind. The brow
+is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One
+realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old
+earth turns on its axis. You witness the miracle
+of the transition of the dawn into day. The day
+is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the
+word "boil" to describe this moment?&mdash;"Day boils
+at last." Gilder, I think, speaks of it as a scimitar
+flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate,
+I watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it
+for the first time. It is the critical moment of the
+day. You actually see the earth turning. Later
+in the day one does not note in the same way the
+sun climbing the heavens. The setting sun does
+not impress one, because it is usually enveloped in
+vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his
+rest veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning
+and old at his going down. His gilding of the clouds
+at sunset is a token of a fair day on the morrow;
+his touching them with fire in the morning is a
+token of wind or storm. So much we make of
+these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
+are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction
+of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span>
+is as great as if this were the case, and yet the
+fraction of his light and heat that actually falls
+upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space
+is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed
+by numbers. In our religion we appropriate
+God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows
+us not in this private and particular way, though
+we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II. NATURE'S METHODS</div>
+
+<p>Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own.
+Man improves upon his inventions, he makes them
+better and better and discards the old. The first
+airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the
+airplane flies hundreds of miles and carries tons of
+weight. Nature has progressed steadily from lower
+to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
+her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the
+perfected models. There is no vacancy at the
+bottom of her series, as there is in the case of man.
+I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting
+them with those of man in any respect. She
+has no method in our sense of the term. She is
+action, and not thought, growth and not construction,
+is internal and not external. To try to
+explain her in terms of our own methods is like
+trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles
+and right lines.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of species is as dark a problem as is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>
+the origin of the secondary rocks. What factors
+or forces entered into the production of the vast
+variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from
+the original Adam rock, the granite, as the races
+of men differ from one another? There is just as
+much room for natural selection to work in one
+case as in the other. We find where two kinds of
+rock touch, one overlying the other, and absolute
+difference in texture and color, and no union between
+them. How account for their juxtaposition?
+Rock begat rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces
+played the chief part, but the origin of each kind
+is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
+of the animal species.</p>
+
+<p>The position of the camel with reference to the
+giraffe in Africa is analogous to that, say, of the
+Catskill conglomerate to the laminated sandstone
+that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates
+into the other. Whence the long neck and
+high withers of the giraffe? The need of high feeding,
+say the selectionists, but other browsing animals
+must have felt the same need. Our moose is
+strictly a browsing animal, and, while his neck and
+shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
+approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a
+long neck also, but it is a low feeder, mainly from
+the ground.</p>
+
+<p>We can only account for man and other higher
+forms of life surviving in the highway of the physi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span>cal
+forces on the ground that the wheels and tramping
+hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit
+them. They learned instinctively to avoid these
+destructive forces. Animal life was developed
+amid these dangers. The physical forces go their
+way as indifferent to life as is your automobile to
+the worms and beetles in the road. Pain and suffering
+are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
+that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter
+how many fall or are crushed by the way; to It
+men are as cheap as fleas; and they have slaughtered
+one another in Europe of late without help or
+hindrance from the Eternal, as do the tribes of
+hostile ants. The wars of the microbes and the
+wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme
+of things. The survivors owe their power of survival
+to the forces that sought their destruction;
+they are strong by what they have overcome; they
+graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can
+say that evil is for us as much as it is against us.
+Pain and suffering are guardian angels; they teach
+us what to shun.</p>
+
+<p>How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is!
+How impossible, for instance, to reduce her use of
+horns to a single rule. In the deer and elk tribe
+the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics.
+They are dropped as the season wanes;
+but the antelopes do not drop their horns, and in
+Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>
+our common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations;
+yet the old ram does not shed his horns.
+Nature will not be consistent.</p>
+
+<p>Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with
+four horns, two on the nose and two on the crown,
+and they were real, permanent, bony growths.</p>
+
+<p>What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given
+to the shovel-footed mole, while the chipmunk,
+who also burrows in the ground, has no special tool
+to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is
+compelled to use his soft, tender little nose as a
+pusher. When the soil which his feet have loosened
+has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he
+shoves it back with his nose.</p>
+
+<p>Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial.
+The Canada thistle sows its seeds upon the wind
+like the common native thistle; then in addition
+it sends a big root underground parallel with its
+surface, and just beyond the reach of the plough,
+which sends up shoots every six or seven inches, so
+that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on
+its conquests like a powerful besieging army,
+both below ground and above.</p>
+
+<p>A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a
+rather peremptory manner, demanding an answer
+by return mail as to why robins are evenly distributed
+over the country instead of collected in
+large numbers in one locality; and if they breed
+in the South; and he insists that my answer be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>
+explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is
+natural law." I wonder that he did not put a
+special-delivery stamp on his letter. He is
+probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.</p>
+
+<p>There seems to be an inherent tendency in
+nearly all living things to scatter, to seek new fields.
+They are obeying the first command&mdash;to increase
+and multiply. Then it is also a question of food,
+which is limited in every locality. Robins do not
+breed in flocks, but in pairs. Every gas is a
+vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is
+a vacuum to the different species of birds that
+breed there. The seed-eaters, the fruit-eaters, the
+insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
+robin&mdash;in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers,
+the warblers&mdash;may and do all live together
+in harmony in the same narrow area.</p>
+
+<p>The struggle of which we have heard so much
+since Darwin's time is mainly a natural sifting and
+distributing process, such as that going on all about
+us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried
+by the winds do not thrive unless they chance to
+fall on suitable ground. All may be "fit" to survive
+and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What
+so frail as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders
+thrive! Nature gives the weak many advantages.</p>
+
+<p>There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species
+with another&mdash;the fleet with the slow, the cunning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span>
+with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and sharp-eared
+with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with
+the blunt of scent&mdash;which we call natural competition;
+but the slow, the stupid, the dull-eyed,
+dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and
+thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because
+they do not need to be otherwise; the conditions
+of their lives do not require speed and
+sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills,
+the skunk its pungent secretion. All parts of
+nature dovetail together. The deer and the
+antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because
+their enemies have speed and sharp senses. The
+small birds are keen-eyed and watchful because
+the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates
+the gray squirrel, which is above him in size and
+strength, and the chipmunk below him, but he
+does not exterminate either. The chipmunk
+burrows in the ground where the red cannot follow
+him, and he lays up a store of nuts and seeds which
+the red does not. The weasel easily dominates
+the rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and
+traps and weasels.</p>
+
+<p>The sifting of species is done largely by environment,
+the wet, the cold, the heat&mdash;the
+fittest, or those best adapted to their environment,
+survive. For some obscure reason they have a
+fuller measure of life than those who fall by the
+way.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center2">III. HEADS AND TAILS</div>
+
+<p>I have heard a story of a young artist who, after
+painting a picture of a horse facing a storm, was
+not satisfied with it, and, feeling that something
+was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly
+the great artist said to him, "Turn the
+horse around."</p>
+
+<p>The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse
+turns his tail. Why this difference? Because
+each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and its
+anatomy. How much better suited is the broad,
+square head of the cow, with its heavy coating of
+hair and its ridge of bone that supports its horns,
+to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous
+and sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast
+between their noses and their mode of grazing!
+The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the
+grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse
+bites it off and loves to bite the turf with it. The
+lip of the horse is mobile and sensitive. Then the
+bovine animals fight with their heads, and the
+equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and
+high kicker, the cow a feeble one in comparison.
+The horse will kick with both hind feet, the cow
+with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick"
+in her kind. The tail of the cow is of less protection
+to her than is that of the horse to him. Her great
+need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the
+rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span>
+her bony stern, with its ridges and depressions and
+thin flanks, is less fit in any encounter with storm
+or with beast than is her head. On the other hand,
+the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with
+their huge masses of muscles, his smooth flanks,
+and his tail&mdash;an apron of long, straight, strong hair&mdash;are
+well designed to resist storm and cold. What
+animal is it in Job whose neck is clothed with
+thunder? With the horse, it is the hips that are so
+clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT</div>
+
+<p>If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
+I suppose the breath of the obscene fungus by any
+other name would smell as rank. The defensive
+weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would
+probably not be less offensive if we called him by
+that name alone, instead of the common one by
+which he is universally known.</p>
+
+<p>While in southern California last winter I heard
+of one that took up his abode in the basement of a
+house that stood on the side of a hill in the edge of
+the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where
+all sorts of odds and ends had accumulated. On
+some shelves was a box of miscellaneous articles,
+such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old toothbrushes,
+bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire,
+chips of wood, and the dried foot and leg of a hen.
+One morning, on opening the door of the basement,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span>
+the mistress of the house was surprised to see the
+whole collection of trash laid out in a line across
+the floor. The articles were placed with some degree
+of regularity covering a space about fifteen
+inches wide and ten feet in length. There were
+sixty-one articles in the row.</p>
+
+<p>Having such an unsavory creature in the basement
+of one's house is rather ticklish business;
+not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet fraught
+with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away
+the exhibit and left the door open, hoping their
+uninvited guest would take his departure. But he
+did not. A few nights later he began another collection,
+finding a lot of new material&mdash;among other
+things a box with old atomizer bulbs, four of which
+bulbs he arranged here and there, in the row&mdash;a
+motley array.</p>
+
+<p>What is his object? I confess I do not know.
+No one has seen him do it, as he works at night,
+but there is little doubt that it is his work.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">3</a> The
+Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger
+than a gray squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">3</span></a> Later investigations point to this having been the work of a wood
+rat instead of a skunk.&mdash;C. B.</p></div>
+
+<p>I wish some one would tell me why this night
+prowler so often seems to spray the midnight air
+with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He
+never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span>
+Eastern species is as free from odor as a squirrel or
+a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by day or night
+in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground
+that lasts for months. While at a friend's house in
+the Catskills last August a wood pussy came up
+behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap.
+We saw him from the window in the early evening,
+and we smelled him. For some reason he betrayed
+his presence. Late that night I was awakened by a
+wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose
+smart, yet in the morning no odor could be detected
+anywhere about the place. Of course the smell is
+much more pronounced in the damp night air
+than by day, yet this does not seem an adequate
+explanation. Does he signal at night to his fellows
+by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I
+have never heard him make a vocal sound. When
+caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs in a stone
+wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping
+his feet. He is the one American who does not
+hurry through life. I have no proof that he ever
+moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he
+ever experiences the feeling of fear, so common to
+nearly all our smaller animals. His track upon the
+snow is that of a creature at peace with all the
+world.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE</div>
+
+<p>Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span>
+some animals than of others. The frog and the
+toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn
+thousands, but most birds lay only five or six
+eggs.</p>
+
+<p>A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a
+miser with the other. She lets loose an army of
+worms upon the forests, and then sends an ichneumon-fly
+to check them. She wastes no perfume
+or color upon the flowers which depend upon the
+wind to scatter their pollen. Cross-fertilization is
+dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways
+to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will
+rob the bones of the fowl of their lime to perfect the
+shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or cunning on
+the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has
+already endowed each of them with a perfect
+means of defense.</p>
+
+<p>Two things Nature is not chary of&mdash;fear and
+pain. She heaps the measure here because fear
+puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them
+from many real dangers. What dangers have
+lurked for man and for most wild things in the
+dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a
+fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic.
+Pain, too, safeguards us; it shields us against real
+dangers. The pains of childbirth are probably no
+check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of
+procreation, especially on the part of the male,
+overcomes all other considerations.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS</div>
+
+<p>Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and
+ticks for the South&mdash;this seems to be Nature's decree,
+at least in this country. The mosquitoes of the
+Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously,
+while our Jersey mosquitoes hesitate and
+parley and make exasperating feints and passes.
+On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a
+swarm of these insects rose out of the grass as if
+they had been waiting for me all the years (as they
+had) and were so hungry that they could not stand
+upon the order of their proceeding, but came headlong.</p>
+
+<p>In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to
+death by the fleas. They were the most sorry,
+forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life was
+evidently a burden to them. I remember that
+Lewis and Clark, in their journey across the continent,
+were greatly pestered by fleas. I have
+found that our woodchucks, when they "hole up"
+in the fall, are full of fleas.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA</div>
+
+<p>I have just been reading, for the third time,
+Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast," my sojourn
+near San Diego for a few months, where so many of
+the scenes and events he describes took place, having
+given me a renewed interest in the book.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is very evident that the climate of southern
+California has greatly changed since Dana was here
+in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in 1832 and
+1833. The change has been from wet to dry.
+At that time his ship collected, and others engaged
+in the same trade collected, hundreds of thousands
+of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from
+cattle grown by the missions between San Diego
+and Santa Barbara. This fact implies good pasturage.
+The cattle grazed on the hills and plains that
+are now, during a large part of the year, as dry as
+a bone. At present cattle left to their own devices
+on this coast would soon starve to death.</p>
+
+<p>Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain,
+mainly from the southeast, which the ship, anchored
+a few miles off the coast, or cruising up and
+down, experienced at all times of year&mdash;one or more
+storms each week, often lasting for days. One
+December he describes it as raining every hour for
+the whole month. The dread of the southeasters
+was ever present with the sailors. One of these,
+lasting three days, which came out of a cloudless
+sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays a southeast
+storm of half a day is, according to my experience,
+an uncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely
+a drop of rain falls here from April till November,
+yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August.
+At present, in some of the interior valleys, where
+they grow alfalfa by means of irrigation, I see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span>
+herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the season
+of rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle
+do well, but during the long dry season there is no
+pasturage save dry pasturage.</p>
+
+<p>Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season
+here, I have been here during three seasons and
+have so far seen only light rains. To-day (December
+16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as
+you care to dig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in
+grain, and a great cloud of dust streamed out behind
+him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavy
+rainfall in this locality that inundated large sections
+of the country and destroyed much property, the
+dry San Diego River getting out of bounds and
+carrying away bridges and floating houses on its
+banks. But it has been as dry as a highway ever
+since. It is clear that when the big rains do come
+they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE</div>
+
+<p>Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on
+my home acres in the Catskills, I noticed that the
+wild strawberry-vines sent out their runners over
+the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the
+turf, just as over the ground. Of course they
+could not take root, but they went through all the
+motions of taking root; the little clusters of leaves
+developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their
+points or stood at "attention," and the runners<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>
+pushed out two or three feet over the barren surface
+and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the
+desert whose strength begins to fail. The first
+knot, or, one might say, the first encampment, was
+about one foot from the last one upon the turf, the
+next one about eight inches farther in; then the
+distance dropped to six inches, then to four. I
+think the runner finally gave it up and stopped
+reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently
+draws its main sustenance from the one next behind
+it, and when this one fails to reach the soil it
+loses heart and can give little succor to the next in
+front. The result is that the stools become smaller
+and smaller, and the distances between them less
+and less, down the whole line.</p>
+
+<p>Nature's methods are seen in the little as well
+as in the big, and these little purple runners of the
+vine pushing out in all directions show the all-round-the-circle
+efforts of Nature as clearly as do
+the revolving orbs in sidereal space. Her living
+impulses go out in all directions. She scatters her
+seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots.
+She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as
+upon the land. She knows not our parsimony nor
+our prudence. We say she is blind, but without
+eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live to
+particular ends, and are limited to particular
+spheres, have need of eyes. Nature has all time
+and all space and all ends. Delays and failure she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span>
+knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do
+not reach their goal, the trouble corrects itself; they
+finally stop searching for it in that direction, and
+the impulse of the plant goes out stronger and fuller
+on other sides.</p>
+
+<p>If the rains were especially designed to replenish
+our springs and supply our growing crops, the
+clouds might reasonably be expected to limit their
+benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the
+rains are older than are we and our crops, and it is
+we who must adjust ourselves to them, not they
+to us.</p>
+
+<p>The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized
+vision. Does the blood need eyes to find its
+way to the heart and lungs? Does the wind need
+eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop
+its winged seeds? It drops them upon all spots, and
+each kind in due time finds its proper habitat, the
+highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants,
+hitting their marks as surely as do others.</p>
+
+<p>Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps
+are numbered and must go in a particular direction,
+but the goal of all-seeing Nature is everywhere,
+and she arrives before she starts. She has no
+plan and no method, and she is not governed.</p>
+
+<p>These conceptions express too little, not too
+much. Nature's movements are circular; her
+definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The
+rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span>
+more an end than is the rising vapor. Each is a
+part of the great circuit of beneficent and malevolent
+forces upon which our life (and all life) depends,
+upon which the making of the soil of the
+earth and the shaping of the landscape depend;
+all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and
+perfume of the world, all the glory of cloud and
+sky, all the hazards of flood and storm, all the terror
+of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit
+of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back
+again through the rivers to the sea. In our geologic
+time there is, in this circuit of the waters, more that
+favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say,
+we should not be here. The enormous destruction
+of human life, of all life, which has taken place and
+will continue to take place, in this beneficent circuit,
+is only an incident in the history of the globe;
+the physical forces are neither for nor against it;
+they are neutral; life to be here at all has to run
+these risks; has to run the gantlet of these forces,
+and to get many a lash and gash in the running.
+Against the suffering and death incident thereto
+there is no insurance save in the wit of man himself.
+All this wit has been developed and sharpened
+by much waste and suffering. We learn to deal
+with difficulties through the discipline of the difficulties
+themselves. If man were finally to learn to
+control the rains and the floods, it would be through
+the experience which they themselves bring him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span>
+The demons that destroy him are on his side when
+he strikes with the strength which they give him.
+Gravity, which so often crushes and overthrows
+him, is yet the source of all his might. The fire
+that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same
+fire that warms him and drives his engines across
+the continent.</p>
+
+<p>There is no god that pities us or weeps over our
+sufferings, save the god in our own breasts. We
+have life on heroic terms. Nature does not baby
+us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take
+our chances with all other forms of life. Our special
+good fortune is that we are capable of a higher development,
+capable of profiting to a greater extent
+by experience, than are the lower forms of life.
+And here is the mystery that has no solution: we
+came out of the burning nebul&aelig; just as our horse
+and dog, but why we are men and they are still
+horse and dog we owe to some Power, or, shall
+I say, to the chance working of a multitude of
+powers, that are beyond our ken. That some
+Being willed it, designed it, no; yet it was in some
+way provided for in the constitution of the world.</p>
+
+<div class="center">THE END</div>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217<br />218<br />219</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>INDEX</h3>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>
+Agassiz, Louis, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</li><li>
+Air, light and heavy, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li><li>
+Albatross, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li><li>
+Animal life, abundance, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li><li>
+Antlers, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li><li>
+Ants, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li><li>
+Army trucks, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li><li>
+Arum, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li><li>
+Automobile trip, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>-26.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Bacon, Francis, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li><li>
+Barton, W. Va., <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li><li>
+Bee, honey, spirit of the hive, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>-62;
+<ul><li>
+intelligence, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li><li>
+communication, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li><li>
+their world, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>;</li><li>
+sting, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Bee, leaf-cutter, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li><li>
+Beech, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Birds, living with, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;<ul><li>
+flight, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>-38;</li><li>
+and cats, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</li><li>
+nesting near houses, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>-59;</li><li>
+home sense, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>;</li><li>
+nests of most species built by the females, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</li><li>
+and dead trees, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li><li>
+song, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</li><li>
+at Pine Knot, Va., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>-05;</li><li>
+of southern California, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>-32;</li><li>
+community of mind in flocks, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Birds' nests, finding, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>-81.</li><li>
+Bluebird, endearing qualities, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li><li>
+experience with a pair, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>-48.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Bobolink, song flight, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li><li>
+Bolar Springs, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li><li>
+Brain, as organ of the mind, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li><li>
+Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li><li>
+Bumble-bee, carpenter, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li><li>
+Bunting, indigo, nesting, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li><li>
+Bunting, painted, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li><li>
+Butterflies, flight, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;
+flocking, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Butterfly, monarch, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Buzzard, turkey, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>-34.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Cacti, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-48.</li><li>
+California, southern, observations in, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>-51;<ul><li>
+coast, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li><li>
+mountains, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</li><li>
+climate and soil, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</li><li>
+bird-song, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li><li>
+birds, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>-32;</li><li>
+change of climate in, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>-12.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Cambium layer, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li><li>
+Carpenter, W. B., quoted, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Catbird, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;<ul><li>
+stealthiness, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</li><li>
+experience with a pair, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-66;</li><li>
+fondness for butter, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</li><li>
+theatrical, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</li><li>
+notes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Caterpillars, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>-94.</li><li>
+Causes, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>-67.</li><li>
+Cedar-bird, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li><li>
+Chance, in animal life, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li><li>
+Cheat River, W. Va., <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li><li>
+Chipmunks, two in a den, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;<ul><li>
+storing currants, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li><li>
+carrying provender, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Chippie. <i>See</i> Sparrow, chipping.</li><li>
+Chlorophyll, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li><li>
+Chrysalis, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li><li>
+Condor, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li><li>
+Connellsville, Pa., <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li><li>
+Cormorant, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li><li>
+Cosmos, the, order and harmony of, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>-93.</li><li>
+Cow, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li><li>
+Crow, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+needs no great wing-power, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>Crow, fish, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li><li>
+Cuckoo, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;<ul><li>
+solemnity, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</li><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li><li>
+young, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li><li>
+food, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Cuckoo, black-billed, notes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting-habits, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Cuckoo, yellow-billed, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., at San Diego, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li><li>
+Darwin, Charles, quoted, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>;<ul><li>
+his eager study of natural history, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li><li>
+observations during the voyage of the Beagle, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</li><li>
+failure of his theory, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>-69;</li><li>
+his mind, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</li><li>
+treated man as an animal, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Darwin, George Howard, on the tides, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</li><li>
+Darwinism, a cause of the World War, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-75.</li><li>
+Death, an analogy of, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li><li>
+Desert, vegetation of the, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-48.</li><li>
+Dove, mourning, <i>or</i> turtle-dove, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Earth, the, quiverings of the surface, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>-71;<ul><li>
+the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Edison, Thomas A., <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;<ul><li>
+contrasted with Mr. Ford, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>-25.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Elm, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li><li>
+Erosion, as sculpture, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>-83.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Fabre, Jean Henri, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;<ul><li>
+quoted, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Far-away, the, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li><li>
+Fear in animals, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li><li>
+Fireflies, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li><li>
+Firestone, H. S., <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</li><li>
+Fish, schools of, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li><li>
+Fleas, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li><li>
+Flies, intelligence, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li><li>
+Foraminifer&aelig;, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Ford, Henry, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;<ul><li>
+contrasted with Mr. Edison, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>-24.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Foxes, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.</li><li>
+Frog, wood, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Germans, Darwinism, and the World War, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-75.</li><li>
+Giraffe, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Girls, two West Virginia, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li><li>
+Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li><li>
+God, man appropriating, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li><li>
+Goldfinch, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;<ul><li>
+chorus singing, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>-42;</li><li>
+notes, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</li><li>
+notes of young, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</li><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Grand Ca&ntilde;on, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Grass, the wonder of, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</li><li>
+Grasshoppers, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Great Smoky Mts., <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li><li>
+Greensborough, Pa., <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</li><li>
+Grosbeak, rose-breasted, nesting, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li><li>
+Grouse, ruffed, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li><li>
+Gull, herring, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li><li>
+Gulls, flight, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Hawk, red-tailed, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li><li>
+Hawks, flight, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li><li>
+Haymaking, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>-76.</li><li>
+Hen-hawk, flight, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li><li>
+Hornets, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li><li>
+Horns, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li><li>
+Horse, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li><li>
+Horseshoe Run, W. Va., <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li><li>
+Hummingbird, ruby-throated, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<ul><li>
+bathing in dew, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>;</li><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</li><li>
+a fairy bird, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Hurley, Edward N., <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li><li>
+Huxley, Thomas Henry, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;<ul><li>
+quoted, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Ibis, white, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li><li>
+Insects, their world, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>-25, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;<ul><li>
+senses, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li><li>
+reaction to heat,</li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span>cold, and vibrations, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li><li>
+antenn&aelig;, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li><li>
+the ruling sex among, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Interpretation, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-90.</li><li>
+Ironweed, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+James, William, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li><li>
+Jay, blue, notes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li><li>
+Joe-Pye-weed, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li><li>
+Junco, young, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</li><li>
+abundance, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Kepler, Johann, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</li><li>
+Killdeer, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li><li>
+Kingbird, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+and bees, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Leaves, autumn, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-3.</li><li>
+Lemmings, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li><li>
+Life, origin of, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li><li>
+Life, human, analogies, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>-27.</li><li>
+Lightning-bugs. <i>See</i> Fireflies.</li><li>
+Lowell, James Russell, quoted, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li><li>
+Lubbock, Sir John, quoted, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+McCarthy, Denis Aloysius, quoted, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li><li>
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, quoted, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;<ul><li>
+on the bee, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>-63.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Man, and Darwinism, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>;<ul><li>
+a part of nature, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>-86;</li><li>
+interpretation of nature and of himself, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-90;</li><li>
+mystery of his evolution, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Maple, sugar, susceptibility to atmospheric changes, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li><li>
+Maples, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Marcus Aurelius, quoted, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li><li>
+Meadowlark, song flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li><li>
+Measuring-worm, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li><li>
+Mice, wild, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;
+barking trees, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li><li>
+Microphone, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li><li>
+Microseisms, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</li><li>
+Mind, community of, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>-55.</li><li>
+Mockingbird, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li><li>
+Moose, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Mosquitoes, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li><li>
+Moth, luna, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.</li><li>
+Mouse, jumping, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</li><li>
+Mouse, white-footed, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li><li>
+Mullets, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Natural history about home, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li><li>
+Nature, her methods unlike ours, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>-81, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;<ul><li>
+interpreting, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-90;</li><li>
+lavishness and parsimony, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</li><li>
+puzzling and contradictory, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;</li><li>
+all-seeing, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>-14;</li><li>
+her movements circular, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>-16.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Nighthawk, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li><li>
+Nonpareil, <i>or</i> painted bunting, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li><li>
+North Carolina, a countryman of, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li><li>
+Northern Hemisphere, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Oak, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Odd and even numbers, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>-65.</li><li>
+Oriole, Baltimore, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>-52, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Oriole, Bullock's, nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li><li>
+Oriole, orchard, nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li><li>
+Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on the origin of life, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li><li>
+Ostrich, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Owl, screech, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>-47.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Pacific Ocean, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li><li>
+Pain, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li><li>
+Pear-trees, autumn color, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>.</li><li>
+Pelican, California brown, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li><li>
+Pennsylvania, motor trip through, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>-13.</li><li>
+Pewee, wood, nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<ul><li>
+its plaint, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Ph&oelig;be, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>-54, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Pigeon, wild, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li><li>
+Pine Knot, Va., visit to, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-08.</li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span>Pipit, American, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Pittsburgh, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li><li>
+Plover, killdeer, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li><li>
+Porcupine, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Rabbit, its protection, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>;<ul><li>
+caught by a weasel, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Rainbow tints, in dew, etc., <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li><li>
+Rat, wood, <a href="#Page_207">207</a> <i>note</i>.</li><li>
+Reasons, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>-67.</li><li>
+Redstart, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li><li>
+Road-mending, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li><li>
+Robin, young, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>-55, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li><li>
+fear of man, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;</li><li>
+fittest to survive, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li><li>
+versatility, 176;</li><li>
+a hustler, 176;</li><li>
+danger of a plague of robins, 177;</li><li>
+a runner, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Rocks, origin of the secondary, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Roosevelt, Theodore, visit to Pine Knot, Va., with, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-08;<ul><li>
+knowledge of India, <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li><li>
+opinion of Taft, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</li><li>
+killing a mosquito, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li><li>
+protection of the President, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li><li>
+bird-gazing, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>;</li><li>
+letter from, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Salamander, orange-colored, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li><li>
+San Diego, Cal., <a href="#Page_210">210</a>-12.</li><li>
+Sandstone, in the Catskills, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li><li>
+Sap, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>-8.</li><li>
+Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li><li>
+Scorpion, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li><li>
+Seals, hair, in California, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>-51.</li><li>
+Sex, the ruling, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li><li>
+Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;<ul><li>
+on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Shrew, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li><li>
+Skunk, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>-08.</li><li>
+Snakes, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li><li>
+Sources, original, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li><li>
+South, characteristics of the, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li><li>
+Southern Hemisphere, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li><li>
+Sparrow, story of a nest, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li><li>
+Sparrow, chipping <i>or</i> social, nest, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li><li>
+Sparrow, song, song flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li><li>
+singing, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Sparrow, vesper, nesting, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>-84;<ul><li>
+its names, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</li><li>
+appearance and habits, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>;</li><li>
+courted by a skylark, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Species, origin of, an insoluble problem, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>-69, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li><li>
+Spider, trap-door, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>-43.</li><li>
+Spiders, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;<ul><li>
+genius of, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Spider-webs, rainbows in, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li><li>
+Squirrel, gray, caught by a weasel, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li><li>
+Squirrel, red, chased by a weasel, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li><li>
+Strawberry-vines, wild, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>-14.</li><li>
+Struggle, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</li><li>
+Sunrise, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li><li>
+Survival of the fit, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</li><li>
+Swallow, bank, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li><li>
+Swallow, barn, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;<ul><li>
+parental anxiety, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li><li>
+notes, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li><li>
+pleasing qualities, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Swallow, cliff, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.</li><li>
+Swallow, tree, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li><li>
+Swallows, feeding, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;<ul><li>
+hibernation, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Swift, chimney, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li><li>
+Sycamore, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Taft, William Howard, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</li><li>
+Telepathy, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Thistle, Canada, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li><li>
+Thorns, the use of, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-48.</li><li>
+Thrasher, brown, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, Alaska hermit, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, hermit, song, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, olive-backed, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, Wilson's. <i>See</i> Veery.</li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>Thrush, wood, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<ul><li>
+manners, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Tides, the, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Titlark. <i>See</i> Pipit.</li><li>
+Trees, leaves, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-3;<ul><li>
+mechanism of growth, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>-8;</li><li>
+roots and rootlets, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>-6;</li><li>
+what man has in common with, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Tree-toad, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li><li>
+Turnip, Indian, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li><li>
+Turtle-dove. <i>See</i> Dove, mourning.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Uniontown, Pa., <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li><li>
+Universe. <i>See</i> Cosmos.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Van Dyke, John C., on desert plants, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li><li>
+Veery, nesting, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li><li>
+Vireo, nest, young, and mother, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li><li>
+Vireo, red-eyed, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li><li>
+Vireo, yellow-throated, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li><li>
+Vital principle, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Warbler, Audubon's, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li><li>
+Warbler, Canada, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li><li>
+Warbler, mourning, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li><li>
+Wasp, a solitary, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li><li>
+Water-thrush, <i>or</i> water accentor, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li><li>
+Waxwing, Bohemian, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li><li>
+Weasel, catching rabbits and squirrels, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;<ul><li>
+an inspirer of terror, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Weather, prophesying the, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>-22.</li><li>
+West Virginia, motor trip through, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>-19.</li><li>
+Whitman, Walt, quoted, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li><li>
+Wolf Creek, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li><li>
+Woodcock, flight song, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li><li>
+Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li><li>
+Woodpeckers, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li><li>
+World War, Darwinism a cause of the, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-75.</li><li>
+Wren, Bewick's, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li><li>
+Wren, house, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;<ul><li>
+and nesting-box, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Wren, winter, nest, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<hr />
+<h5>
+<b>The Riverside Press</b><br />
+CAMBRIDGE &middot; MASSACHUSETTS<br />
+U &middot; S &middot; A</h5>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #30246 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30246)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under the Maples
+
+Author: John  Burroughs
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2009 [EBook #30246]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE MAPLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Turgut Dincer, Joseph Cooper and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  
+   Transcriber's Note:                           
+   Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy 
+   has been retained as it appears in the  
+   original publication, and if you cannot  
+   read "Phœbe" clearly please change the
+   encoding of your text reader to UTF-8. 
+  
+
+
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: _Copyright, 1921, by Charles F. Lummis.
+     All rights reserved._
+
+  THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  (March 23, 1921; six days before his death)
+  Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time
+  friend Charles F. Lummis]
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+  BY
+  JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  [Illustration: The Riverside Press]
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and looking
+out upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples at
+Riverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last two
+years of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near his
+Hudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering in
+Southern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breaking
+up on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds,
+the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there in
+spirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the veranda
+of the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busy
+with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.
+
+Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees and
+dripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind,
+one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, he
+suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it _Under the Maples_!"
+
+His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit upon
+this title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among his
+miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows
+It was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It
+looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on my
+fire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as a
+lily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory
+wood to handle--a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning without
+snapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain,
+hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shade
+tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its
+veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the
+year round."
+
+  CLARA BARRUS
+
+    _The Nest at Riverby_
+  _West Park on the Hudson_
+      _New York_
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. THE FALLING LEAVES                                     1
+
+   II. THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST                         11
+
+  III. THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS                                   32
+
+   IV. BIRD INTIMACIES                                       39
+
+    V. A MIDSUMMER IDYL                                      69
+
+   VI. NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE                               79
+
+  VII. WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT                          101
+
+ VIII. A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY                                  109
+
+   IX. UNDER GENIAL SKIES                                   127
+       I. A Sun-Blessed Land                                127
+      II. Lawn Birds                                        129
+     III. Silken Chambers                                   132
+      IV. The Desert Note                                   143
+       V. Sea-Dogs                                          148
+
+    X. A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES                              152
+       I. Nature's Wireless                                 152
+      II. Maeterlinck on the Bee                            156
+     III. Odd or Even                                       163
+      IV. Why and How                                       165
+       V. An Insoluble Problem                              167
+      VI. A Live World                                      169
+     VII. Darwinism and the War                             172
+    VIII. The Robin                                         175
+      IX. The Weasel                                        177
+       X. Misinterpreting Nature                            179
+      XI. Natural Sculpture                                 181
+
+   XI. RUMINATIONS                                          184
+       I. Man a Part of Nature                              184
+      II. Marcus Aurelius on Death                          185
+     III. The Interpreter of Nature                         186
+      IV. Original Sources                                  190
+       V. The Cosmic Harmony                                191
+      VI. Cosmic Rhythms                                    193
+     VII. The Beginnings of Life                            194
+    VIII. Spendthrift Nature                                195
+
+  XII. NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD                      197
+       I. Sunrise                                           197
+      II. Nature's Methods                                  199
+     III. Heads and Tails                                   205
+      IV. An Unsavory Subject                               206
+       V. Chance in Animal Life                             208
+      VI. Mosquitoes and Fleas                              210
+     VII. The Change of Climate in Southern California      210
+    VIII. All-Seeing Nature                                 212
+
+   INDEX                                                    217
+
+
+
+
+UNDER
+THE MAPLES
+
+I
+
+THE FALLING LEAVES
+
+
+The time of the falling of leaves has come again. Once more in our
+morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and
+bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures
+while we slept.
+
+How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of light and color are
+their last days! There are exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of
+the fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously. They bequeath
+their heritage of color to their fruit. Upon it they lavish the hues
+which other trees lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often an
+exception. I have seen pear orchards in October painting a hillside in
+hues of mingled bronze and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, it
+is so chary of color upon its fruit.
+
+But in October what a feast to the eye our woods and groves present! The
+whole body of the air seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They
+are giving back the light they have been absorbing from the sun all
+summer.
+
+The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so clean and delicate when
+it first covers the paths and the highways that one almost hesitates to
+walk upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw down his cloak for
+Queen Elizabeth to walk upon? See what a robe the maples have thrown
+down for you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to soil it! The
+summer robes of the groves and the forests--more than robes, a vital
+part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have
+captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar
+rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when
+they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark,
+the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When
+the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what
+sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands
+reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a
+union and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the old
+trees suddenly become! what suppleness and grace invest their branches!
+The leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the cambium layer beneath
+the bark is the girdle of perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial
+expression of the same quality. The leaves have their day and die, but
+the last leaf that comes to the branch is as young as the first. The
+leaves and the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go, yet they
+age not; under the magic touch of spring the miracle is repeated over
+and over.
+
+The maples perhaps undergo the most complete transformation of all the
+forest trees. Their leaves fairly become luminous, as if they glowed
+with inward light. In October a maple-tree before your window lights up
+your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days its presence helps to
+dispel the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess in a much less
+degree that quality of luminosity, though certain species of oak at
+times are rich in shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees just
+named for the most part turn brown before they fall. The great leaves of
+the sycamore assume a rich tan-color like fine leather.
+
+The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals with which to capture her
+prey, but the net is not a part of herself as the leaf is a part of the
+tree. The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree never repairs its
+leaves. It may put forth new leaves, but it never essays to patch up the
+old ones. Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves that a few more
+or less or a few torn and bruised ones do not seem to matter. When the
+leaf surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some insect pest,
+or some form of leaf-blight, or by the ravages of a hail-storm, the
+growth of the tree and the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked.
+To denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession usually
+proves fatal. The vitality of the tree declines year by year till death
+ensues.
+
+To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy
+of the mechanism by which it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets
+at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top. The
+rootlets absorb the water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and
+the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree
+were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its
+vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds,
+on the other--earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic
+sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold
+upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they
+are; but all are delicate feeders in their mechanism of absorption from
+the earth and air.
+
+The tree touches the inorganic world at the two finest points of its
+structure--the rootlets and the leaves. These attack the great crude
+world of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only the microscope
+can fully reveal them to us. The animal world seizes its food in masses
+little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable,
+through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its
+nourishment molecule by molecule.
+
+A tree does not live by its big roots--these are mainly for strength
+and to hold it to the ground. How they grip the rocks, fitting
+themselves to them, as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's life
+is in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the roots. Darwin says
+those rootlets behave as if they had minute brains in their extremities.
+They feel their way into the soil; they know the elements the plant
+wants; some select more lime, others more potash, others more magnesia.
+The wheat rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the pea
+rootlets select more lime: the pea does not need the silica. The
+individuality of plants and trees in this respect is most remarkable.
+The cells of each seem to know what particular elements they want from
+the soil, as of course they do.
+
+The vital activity of the tree goes on at three points--in the leaves,
+in the rootlets, and in the cambium layer. The activity of the leaf and
+rootlet furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this generative
+layer--the milky, mucilaginous girdle of matter between the outer bark
+and the wood through which the tree grows and increases in size.
+Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have called
+it the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annually
+renewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeed
+the tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may die
+and fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact that
+its cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, is still
+youthful and doing its work. It is this layer that the yellow-bellied
+woodpecker, known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours, thus
+drawing directly upon the vitality of the tree. But his ravages are
+rarely serious. Only in two instances have I seen dead branches on an
+apple-tree that appeared to be the result of his drilling.
+
+What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no
+vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It
+adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a
+tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged
+in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and
+adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a
+plant or a tree are like the laborers in the field that produce for us
+the raw material of our food, while the leaves are like our many devices
+for rendering it edible and nourishing. The rootlets continue their
+activity in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and thus gorge the
+tree with fluid against the needs of the spring. In the growing tree or
+vine the sap, charged with nourishment, flows down from the top to the
+roots. In the spring it evidently flows upward, seeking the air through
+the leaves. Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always flows
+upward, while the nutritive sap flows downward, thus giving the tree a
+kind of double circulation.
+
+A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful when we have come to a
+knowledge of all its hidden processes, but it certainly is no less so.
+We do not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the bark, nor of
+the roots and rootlets, when we gaze upon a noble oak or an elm; we
+admire it for its form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin to
+ourselves; it is the work of a vast community of cells like those that
+build up our own bodies; it is a fountain of living matter rising up out
+of the earth and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a spray of
+leaves and flowers; and if we could see its hidden processes we should
+realize how truly like a fountain it is. While in full leaf a current of
+water is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward against
+gravity. This stream of water is truly its life current; it enters at
+the rootlets under the ground and escapes at the top through the leaves
+by a process called transpiration. All the mineral salts with which the
+tree builds up its woody tissues,--its osseous system, so to speak,--the
+instruments with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon which it
+obtains from the air, are borne in solution in this stream of water. Its
+function is analogous to that of the rivers which bring the produce and
+other material to the great cities situated upon their banks. A cloud of
+invisible vapor rises from the top of every tree and a thousand
+invisible rills enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The trees
+are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters from the earth to the
+clouds. Our own bodies and the bodies of all living things perform a
+similar function. Life cannot go on without water, but water is not a
+food; it makes the processes of metabolism possible; assimilation and
+elimination go on through its agency. Water and air are the two ties
+between the organic and the inorganic. The function of the one is mainly
+mechanical, that of the other is mainly chemical.
+
+As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows out at the top, to which
+point it rises by capillary attraction and a process called osmosis.
+Neither of them is a strictly vital process, since both are found in the
+inorganic world; but they are in the service of what we call a vital
+principle. Some physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a vital
+principle. Huxley thought we might as well talk about the principle of
+aqueosity in water. We are the victims of words. The sun does not shoot
+out beams or rays, though the eye reports such; but it certainly sends
+forth energy; and it is as certain that there is a new activity in
+matter--some matter--that we call vital.
+
+Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up new compounds and begets
+myriads of new forms not found in the inorganic world, till it finally
+builds up the body and mind of man. Death puts an end to this activity
+alike in man and tree, and a new kind of activity sets in--a
+disorganizing activity, still with the aid of water and air and living
+organisms. It is like the compositor distributing his type after the
+book is printed. The micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but they
+are of a different kind from those which build up the body in the first
+instance. But the living body as a whole, with its complex of
+coördinating organs and functions--what attended to that? The cells
+build the parts, but what builds the whole?
+
+How many things we have in common with the trees! The same mysterious
+gift of life, to begin with; the same primary elements--carbon,
+nitrogen, oxygen, and so on--in our bodies; and many of the same vital
+functions--respiration, circulation, absorption, assimilation,
+reproduction. Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell is
+the architect that builds up the bodies of both. Trees are rooted men
+and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through
+the minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillæ, and the animal body
+absorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, called
+lacteals.
+
+Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my
+mind. They are the words of a poet who sees hidden relations and
+meanings everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all animate nature
+is. The trees are wrapped in a kind of slumber in winter, and they are
+reservoirs of living currents in summer. If all living bodies came
+originally out of the sea, they brought a big dower of the sea with
+them. The human body is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held in
+solution by several gallons of water. The ashes of the living tree bulk
+small in comparison with the amount of water it holds. Yes, "the
+slumbering and liquid trees." They awaken from their slumber in the
+spring, the scales fall from their buds, the fountains within them are
+unsealed, and they again become streams of living energy, breaking into
+leaf and bloom and fruit under the magic of the sun's rays.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST
+
+
+I
+
+How closely every crack and corner of nature is packed with life,
+especially in our northern temperate zone! I was impressed with this
+fact when during several June days I was occupied with road-mending on
+the farm where I was born. To open up the loosely piled and decaying
+laminated rocks was to open up a little biological and zoölogical
+museum, so many of our smaller forms of life harbored there. From
+chipmunks to ants and spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the
+chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more beneath the loosely
+piled rocks. There were two of them in a soft, warm nest of dry,
+shredded maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned out of doors, but
+when they heard the racket overhead bolted precipitately. Two living
+together surprised me, as heretofore I had never known but one in a den.
+Near them a milk snake had stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the
+little earthquake which we set up got badly crushed. Two little
+red-bellied snakes about one foot long had also found harbor there.
+
+The ants rushed about in great consternation when their eggs were
+suddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under every
+stone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which they
+picked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-building
+spiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball of
+eggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body.
+This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about held
+between her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand,
+sheltered the chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was attached
+to it at its tail. It was surprising to see this enshrouded creature,
+blind and deaf, wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with its
+wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would about as soon expect to see
+an egg protest.
+
+Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to
+him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to
+eye or ear.
+
+The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or
+summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his
+pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open
+before him and he has only to turn the leaves.
+
+A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory rocking-chair the other day
+was annoyed by one of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want to
+occupy the chair. It held a small worm in its legs. She would "shoo" it
+away, only to see it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it did
+not want to sting her, but that its nest was somewhere in the chair.
+And, sure enough, as soon as she quieted down, it entered a small
+opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and deposited its worm, and
+presently was back with another, and then a third and a fourth; and
+before the day was done it came with little pellets of mud and sealed up
+the opening.
+
+
+II
+
+My morning walk up to the beech wood often brings me new knowledge and
+new glimpses of nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird taking its bath
+in the big dewdrops on a small ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe
+in the dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not before know that
+the hummer bathed at all.
+
+I also discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when
+saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning,
+exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute
+spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow.
+In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a
+pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I
+could not see the completed bow in so small an area. These fragments are
+as unapproachable as the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a
+suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays rainbow tints, you can
+see only one at a time--to the right or left of you. It also is a
+fragment of a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a great
+display of prismatic effects in the foliage of trees, or in the grass
+after a shower, are not to be credited. You may see the drops glistening
+in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit prismatic tints.
+In only one at a time will you see rainbow tints. Change your position,
+and you may see another, but never a great display of prismatic tints at
+one time.
+
+In my walk the other morning I turned over a stone, looking for spiders
+and ants. These I found, and in addition there were two cells of one of
+our solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called "sweat bees," because
+they came around us and would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if
+in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about the size of a honey
+bee, of lighter color, and its abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It
+carries its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs. These cells
+were of a greenish-brown color; each of them was like a miniature barrel
+in which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egg
+hatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment.
+These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits of
+leaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon the
+other. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings from
+leaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, a
+dozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the most
+workmanlike manner.
+
+In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out her
+nesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she had
+cut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and,
+holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen her
+carry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About the
+period of hatching, I do not know.
+
+
+III
+
+Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their game
+up as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which they
+drive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings ago
+the air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the
+size of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happened
+to be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep
+past. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a very
+conspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How
+many hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day!
+Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and other
+insect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!
+
+
+IV
+
+We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. We
+see little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures are
+cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookout
+for them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which,
+except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the night
+prowlers--skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls--yes, and mice.
+
+The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know is
+active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called
+the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to
+suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later it
+was literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.
+
+Turn over a stone in the fields and behold the consternation among the
+small folk beneath it,--ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders,--all
+objecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil,
+but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As I
+write these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the
+roadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants which
+grew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment and
+rot, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep,
+and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of the
+nuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesser
+rodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts.
+
+
+V
+
+In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature,
+Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:
+
+  Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+  inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean
+  ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains--warm mineral
+  springs--the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the
+  upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of
+  perpetual snow--all support organic beings.
+
+Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In the
+earth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the
+mud--he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was never
+scanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardships
+to add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the
+comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys of
+hundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions to
+glean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany or
+zoölogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a great
+altitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which they
+called "puna," and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with a
+twinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossil
+shells."
+
+His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge.
+Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biological
+facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere his
+insatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a different
+purpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read him
+for that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils,
+in reptiles, in volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with each of
+these subjects in mind. I recently had in mind the problem of the
+soaring condor, and I re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had
+studied and mastered that subject, too. If you are interested in seeing
+how the biological characteristics of the two continents, North and
+South America, agree or contrast with each other, you will find what
+you wish to know. You will learn that in South America the
+lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North
+America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps
+itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that
+the obscene fungus, or _Phallus_, taints the tropical forests, as a
+similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and
+that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders
+for their young, just as in North America. Of course there are new
+species of animal and plant life, but not many. The influence of
+environment in modifying species is constantly in his mind.
+
+
+VI
+
+The naturalist can content himself with a day of little things. If he
+can read only a word of one syllable in the book of nature, he will make
+the most of that. I read such a word the other morning when I perceived,
+when watching a young but fully fledged junco, or snowbird, that its
+markings Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young of birds
+always for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parent
+stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have
+speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco
+shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral
+white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper
+sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the
+white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of its
+forbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields,
+but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in the
+woods, and constructs a very artistic nest of dry grass and hair which
+is so well hidden that the passer-by seldom detects it.
+
+Another small word I read about certain of the rocks in my native
+Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray sandstone, that when you have split
+them open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown them up with
+dynamite, instead of the gray fresh surface of the rock greeting you, it
+is often a surface of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled or
+electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from the first muddy day of
+creation. I have such a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It is
+amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of doorstones fall upon it
+with soap and hot water, and utterly fail to make any impression upon
+it. Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with primal mud. The
+fresh-water origin of the Catskill rocks no doubt in some way accounts
+for it.
+
+
+VII
+
+We are all interested students of the weather, but the naturalist
+studies it for some insight into the laws which govern it. One season I
+made my reputation as a weather prophet by predicting on the first day
+of December a very severe winter. It was an easy guess. I saw in Detroit
+a bird from the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the Bohemian
+waxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above the Arctic Circle and is common
+to both hemispheres. I said, When the Arctic birds come down, be sure
+there is a cold wave behind them. And so it proved.
+
+When the birds fail to give one a hint of the probable character of the
+coming winter, what reliable signs remain? These remain: When December
+is marked by sudden and violent extremes of heat and cold, the winter
+will be broken; the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that the
+hum of the bee in December is the requiem of winter. But when the season
+is very evenly spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing through
+November and December, no hurry, no violence, then be prepared for a
+snug winter.
+
+As to wet and dry summers, one can always be guided by the rainfall on
+the Pacific coast; a shortage on the western coast means an excess on
+the eastern. For four or five years past California has been short of
+its rainfall; so much so that quite general alarm is felt over the
+gradual shrinkage of their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs;
+and during the summer seasons the parts of New England and New York with
+which I am acquainted have had very wet seasons--floods in midsummer,
+and full springs and wells at all times. The droughts have been
+temporary and local.
+
+We say, "As fickle as the weather," but the meteorological laws are
+pretty well defined. All signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail in
+a wet season. At one time the south wind brings no rain, at another time
+the north and northwest winds do bring rain. The complex of conditions
+over a continental area of rivers and lakes and mountain-chains is too
+vast for us to decipher; it inheres in the nature of things. It is one
+of the potencies and possibilities which matter possesses. We can take
+no step beyond that.
+
+
+VIII
+
+There seems to me to be false reasoning in the argument from analogy
+which William James uses in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The
+brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but may only sustain the
+relation to it, he says, which the wire sustains to the electric current
+which it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water which it
+conveys.
+
+Now the source and origin of the electric current is outside the wire
+that transmits it, and it could sustain no other than a transient
+relation to any outside material through which it passed. But if we
+know anything, we know that the human mind or spirit is a vital part of
+the human body; its source is in the brain and nervous system; hence, it
+and the organ through which it is manifested are essentially one.
+
+The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo in which the current
+originates is the only logical or permissible one.
+
+
+IX
+
+Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life,
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
+  earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something, on
+  the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to
+  the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One
+  would be inclined to say that the insect comes from
+  another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more
+  insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+
+Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, for
+instance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. The
+scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our land
+animals outside the insect world.
+
+The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have little
+conception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these little
+people. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecular
+constitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by our
+coarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarse
+and fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If they
+exceed three thousand a second, they become too shrill for our ears. It
+is thought that the world of sound with the insects begins where ours
+leaves off. The drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute. What
+would to us be a continuous sound is to them a series of separate blows.
+We begin to hear blows as continuous sounds when they amount to about
+thirty a second. The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; the
+cabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; and
+some species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin to
+think in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and
+vibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed the
+same microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed! We
+might see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies, or hear
+the hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so
+much that disturbs us must escape the insects, because their senses are
+too fine to take it in. Doubtless they do not hear the thunder or feel
+the earthquake.
+
+The insects are much more sensitive to heat and cold than we are, and
+for reasons. The number of waves in the ether that gives us the
+sensation of heat is three or four million millions a second. The number
+of tremors required to produce red light is estimated at four hundred
+and seventy-four million millions a second, and for the production of
+violet light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions a second. No
+doubt the insects react to all these different degrees of vibration.
+Those marvelous instruments called antennæ seem to put them in touch
+with a world of which we are quite oblivious.
+
+
+X
+
+To how many things our lives have been compared!--to a voyage, with its
+storms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with its
+morning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer,
+autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle.
+
+In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of
+chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each
+piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully.
+The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
+universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.
+But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a
+game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over
+an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess
+will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle
+where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more
+vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life
+is coöperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I
+suppose business is more often like a game than is life--your gain is
+often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
+rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that
+suggests a game of any kind.
+
+We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three
+things--money, goods, labor--and the greatest of these is labor. Labor
+is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires
+to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, the
+latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe and
+in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from nature
+what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands or
+under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us from
+obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us.
+
+The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen to
+whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their
+problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful
+suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen,
+artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through
+experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many persons
+who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces and
+conditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have of
+the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?
+
+Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastly
+more logical force in his figures than in those of most writers.
+
+Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a
+mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and
+noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then
+its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life
+that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to
+many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructive
+force.
+
+
+XI
+
+I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted to know why the
+meadow, or field, mice gnawed or barked the apple-trees when there was a
+deep coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because they found it
+difficult to get up through the deep, frozen snow to the surface to get
+seeds to eat? He did not seem to know that meadow mice are not
+seed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots and keep well hidden
+beneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snow
+coming up out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday life
+beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls, and hawks.
+Life then becomes a sort of picnic. They build new nests on the surface
+of the ground and form new runways, and disport themselves apparently in
+a festive mood. The snow is their protection. They bark the trees and
+take their time. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at an
+end, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flat
+stones, and lead once more the life of fear.
+
+
+XII
+
+Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my blanket, recovering from a
+slight indisposition, I was in a mood to be interested in the everyday
+aspects of nature before me--in the white and purple lilacs, in the
+maple-leaves nearly full grown, in the pendent fringe of the
+yellowish-white bloom of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of the
+grapevines, and so forth. All these things formed only a setting or
+background for the wild life near by.
+
+The birds are the little people that peep out at me, or pause and regard
+me curiously in this great temple of trees,--wrens, chippies, robins,
+bluebirds, catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants. A few
+days earlier, for a moment, a mourning ground warbler suddenly appeared
+around the corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and glanced
+hastily up at me. When I arose and looked over the railing, it had gone.
+Then the speckled Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringa
+branches and gave me several good views. The bay-breasted warbler was
+reported in the evergreens up by the stone house, but he failed to
+report to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart, however, came
+several times to the gravel walk below me, evidently looking for
+material to begin her nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren,
+was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying nesting-material
+into the box on the corner of the veranda. How intense and emphatic she
+is! And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with song! Yesterday an
+interloper appeared. He or she climbed the post by the back way, as it
+were, and hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as if to see
+that the coast was clear. He acted as if he felt himself an intruder.
+Quick as a flash there was a brown streak from the branch of a maple
+thirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after him. The culprit
+did not stop to argue the case, but was off, hotly pursued. I must not
+forget the pair of wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maple
+fifty or more feet away. How I love to see them on the ground at my
+feet, every motion and gesture like music to the eye! The head and neck
+of the male fairly glows, and there is something fine and manly about
+his speckled breast.
+
+A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry bushes at the south end
+of the house, and are in evidence at all hours. But when the nest is
+completed, and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out of the public
+eye as much as possible. From the front of the stage they retreat behind
+the curtain.
+
+One day as I sat here I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush down
+in the currant-bushes below me. Instantly I was transported to the deep
+woods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills. I heard the murmuring
+water and felt the woodsy coolness of those retreats--such magic hath
+associative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated vireo sang
+briefly in the maple, a harsh note; and the oriole with its insistent
+call added to the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the oriole. He
+has not one musical note, and in grape time his bill is red, or purple,
+with the blood of our grapes.
+
+But the most of these little people are my benefactors, and add another
+ray of sunshine to the May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacle
+of that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of the porch,
+like a little fairy, and then vanishing.
+
+The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere knowledge of them, is not
+enough. You must live with the birds, so to speak; have daily and
+seasonal associations with them before they come to mean much to you.
+Then, as they linger about your house or your camp, or as you see them
+in your walks, they are a part of your life, and help give tone and
+color to your day.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS
+
+
+To what widely different use birds put their power of flight! To the
+great mass of them it is simply a means of locomotion, of getting from
+one point to another. A small minority put their wing-power to more
+ideal uses, as the lark when he claps his wings at heaven's gate, and
+the ruffed grouse when he drums; even the woodcock has some other use
+for his wings than to get from one point to another. Listen to his
+flight song in the April twilight up against the sky.
+
+Our small hawks use their power of flight mainly to catch their prey, as
+does the swallow skimming the air all day on tireless wing, but some of
+the other hawks, such as our red-tailed hawk, climb their great spirals
+apparently with other motives than those which relate to their daily
+fare. The crow has little other use for his wings than to gad about like
+a busy politician from one neighborhood to another. In Florida I have
+seen large flocks of the white ibis performing striking evolutions high
+up against the sky, evidently expressive of the gay and festive feeling
+begotten by the mating instinct.
+
+The most beautiful flyer we ever see against our skies is the unsavory
+buzzard. He is the winged embodiment of grace, ease, and leisure.
+Judging from appearances alone, he is the most disinterested of all the
+winged creatures we see. He rides the airy billows as if only to enjoy
+his mastery over them. He is as calm and unhurried as the orbs in their
+courses. His great circles and spirals have a kind of astronomic
+completeness. That all this power of wing and grace of motion should be
+given to an unclean bird, to a repulsive scavenger, is one of the
+anomalies of nature. He does not need to hurry or conceal his approach;
+what he is after cannot flee or hide; he has no enemies; nothing wants
+him; and he is at peace with all the world.
+
+The great condor of South America, in rising from the ground, always
+faces the wind. It is often captured by tempting it to gorge itself in a
+comparatively narrow space. But if a strong enough wind were blowing at
+such times, it could quickly rise over the barrier. Darwin says he
+watched a condor high in the air describing its huge circles for six
+hours without once flapping its wings. He says that, if the bird wished
+to descend, the wings were for a moment collapsed; and when again
+expanded, with an altered inclination, the momentum gained by the rapid
+descent seemed to urge the bird upwards with the even and steady
+movement of a paper kite. In the case of any bird _soaring_, its motion
+must be sufficiently rapid for the action of the inclined surface of
+its body on the atmosphere to counterbalance its gravity. The force to
+keep up the momentum of a body moving in a horizontal plane in the air
+(in which there is so little friction) cannot be great, and this force
+is all that is wanted. The movement of the neck and body of the condor,
+we must suppose, is sufficient for this. However this may be, it is
+truly wonderful and beautiful to see so great a bird, hour after hour,
+without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain and
+river.
+
+The airplane has a propelling power in its motor, and it shifts its
+wings to take advantage of the currents. The buzzard and condor do the
+same thing. They are living airplanes, and their power is so evenly and
+subtly distributed and applied, that the trick of it escapes the eye.
+But of course they avail themselves of the lifting power of the
+air-currents.
+
+All birds know how to use their wings to propel themselves through the
+air, but the mechanism of the act we may not be able to analyze. I do
+not know how a butterfly propels itself against a breeze with its
+quill-less wings, but we know that it does do it. As its wings are
+neither convex nor concave, like a bird's, one would think that the
+upward and downward strokes would neutralize each other; but they do
+not. Strong winds often carry them out over large bodies of water; but
+such a master flyer as the monarch beats its way back to shore, and,
+indeed, the monarch habitually flies long distances over salt water when
+migrating along our seacoast in spring and fall.
+
+At the moment of writing these paragraphs, I saw a hen-hawk flap heavily
+by, pursued by a kingbird. The air was phenomenally still, not a leaf
+stirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat his wings vigorously. No
+soaring now, no mounting heavenward, as I have seen him mount till his
+petty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and returned to earth. But
+the next day, with a fairly good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks for
+many minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the skies, till they
+became very small objects against the clouds, and not once did they flap
+their wings! Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top and sailed
+straight into the face of the wind, till he was probably over his mate
+or young, when, with half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-tops
+like an arrow.
+
+In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the air may be divided into
+three grand classes: those which use their wings simply to transport
+themselves from one place to another,--the same use we put our legs
+to,--those which climb the heavens to attain a wide lookout, either for
+the pleasure of soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to scan a
+wide territory in search of food or prey, and those which feed as they
+fly. Most of our common birds are examples of the first class. Our hawks
+and buzzards are examples of the second class. Swallows, nighthawks, and
+some sea-birds are examples of the third class. A few of our birds use
+their wings to gain an elevation from which to deliver their songs--as
+the larks, and some of the finches; but the robins and the sparrows and
+the warblers and the woodpeckers are always going somewhere. The hawks
+and the buzzards are, comparatively speaking, birds of leisure.
+
+Every bird and beast is a master in the use of its own tools and
+weapons. We who look on from the outside marvel at their skill. Here is
+the carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about the verge-board of
+my porch-roof as I write this. It darts swiftly this way and that, and
+now and then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of whirring wings,
+as often does the hummingbird. How it does it, I do not know. I cannot
+count or distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At the same time,
+the chimney swifts sweep by me like black arrows, on wings apparently as
+stiff as if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air, now sailing.
+In some way they suggest winged gimlets. How thin and scimitar-like
+their wings are! They are certainly masters of their own craft.
+
+In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far below the body as
+they do above it. Note the crow flapping his way through the air. He is
+a heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His wings probably
+move through an arc of about ninety degrees. The phœbe flies with a
+peculiar snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird, with a mincing
+and hovering flight; it tiptoes through the air. The woodpeckers gallop,
+alternately closing and spreading their wings. The ordinary flight of
+the goldfinch is a very marked undulatory flight; a section of it, the
+rise and the fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The bird goes half
+that distance or more with wings closed. This is the flight the male
+indulges in within hearing distance of his brooding mate. During the
+love season he occasionally gives way to an ecstatic flight. This is a
+level flight, performed on round, open wings, which beat the air
+vertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song season is common to
+many of our birds. I have seen even the song sparrow indulge in it,
+rising fifty feet or more and delivering its simple song with obvious
+excitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock, inspired by the grand passion,
+rises upon whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and floats and
+circles at an altitude of a hundred feet or more, and in rapid
+smackering and chippering notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasy
+with our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight and is sharp and
+hurried, both flight and song differing radically from its everyday
+performance. One thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually on
+the wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk of all our singing
+birds. His season is brief but hilarious. In his level flight he seems
+to use only the tips of his wings, and we see them always below the
+level of his back. Our common birds that have no flight-song, so far as
+I have observed, are the bluebird, the robin, the phœbe, the social
+sparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the wood warblers, and
+most of the ground warblers.
+
+Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines had this to say about
+the flight of sea-gulls: "Sweeping around in circles, occasionally
+elevating themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide down and up
+the aerial inclines without apparently any effort whatever. But a close
+observation will show that at every turn the angle of inclination of the
+wings is changed to meet the new conditions. There is continual movement
+with power--by the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine only
+through mechanism obeying a mind not nearly so well instructed."
+
+The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing round and round, in a
+brisk breeze, on unbending wing, only now and then righting itself with
+a single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides upon the storm.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+BIRD INTIMACIES
+
+
+When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination to seek out new lands
+in my own country, or in other countries, to see what Nature is doing
+there, and what guise she wears, something prompts me to pause, and
+after a while to say to myself: "Look a little closer into the nature
+right at your own door; do a little intensive observation at home, and
+see what that yields you. The enticement of the far-away is mostly in
+your imagination; let your eyes and your imagination play once more on
+the old familiar birds and objects."
+
+One season in my walks to the woods I was on the lookout for a natural
+bracket among the tree-branches, to be used in supporting a book-shelf.
+I did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree, within a few feet
+from the corner of my own house, I found what I was searching for,
+perfect in every particular--the right angle and the supporting brace,
+or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have not forgotten.
+
+I find that one has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness and
+indifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild life
+about him to realize how much interesting natural history is being
+enacted every day before his very eyes--in his own garden and dooryard
+and apple-orchard and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and
+sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one rides or walks or sits
+under the trees, or loiters about the fields or woods, the play of wild
+life is going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed with the
+seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available for his instruction and
+entertainment. On every farm in the land a volume of live natural
+history goes to waste every year because there is no historian to note
+the happenings.
+
+The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens--a screen of
+leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert
+and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere
+fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that
+take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course
+of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have!
+The drama of wild life is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the
+stage before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other stages.
+
+I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing along the road
+between my place and the railway station one early May day became aware
+that a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees over their
+heads. It was the annual _sängerfest_ of the goldfinches--one of the
+prettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musical
+reunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, many
+hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and in
+the groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to
+the surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to account
+for. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birds
+sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it is difficult to
+identify the singers. It is a minor strain, but multitudinous, and fills
+all the air. The males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if to
+celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which, with the elm-trees,
+afford them their earliest food-supply. While they are singing they are
+busy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down to
+the ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut up
+to ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal flowering
+when they become spheres of fragile silver down.
+
+Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called a
+dandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bring
+the sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss to
+decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days as
+well as on fair. It all has a decidedly festive air, like the fête-days
+of humans. I know of nothing like it among other birds. It is the
+manifestation of something different from the flocking instinct; it is
+the social and holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a brief
+season, as if in celebration of some special event or purpose. I have
+observed it in my vicinity every spring for many years, usually in April
+or early May, and it is the prettiest and most significant bird episode,
+involving a whole species, known to me.
+
+The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one of our most amiable birds.
+So far as my knowledge goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. His
+tones are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring reunions they
+are joyous. In the peculiar flight-song in which he indulges in the
+mating season, beating the air vertically with his round, open wings,
+his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to his mate when she is
+brooding, and when he circles about her in that long, billowy flight,
+the crests of his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling,
+"Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee," as if he were saying, "For love of thee,
+for love of thee," and she calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"--his
+tones at such times express contentment and reassurance.
+
+When any of his natural enemies appear--a hawk, a cat, a jay--his tones
+are plaintive and appealing. "Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and not
+in anger.
+
+When with his mate he leads their brood about the August thistles, the
+young call in a similar tone. When in July the nesting has begun, the
+female talks the prettiest "baby talk" to her mate as he feeds her. The
+nest-building rarely begins till thistledown can be had--so literally
+are all the ways of this darling bird ways of softness and gentleness.
+The nest is a thick, soft, warm structure, securely fastened in the fork
+of a maple or an apple-tree.
+
+None of our familiar birds endear themselves to us more than does the
+bluebird. The first bluebird in the spring is as welcome as the blue sky
+itself. The season seems softened and tempered as soon as we hear his
+note and see his warm breast and azure wing. His gentle manners, his
+soft, appealing voice, not less than his pleasing hues, seem born of the
+bright and genial skies. He is the spirit of the April days incarnated
+in a bird. He has the quality of winsomeness, like the violet and the
+speedwell among the flowers. Not strictly a songster, yet his every note
+and call is from out the soul of harmony. The bluebird is evidently an
+offshoot from the thrush family, and without the thrush's gift of song;
+still his voice affords us much of the same pleasure.
+
+How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer
+them suitable nesting-retreats! Bring them something from nature,
+something with the bark on--a section of a dry beech or maple limb in
+which the downy woodpecker has excavated his chamber and passed the
+winter or reared his brood; fasten it in early spring upon the corner of
+your porch, or on the trunk of a near-by tree, and see what interesting
+neighbors you will soon have. One summer I brought home from one of my
+walks to the woods a section, two or three feet long, of a large yellow
+birch limb which contained such a cavity as I speak of, and I wired it
+to one of the posts of the rustic porch at Woodchuck Lodge. The next
+season a pair of bluebirds reared two broods in it. The incubation of
+the eggs for the second brood was well under way when I appeared upon
+the scene in early July. My sudden presence so near their treasures, and
+my lingering there with books and newspapers, disturbed the birds a good
+deal. The first afternoon the mother bird did not enter the cavity for
+hours. I shall always remember the pretty and earnest manner in which
+the male tried to reassure her and persuade her that the danger was not
+so imminent as it appeared to be, probably encouraging a confidence in
+his mate which he did not himself share. The mother bird would alight at
+the entrance to the chamber, but, with her eye fixed upon the man with
+the newspaper, feared to enter. The male, perched upon the telegraph
+wire fifty feet away, would raise his wings and put all the love and
+assurance in his voice he was capable of, apparently trying to dispel
+her fears. He would warble and warble, and make those pretty wing
+gestures over and over, saying so plainly: "It is all right, my dear,
+the man is harmless--absorbed there in his newspaper. Go in, go in, and
+keep warm our precious eggs!" How long she hesitated! But as night grew
+near she grew more and more anxious, and he more and more eloquent.
+Finally she alighted upon the edge of the overhanging roof and peered
+down hesitatingly. Her mate applauded and encouraged till finally she
+made the plunge and entered the hole, but instantly came out again; her
+heart failed her for a moment; but she soon returned and remained
+inside. Then her mate flew away toward the orchard, uttering a cheery
+note which doubtless she understood.
+
+The birds soon became used to my presence and their household matters
+progressed satisfactorily. Both birds took a hand in feeding the young,
+which grew rapidly. When they were nearly ready to leave the nest, a
+cruel fate befell them: I slept upon the porch, and one night I was
+awakened by the cry of young bluebirds, and the sound of feet like those
+of a squirrel on the roof over me. Then I heard the cry of a young bird
+proceed from the butternut-tree across the road opposite the house. I
+said to myself, "A squirrel or an owl is after my birds." The cry coming
+so quickly from the butternut-tree made me suspect an owl, and that the
+bird whose cry I heard was in his talons. I was out of my cot and up to
+the nest in a moment, but the tragedy was over; the birds were all gone,
+and the night was silent. In the morning I found that a piece of the
+brittle birch limb had been torn away, enlarging the entrance to the
+cavity so that the murderous talons of the owl could reach in and seize
+the young birds. I had been aroused in time to hear the marauder on the
+roof with one, and then hear its cry as he carried it to the tree. In
+the grass in front I found one of the young, unable to fly, but
+apparently unhurt. I put it back in the nest, but it would not stay. The
+spell of the nest was broken, and the young bird took to the grass
+again. The parent birds were on hand, much excited, and, when I tried to
+return the surviving bird to the nest, the male came at me fiercely,
+apparently charging the whole catastrophe to me.
+
+We had strong proof the previous season that an owl, probably the
+screech owl, prowled about the house at night. A statuette of myself in
+clay which a sculptor was modeling was left out one night on the porch,
+and in the morning its head was unusually bowed. The prints of a bird's
+talons upon the top told what had happened. In the bronze reproduction
+of that statuette the head has more of a droop than the artist at first
+planned to give it.
+
+The next season the bluebirds occupied the cavity in the birch limb
+again, but before my arrival in July the owls had again cleaned them
+out. In so doing they had ripped the cavity open nearly to the bottom.
+For all that, early the following May bluebirds were occupying the
+cavity again. It held three eggs when I arrived. I looked over the
+situation and resolved to try to head off the owl this time, even at the
+risk of driving the bluebirds away. I took a strip of tin several inches
+wide and covered the slit with it and wired it fast. Then I obtained a
+broad strip of dry birch-bark, wrapped it about the limb over the tin,
+and wired it fast, leaving the entrance to the nest in its original
+form. I knew the owl could not slit the tin; the birch-bark would hide
+it and preserve in a measure the natural appearance of the branch. When
+the bluebirds saw what had happened to their abode, they were a good
+deal distressed; they could no longer see their eggs through the slit
+which the owl had made, and they refused to enter the cavity. They hung
+about all day, uttering despondent notes, approaching the nest at times,
+but hesitating even to alight upon the roof above it. Occasionally the
+female would fly away toward the distant woods or hills uttering that
+plaintive, homesick note which seemed to mean farewell. The male would
+follow her, calling in a more cheery and encouraging tone. Once the
+couple were gone three or four hours, and I concluded they had really
+deserted the place. But just before sundown they were back again, and
+the female alighted at the entrance to the nest and looked in. The male
+called to her cheerily; still she would not enter, but joined him on the
+telephone wire, where the two seemed to hold a little discussion.
+Presently the mother bird flew to the nest again, then to the roof above
+it, then back to the nest, and entered it till only her tail showed,
+then flew back to the wire beside her mate. She was evidently making up
+her mind that the case was not hopeless. After a little more
+maneuvering, and amid the happy, reassuring calls of her mate, she
+entered the nest cavity and remained, and I was as well pleased as was
+her mate.
+
+No owls disturbed them this time, and the brood of young birds was
+brought off in due season. In July a second brood of four was
+successfully reared and sent forth on their career.
+
+The oriole nests in many kinds of trees--oaks, maples, apple-trees,
+elms--but her favorite is the elm. She chooses the end of one of the
+long drooping branches where a group of small swaying twigs affords her
+suitable support. It is the most unlikely place imaginable for any but a
+pendent nest, woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical twigs,
+and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests are so secure, so hidden, and
+so completely sheltered from the rains by the drooping leaves above and
+around it. It is rarely discoverable except from directly beneath it. I
+think a well-built oriole's nest would sustain a weight of eight or ten
+pounds before it would be torn from its moorings. They are also very
+partial to the ends of branches that swing low over the highway. One May
+I saw two female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five feet
+above our State Road, where automobiles and other vehicles passed nearly
+every minute all the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far from
+highways and dwellings is a rare occurrence.
+
+Birds of different species differ as widely in skill in nest-building as
+they do in song. From the rude platform of dry twigs and other coarse
+material of the cuckoo, to the pendent, closely woven pouch of the
+oriole, the difference in the degree of skill displayed is analogous to
+the difference between the simple lisp of the cedar-bird, or the little
+tin whistle of the "chippie," and the golden notes of the wood thrush,
+or the hilarious song of the bobolink.
+
+Real castles in the air are the nests of the orioles; no other nests are
+better hidden or apparently more safe from the depredations of crows and
+squirrels. To start the oriole's nest successfully is quite an
+engineering feat. The birds inspect the branches many times before they
+make a decision. When they have decided on the site, the mother bird
+brings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches it to a twig by
+winding it around and around many times, leaving one or both ends
+hanging free. I have nests where these foundation strings are wound
+around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings and tuckings and
+loopings the bird occasionally ties a substantial knot, but it is never
+the result of a deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but purely
+a matter of chance. When she uses only wild vegetable fibers, she
+fastens it to the twig by a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about the
+craziest kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastened
+many lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds to
+span the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her claws
+clasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping up
+and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest
+looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she
+did it, but all I could see was the bird standing astride the chasm she
+was trying to bridge, and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze
+of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom of the nest thickens,
+till some morning you see the movement of the bird inside it; her beak
+comes through the sides from within, like a needle or an awl, seizes a
+loose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightens
+it. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of any
+particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it were
+the work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no conscious
+method of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is not
+something builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethought
+enter; it is the result of the blind groping of instinct which rarely
+errs, but which does not see the end from the beginning, as reason does.
+The oriole sometimes overhands the rim of her nest with strings and
+fibers to make it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perch
+upon, but it is like the pathetic work which an untaught blind child
+might do under similar conditions. The birds use fine, strong strings in
+their nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results from it. I
+have an oriole's nest sent me from Michigan on the outside of which is a
+bird's dried foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it. It would
+be difficult to tie so complicated a knot. The tragedy is easy to read.
+Another nest sent me from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of
+fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them. But there is no sign
+that the bird came to grief using this dangerous material. Where the
+lives of the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always a
+danger-line to them. They are partakers of our bounty in many ways, but
+they pay a tax to fate in others.
+
+The orioles in my part of the country always use the same material in
+the body of their nests--a kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which they
+apparently get from some species of everlasting flower. Woven together
+and quilted through with strings and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm,
+feltlike walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the walls are made of
+something that suggests brown human hair, except that it is too hard and
+brittle for hair.
+
+Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest, but not so deep and
+pocketlike as that of the Baltimore oriole, and showing no such
+elaborate use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of some sort of
+dried grass, very elaborately woven together.
+
+Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely of the long,
+strong threads which it draws out of the palm-leaves. The only one I
+have seen was suspended from the under side of one of those leaves.
+
+I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except the nest of the
+hummingbird, is that of the wood pewee. It is as smooth and compact and
+symmetrical as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike
+substance. Of course, the phœbe's artistic masonry under the shelving
+rocks, covered with moss and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry
+grass and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and beyond the reach
+of four-footed prowlers, is almost ideal. It certainly is a happy
+thought.
+
+The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, the
+indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders, each with a style of its own.
+
+About the most insecure nest in our trees is that of the little social
+sparrow, or "chippie." When the sudden summer storms come, making the
+tree-tops writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest amid the
+tossing branches. Pass through the grove or orchard after the tempest is
+over, and you are pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon the
+ground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of nest-building in trees.
+She is a poor architect. She should have kept to the ground or to the
+low bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their nests fast to the
+branches, but "Chippie" does not; she simply arranges her material
+loosely between them, where the nest is supported, but not secured. She
+seems pathetically ignorant of the fact that there are such things as
+wind and storm. Hence her frail structure is more frequently dislodged
+from the trees than that of any other bird.
+
+Recently, after a day of violent northwest wind, I found a wrecked
+robin's nest and eggs upon the lawn under a maple--not a frequent
+spectacle. The robin's firm masonry is usually proof against wind and
+rain, but in this case the nest was composed almost entirely of dry
+grass; there was hardly a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible and
+yielding, and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently the second
+nest of the pair this season, and the second nest in summer of any
+species of bird is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first nest
+in spring. Comparatively few of our birds attempt to bring off a second
+brood unless the first attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sure
+to bring off two, and may bring off three. But the robin is a hustler,
+probably the most enterprising of all our birds. I recall a mother robin
+that, in late June, repaired a nest in a climbing rosebush which her
+first brood had vacated only a week before. A brood of wood thrushes
+which left their nest about the same time was still being fed by their
+parents about the place.
+
+The song sparrow, the social sparrow, the phœbe, the bluebird, all
+build a second nest. The first brood of the bluebird will be looked
+after by the father in some near-by grove or orchard, while the mother
+starts a new family in the old nest. If all goes well with them, those
+two bluebird families will unite and keep together in a loose flock till
+they migrate in the fall.
+
+So many of our birds nest about our houses and lawns and gardens and
+along our highways, that at first sight it seems as if they must be
+drawn there by a sense of greater security for their eggs and young. The
+robin has become almost a domestic institution. It is rarely that one
+finds a robin's nest very far from a human habitation. One spring there
+were four robins' nests on my house and outbuildings--in the vines, on
+window-sills, or other coigns of vantage. There were at the same time at
+least fifteen robins' nests on my lot of sixteen acres, and I am quite
+certain that I have not seen all there were. They were in sheds and
+apple-trees and spruces and cedars, in the ends of piles of grape-posts,
+in rosebushes, in the summer-house, and on the porch. We did not expect
+to get one of the early cherries, and might count ourselves lucky if we
+got any of the later ones.
+
+A robin has built her nest in my summer-house. She abuses me so when I
+try to tarry there, after incubation has begun, that I take no comfort
+and presently withdraw. Until her brood has flown, I am practically a
+stranger in my open-air rest-house and study.
+
+When the fish crows come egging in the spruces and maples about the
+house, and I hear the screaming of the robins, I seize my gun and rush
+out to protect them, but am not always successful, as the mischief is
+often done before I get within reach; I am not sure but that the robins
+think--if they think at all--that I am in league with the crows to
+despoil them. I was not in time to save the eggs of the wood thrush the
+other morning, when I heard the alarm calls of the birds, but I had the
+satisfaction of seeing the black marauder go limping over the hill,
+dropping quills from his wings at nearly every stroke. I am sure he will
+not come back. The fish crow is one of the most active enemies of our
+small birds. Of course, he only obeys his instincts in hunting out and
+devouring their eggs and young, but I fancy I obey something higher than
+instinct when I protest with powder and shot.
+
+The birds do not mind the approach of the domestic animals, such as the
+cow, the horse, the sheep, the pig, and they are only a little
+suspicious of the dog, but the appearance of the cat fills them with
+sudden alarm. I think that birds that have never before seen a cat join
+in the hue and cry. What alarms one alarms all within hearing. The
+orioles are probably the most immune from the depredations of crows and
+jays and owls of all our birds, and yet they will join in the cry of
+"Thief, thief!" when a crow appears. (The alarm cry of birds will even
+arrest the attention of four-footed beasts, and often bring the
+sportsman's stalking to naught.)
+
+I fancy that Phœbe selects our sheds and bridges and porticoes for
+her nesting-sites because they are so much more numerous than the
+overhanging rocks where her forbears built. For the same reason certain
+of the swallows and the swifts select our barns and chimneys.
+
+If the birds themselves are not afraid to draw near us, why should their
+instinct lead them to feel that their enemies will be afraid of us? How
+do they know that a jay or a crow or a red squirrel will be less timid
+than they are? And why also, if they have such confidence in us, do they
+raise such a hue and cry when we pass near their nests? The robin in my
+summer-house knew, if she knew anything, that I had never raised a
+finger against her. On the contrary, my hoe in the garden had unearthed
+many a worm and slug for her. Still she sees in me only a possible
+enemy, and tolerate me with my book or my newspaper near her nest she
+will not. Another robin has built her nest in a rosebush that has been
+trained to form an arch over the walk that leads to the kitchen door and
+only a few yards from it; but whenever we pass and repass she scurries
+away with loud, angry protests and keeps it up as long as we are in
+sight, so that we do not feel at all complimented by her settling down
+so near us. If one's appearance is so alarming, even when he is going to
+hoe the garden, why did the intolerant bird set up her household gods so
+near? If I keep away her enemies, why will she not be gracious enough to
+regard me as her friend? The robin that trusted her brood to the
+sheltering vines of the woodshed, and lined her nest with the hair of
+our old gray horse--why should she scream, "Murder!" whenever any of us
+go to the well a few feet away?
+
+What is the real explanation of the fact that so many of our birds nest
+so near our dwellings and yet show such unfriendliness when we come near
+them? Their apparent confidence, on the one hand, contradicts their
+suspicion on the other. Is it because we have here the workings of a new
+instinct which has not yet adjusted itself to the workings of the older
+instinct of solicitude for the safety of the nest and young? My own
+interpretation is that birds are not drawn near us by any sense of
+greater security in our vicinity. It is evident from the start that
+there is an initial fear of us to be overcome. How, then, could the
+sense of greater safety in our presence arise? Fear and trust do not
+spring from the same root. How should the robins and thrushes know that
+their enemies--the jays, the crows, and the like--are more afraid of
+human beings than they are themselves? Hunted animals pursued by wolves
+or hounds will at times take refuge in the haunts of men, not because
+they expect human protection, but because they are desperate, and
+oblivious to everything save some means of escape. If the hunted deer or
+fox rushes into an open shed or a barn door, it is because it is
+desperately hard-pressed, and sees and knows nothing but some object or
+situation that it may place between itself and its deadly enemy. The
+great fear obliterates all minor fears.
+
+The key to the behavior of the birds in this respect may be found in the
+Darwinian theory of natural selection. From the first settlement of the
+country a few of the common birds, attracted by a more suitable or more
+abundant food-supply, or other conditions, must inevitably have nested
+near human dwellings. These birds would thrive better and succeed in
+bringing off more young than those that nested in more exposed places.
+Hence, their progeny would soon be in the ascendancy. All animals seem
+to have associated memory. These birds would naturally return to the
+scenes and conditions of their youth, and start their nests there. It
+would not be confidence in men that would draw them; rather would the
+truth be that the fear of man is inadequate to overcome or annul this
+home attraction.
+
+The catbird does not come to our vines on the veranda to nest from
+considerations of safety, but because her line of descent runs through
+such places. The catbirds and robins and phœbe-birds that were reared
+far from human habitations doubtless return to such localities to rear
+their young. The home sense in birds is strong. I have positive proof in
+a few instances of robins and song sparrows returning successive years
+to the same neighborhood. It is very certain, I think, that the
+phœbe-birds that daub our porches with their mud, and in July leave
+a trail of minute creeping and crawling pests, were not themselves
+hatched and reared in the pretty, moss-covered structure under the
+shelving rocks in the woods, or on the hillsides.
+
+How different from the manners of the robins are the manners of a pair
+of catbirds that have a nest in the honeysuckle against the side of the
+first-floor sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from the nature of the
+catbird than the hue and cry which the robin at times sets up. The
+catbird is sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline _mew_ is her
+characteristic note. She never raises her voice like the town-crier, as
+the robin does, perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold him.
+The catbird peers and utters her soft protest from her hiding-place in
+the bushes. This particular pair of catbirds appeared in early May and
+began slyly to look over the situation in the vines and bushes about the
+house. All their proceedings were very stealthy; they were like two dark
+shadows gliding about, avoiding observation--no tree-tops or house-tops
+for them, but coverts close to the ground. We hoped they would divine
+safety in the shadow of the cottage, but tried to act as if oblivious of
+their goings and comings. We saw them now and then stealthily inspecting
+the tangle of honeysuckle on the east side of the veranda, where a robin
+last season reared a brood, and the low hedge of barberry-bushes on the
+south side of the cottage, where a song sparrow had her nest. If they
+come, which will they take, we wondered. Several times in the early
+morning I heard the male singing vivaciously and confidently in the
+thick of the honeysuckle. I guessed that the honeysuckle was the choice
+of the male, and that his song was a pæan in praise of it, addressed to
+his mate. But it was nearly a week before his musical argument prevailed
+and the site was apparently agreed upon.
+
+When the nest-building actually began, the birds were so shy about it
+that, watch as I might, I failed to catch them in the act. One morning I
+saw the mother bird in the garden with nesting-material in her beak, but
+she failed to come to the honeysuckle with it while I watched from a
+near-by covert. At the same time robins were flying here and there with
+loaded beaks, and wood thrushes were going through the air trailing long
+strips of white paper behind them, but the catbird was an emblem of
+secrecy itself. She, too, brought fragments of white paper to her nest,
+but no one saw her do it. Like other nest-builders, she apparently put
+in her big strokes of work in the early morning before the sleepers on
+the veranda were stirring. A few times my inquisitive eye, cautiously
+peering over the railing, started her from the vine, but I never saw her
+enter it with leaf, stick, or straw; yet slowly the nest grew and came
+into shape, and finally received its finishing touches. So cautiously
+had the birds proceeded that, were they capable of concepts like us, I
+should fancy they flattered themselves that we had not the least
+suspicion of their little secret. The male ceased to sing near the house
+after the nest was begun. So much time elapsed after the finishing of
+the nest before the first egg appeared in it that some members of the
+household feared the birds had deserted it, especially as they were not
+seen about the premises for several days. But the weather was wet and
+cool, and the eggs ripened slowly. Then one morning the birds were seen
+again, and one blue-green egg was discovered in the nest. The next
+morning another egg was added, and a third egg on the third morning, and
+a fourth on the fourth morning. In due time incubation began, and
+thenceforth all went well with our dusky neighbors.
+
+It is an anxious moment for all birds when their young leave the nest.
+One noontime by the unusual mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure that
+the critical time had come. Sure enough, there sat one of the young on a
+twig a few inches above the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty
+response to the agitated cry of the mother, as is usually the case with
+the robin. "No publicity" is the watchword of the young catbirds as well
+as of the old. An hour or two later another young one was perched on a
+branch, and before night, when no one was looking, they both
+disappeared, leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The next morning
+early, without any signs of alarm or agitation on the part of the old
+birds, they took the important step. It could hardly have been much of a
+flight with any of them, as their wing-quills were only partially
+developed, and their tails were mere stubs. For several days afterward
+no sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard. They were probably
+keeping well concealed in the near-by trees or in the vines and
+currant-bushes in the vineyard. In about a week the whole family
+appeared briefly in upper branches of the maples near the house. The
+young were distinguishable from the old only by their shorter tails. A
+few days later the parent birds were seen moving stealthily through the
+vines and bushes about the house, or perching on the near-by stakes that
+supported the wire netting. Are they coming back for a second brood? was
+the question in our minds.
+
+Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the male, then one morning a
+regular old-time burst of joy from him in the vine that held the old
+nest. Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window on the south side
+of the cottage, and both birds were soon seen paying frequent visits to
+the bush. We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether or not the
+first brood were now shifting for themselves, we did not know; they
+never again appeared upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of the
+Fourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was started in the
+syringa-bush three feet from the ground, and barely four feet from the
+window!
+
+We had a view of the proceedings that the first site did not afford us.
+The old nest appeared to be in perfect condition, but there was
+evidently no thought with the birds of using it again, as the robins
+sometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff swallows always do. A new nest,
+built of material almost identical with that of the old, and in a more
+exposed position, was decided upon. It progressed rapidly, and I was
+delighted to find that the male assisted in the building. Indeed, he was
+fully as active as the female. Very often they were both in the nest
+with material at the same moment. They seemed to agree perfectly. At
+first I got the impression that the male was not quite as decided as the
+female, and hesitated more, once or twice bringing material that he
+finally rejected. But he soon warmed up to the work and certainly did
+his share.
+
+With most species of our birds the nest is entirely built by the female.
+With the robin, the wood thrush, the phœbe, the oriole, the
+hummingbird, the pewee, and many others, the male is only an interested
+spectator of the proceeding. He usually attends his mate in her quest
+for material, but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the cock
+wren assists in nest-building. I know the male cedar-bird does, and
+probably the male woodpeckers do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeak
+assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing upon the nest. It seems
+fair to infer that he assists in the nest-building also, but I am not
+certain that he does, and I have heard another observer state that in a
+nest which he watched the female apparently did it all.
+
+My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon at least, being on their
+job as late as seven o'clock. In three days the nest was done, all but
+touching up the interior. During the construction I laid out pieces of
+twine and bits of white paper on the bushes and wire netting, also some
+loose material from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly used.
+How much labor the birds would have saved themselves had they pulled the
+old nest to pieces and used the material a second time! I have known the
+oriole to start a nest, then change her mind, and then detach some of
+her strings and fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once saw a
+"chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull the old nest to pieces and
+rebuild it in a tree a hundred feet away.
+
+The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking than his mate,
+but we could easily tell her by her often simulating the actions of a
+young bird when she came with material in her beak; she would alight on
+a near-by post and slightly spread and quiver her wings in a tender,
+beseeching kind of way. She would do this also when bringing food to her
+first brood. When one of the parent birds of any species simulates by
+voice or manner the young birds, it is always the female; her heart
+would naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation than that of the
+male.
+
+On the fifth day the nest was completed and received its first egg.
+There was considerable delay with the second egg, but it appeared on the
+second or third day, and the third egg the following day. Then
+incubation began. In twenty days from the day the nest was begun, the
+birds were hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly left the
+nest.
+
+A friend of mine who has a summer home on one of the trout-streams of
+the Catskills discovered that the catbird was fond of butter, and she
+soon had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room window for
+its lump of fresh butter, and finally entering the dining-room, perching
+on the back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter from a fork
+held in the mistress's hand. I think the butter was unsalted. My friend
+was convinced after three years that the same pair of birds returned to
+her each year, because each season the male came promptly for his
+butter.
+
+The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird contrast strongly with
+the frank, open manners of the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrasher
+goes skulking about in much the same way, flirting from bush to bush
+like a culprit escaping from justice. But he does love to sing from the
+April tree-tops where all the world may see and hear, if said world does
+not come too near. In the South and West the thrasher also nests in the
+vicinity of houses, but in New York and New England we must look for him
+in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of any bad traits that go with
+the thrasher's air of suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that
+goes with the catbird's--I have seen her perch on the rim of another
+bird's nest and deliberately devour the eggs. But only once. Whether or
+not she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If she does, she is
+doubtless so sly about it that she escapes observation.
+
+I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so attractive a neighbor as
+the wood thrush. She has none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace.
+She skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the wood thrush stands
+up before you or perches upon a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoat
+toward you in the most open and trusting manner. In fact, few birds have
+such good manners as the wood thrush, and few have so much the manner of
+a Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The flight of the wood
+thrush across the lawn is such a picture of grace and harmony, it is
+music to the eye. The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I told you
+so, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!" But the courteous thrush
+(just here I heard the excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry caw
+of a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow fly away from the
+maple in front of the Study, pursued by a mob of screeching robins. He
+took refuge in the spruces above the house where the collected robins
+abused him from surrounding branches. On my appearance he flew away, and
+the robins dispersed)--but the courteous thrush, I say, invites the
+good-breeding in you which he himself shows. The thrush never has the
+air of a culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other air. But I
+welcome them both. One shall stand for the harmony and repose of bird
+life, and the other for its restlessness and curiosity. The songs and
+the manners of birds correspond. The catbird, the brown thrasher, and
+the mockingbird are all theatrical in their manners--full of gestures of
+tail and wings, and their songs all imply an audience, while the serene
+melody of the thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of their
+behavior.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A MIDSUMMER IDYL
+
+
+As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the wide-open doors of a
+big hay-barn, busy with my pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my
+farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I idly contrast his harvest
+with mine. I have to admit that he succeeds with his better than I do
+with mine, though he can make hay only while the sun shines, while I can
+reap and cure my light fancies nearly as well in the shade as in the
+sun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. But
+I have this advantage over him--I might make literature out of his
+haymaking, or might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest he
+never dreamed of. What does Emerson say?
+
+  One harvest from the field
+    Homeward bring the oxen strong;
+  A second crop thine acres yield,
+    Which I gather in a song.
+
+But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only where he has sown, and if
+Emerson had not scattered his own heart in the fields his Muse would not
+reap much there. Song is not one of the instruments with which I gather
+my harvest, but long ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving
+the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself there, and whatever
+comes back to me now from that source is honestly my own. The second
+crop which I gather is not much more tangible than that which the poet
+gathers, but the farmer as little suspects its existence as he does that
+of the poet. I can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies, his
+buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow, his meadow-rue, serve my
+purpose better than they do his. They look better on the printed page
+than they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy and clover have their
+literary uses, and his new-mown hay may perfume a line in poetry. When
+one of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod round his quiet bed,"
+he makes better use of this weed than the farmers can.
+
+Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with all its sights and
+sounds, its singing birds, its skimming swallows, its grazing or
+ruminating cattle, its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes from
+the meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with his men and teams
+busy with the harvest, has material for the literary artist. A good hay
+day is a good day for the writer and the poet, because it has a certain
+crispness and pureness; it is positive; it is rich in sunshine; there is
+a potency in the blue sky which you feel; the high barometer raises your
+spirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You can sit in a circle
+of shade beneath a tree in the fields, or in front of the open hay-barn
+doors, as I do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature all
+about you. The brimming meadows seem fairly to purr as the breezes
+stroke them; the trees rustle their myriad leaves as if in gladness; the
+many-colored butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the swallows' backs
+glistens in the sun as they skim the fields; and the mellow boom of the
+passing bumble-bee but enhances the sense of repose and contentment that
+pervades the air. The hay cures; the oats and corn deepen their hue; the
+delicious fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the breeze; your
+mental skies are lucid, and life has the midsummer fullness and charm.
+
+As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of the scarlet tanager in
+the maple woods that crown a hill above me, and in the loft overhead two
+broods of swallows are chattering and lining up their light-colored
+breasts on the rims of their nests, or trying their newly fledged wings
+while clinging to its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound is the
+call of the cuckoo, which I hear and have heard at nearly all hours for
+many days, and which surely bodes rain. The countryman who first named
+this bird the "rain crow" hit the mark. The cuckoo is a devourer of
+worms and caterpillars, and why he should be interested in rain is hard
+to see. The tree-toad calls before and during a shower, mainly, I think,
+because he likes to have his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like
+the cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a mystery, unless the
+rain and the shadows are congenial to the gloomy mood in which he
+usually seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery of our birds,
+and the part of doleful prophet in our bird drama suits him well.
+
+A high barometer is best for the haymakers and it is best for the human
+spirits. When the smoke goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likely
+to soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons who do not like
+to get up in the morning till the day has been well sunned and aired
+evidently thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do seem better
+ventilated, and our lungs take in fuller draughts of air. How curious it
+is that the air should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light when
+it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days when it is an effort to move,
+and the grasshopper is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the
+trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we are on its crest, and are
+buoyed up both in mind and in body, on the crisp, bright days when the
+air seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the heavier salt
+sea-water buoys us up more than the fresh river or pond water, but we do
+not feel in the same way the lift of the high barometric wave. Even the
+rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring are quickly susceptible to
+these atmospheric changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine and
+crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as to make hay. Let the high
+blue-domed day with its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer,
+overcast, humid day from the south, and the flow of sap lessens at once.
+It would seem as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their dry
+bark, they respond to the change so quickly. There is no sap without
+warmth, and yet warmth, without any memory of the frost, stops the flow.
+
+The more the air presses upon us the lighter we feel, and the less it
+presses upon us the more "logy" we feel. Climb to the top of a mountain
+ten thousand feet high, and you breathe and move with an effort. The air
+is light, water boils at a low temperature, and our lungs and muscles
+seem inadequate to perform their usual functions. There is a kind of
+pressure that exhilarates us, and an absence of pressure that depresses
+us.
+
+The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy work, sets one up, while the
+idle, the unemployed, has a deficiency of hæmoglobin in his blood. The
+Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the man so over-employed that the
+pressure upon him is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled
+with compressed air.
+
+Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of the
+harvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day--the high
+blue dome, the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still white
+in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, the
+clover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds
+of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds still
+vocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. Very soon it
+will begin to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become dry and
+harsh, the clover will fade, the girlish daisies will become coarse and
+matronly, the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the pastures
+will turn brown, and the haymakers will find the hay half cured as it
+stands waiting for them in the meadows.
+
+What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common, so abundant, so various,
+a green summer snow that softens the outlines of the landscape, that
+makes a carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields, and that
+furnishes food to so many and such various creatures! More than the
+grazing animals live upon the grass. All our cereals--wheat, barley,
+rye, rice, oats, corn--belong to the great family of the grasses.
+
+Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment of the hills. It
+gives us the meadow, a feature in the northern landscape so common that
+we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once when we enter a
+tropical or semi-tropical country. In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw
+no meadows and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the genial,
+mellow look which our landscape presents. Harshness, rawness, aridity,
+are the prevailing notes.
+
+From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows with their boundary line of
+stone fences that are like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover.
+They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in the breeze, the green
+inundation seems about to overwhelm its boundaries, all the surface
+inequalities of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and stones are
+hidden, the woodchucks make their roads through it, immersed like
+dolphins in the sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowing
+beneficence of our temperate zone it all presents! Nature in her kinder,
+gentler moods, dreaming of the tranquil herds and the bursting barns.
+Surely the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for the most part
+noiseless, peace-yielding victories that gladden the eye and
+tranquillize the heart.
+
+The meadow presents a pleasing picture before it is invaded by the
+haymakers, and a varied and animated one after it is thus invaded; the
+mowing-machine sending a shudder ahead of it through the grass, the
+hay-tedder kicking up the green locks like a giant, many-legged
+grasshopper, the horserake gathering the cured hay into windrows, the
+white-sleeved men with their forks pitching it into cocks, and, lastly,
+the huge, soft-cheeked loads of hay, towering above the teams that draw
+them, brushing against the bar-ways and the lower branches of the trees
+along their course, slowly winding their way toward the barn. Then the
+great mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the fields, and the battle
+is won. Milk and cream are stored up in well-cured hay, and when the
+snow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills them in summer, the
+tranquil cow can still rest and ruminate in contentment.
+
+As the swallows sweep out and in near my head they give out an angry
+"Sleet, sleet," as if my presence had suddenly become offensive to them.
+I know what makes the change in their temper. The young are leaving
+their nests, and at such eventful times the parent birds are always
+nervous and anxious. When any of our birds launch a family into the
+world they would rather not have spectators, and you are pretty sure to
+be abused if you intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a good deal
+of sharp emphasis into that "Sleet, sleet," though she is not armed to
+make any of her threats good. Who knows that all will go well with them
+when they first make the plunge into space with their untried wings? A
+careful parent should keep the coast clear.
+
+They have been testing their wings for several days, clinging to the
+sides of the nest and beating the wings rapidly. And now comes the
+crucial moment of letting go and attempting actual flight. Several of
+them have already done it, and I see them resting on the dead limbs of a
+plum-tree across the road. But more are to follow, and parental anxiety
+is still rife. I shall be sorry when the spacious hayloft becomes
+silent. That affectionate "Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing
+squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged companionship. The
+old barn is the abode of friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of
+them and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of poetry and
+romance to these familiar scenes.
+
+Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest of birds? Known to the
+poets and sages and prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless
+and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, the
+child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in
+the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly
+food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly
+coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape
+of a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have got
+that steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of course
+I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of the
+sky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, and its shape
+and motions less arrowy. More varied in color, its hues yet lack the
+intensity, and its flight the swiftness, of those of its brother of the
+haylofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows are pleasing, but they
+are much more local and restricted in their ranges than the
+barn-frequenters. As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the barn
+swallows the summer always brought.
+
+After all, there is but one swallow; the others are particular kinds
+that we specify. How curious that men should ever have got the notion
+that this airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams, spends
+the winter hibernating in the mud of ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of
+newts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of the
+blindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain of
+the rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the
+fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would as
+soon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow
+follows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, where
+it hibernates on the wing, buried in tropical sunshine.
+
+Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the swallows, a good day for
+the haymakers, and a good day for him who sits before his open barn door
+and weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this slight literary
+fabric.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE
+
+
+The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own way
+so quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate an
+interest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a line
+of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. One
+thing is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surer
+way to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In the
+blackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest or
+the indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed my
+fish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled the
+branch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. I
+unwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbled
+upon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; on
+still another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossy
+softness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log.
+
+Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fisherman
+often sees the nest of the phœbe-bird, which does not cease to please
+for the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry.
+On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far less
+pleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
+the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.
+
+Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight
+on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye
+upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the
+roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her
+secret--a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the
+finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited
+her first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season.
+Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably her
+first brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added an
+egg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out,
+the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said when
+she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they were
+mildewed.
+
+These ground-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the great
+common of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every
+hour--the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels,
+coons by night, and crows and hawks by day--what bird-lover does not
+experience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
+nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly;
+he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate.
+Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves a
+purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it is
+placed. What a center of solicitude and forethought.
+
+Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road,
+is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any other
+ground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden.
+The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only a
+nest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blind
+man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A little
+screen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of the
+nest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand did
+the mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with drooping
+wings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting up
+the whole performance.
+
+A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of the
+male many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
+one male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stone
+wall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford a
+hint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a very
+successful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall and
+in the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usually
+precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and
+breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.
+
+When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself
+into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
+her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays
+of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the
+hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be
+considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely
+placed in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of
+Canada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few square
+yards, the grazing is very poor. I do not think that the chances are one
+in fifty that the hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that the
+problem presented itself to the bird as it does to me, but her instinct
+was as sure a guide as my reason is to me--or a surer one.
+
+The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by a New England bird-lover,
+Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned writer on our birds, fifty or more years
+ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by our earlier
+writers. It haunts the hilly pastures and roadsides in the Catskill
+region. It is often called the road-runner, from its habit of running
+along the road ahead when one is driving or walking--a very different
+bird, however, from the road-runner of the Western States. The vesper is
+larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and russet, and does not
+frequent our gardens and orchards as does the latter. In color it
+suggests the European skylark; the two lateral white quills in its tail
+enhance this impression. One season a stray skylark, probably from Long
+Island or some other place where larks had been liberated, appeared in a
+broad, low meadow near me, and not finding his own kind paid court to a
+female vesper sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt pestered
+her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately and seemed much
+embarrassed by the attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.
+
+When the young of any species appear, the solicitude and watchfulness of
+the mother bird are greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the
+vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of my harmless
+character now for several weeks and, one would think, must know that her
+precious secret is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in her
+beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards away, she maneuvers
+around for a minute or two, flying up to the telephone wire or a few
+yards up or down the road, and finally approaches the nest with much
+hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her in the act. When she comes
+again and again and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.
+
+After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the half-fledged young were
+lying on the ground in front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous
+marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I could not divine.
+
+What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently so wise on some
+occasions and so absurd on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food
+to her young, going through the same tactics over and over, learns no
+more than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think;
+hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom of
+nature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to us
+sheer folly under changed conditions.
+
+When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better of her, she often
+devours the food she has in her beak, so fearful is she of betraying her
+precious secret. But the next time she comes she may only maneuver
+briefly before approaching the nest, and then again hesitate and parley
+with her fears and make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I had
+only just appeared upon the scene.
+
+One of the best things a bird-lover can have in front of his house or
+cabin is a small dead tree with numerous leafless branches. Many kinds
+of birds love to perch briefly where they can look around them. I would
+not exchange the old dead plum-tree that stands across the road in front
+of my lodge for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It bears a
+perpetual crop of birds. Of course the strictly sylvan birds, such as
+the warblers, the vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit thrushes,
+do not come, but many kinds of other birds pause there during the day
+and seem to enjoy the unobstructed view.
+
+All the field and orchard and grove birds come. In early summer the
+bobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows
+below, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comes
+and shows his brilliant front. The purple finch, the goldfinch, the
+indigo bunting, the bluebird, the kingbird, the phœbe-bird, the great
+crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee, the high-hole,
+the downy woodpecker, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy,
+pause there in the course of the day, and some of them several times
+during the day. Occasionally the scarlet tanager lights it up with his
+vivid color.
+
+But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song sparrow whose mate
+has a nest not far off. Here he perches and goes through his repertoire
+of three or four different songs from dawn till nightfall, pausing only
+long enough now and then to visit his mate or to refresh himself with a
+little food. He repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening
+his plumage in the intervals. He sings several hundred times a day and
+has been doing so for many weeks. The house wren during the
+breeding-season repeats his song thousands of times a day, while the
+red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning till night for several
+months. How a conscious effort like that would weary our human singers
+and their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious, in our sense, of
+what they are doing.
+
+When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle this singing sparrow
+presents! A little wild bird sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its
+voice in song hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
+
+In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, but
+viewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a song
+of praise and thanksgiving--joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mate
+and brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, a
+voice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving for
+the universal beneficence without which you and I and the little bird
+would not be here? In foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain
+and the cold do not silence him.
+
+There are few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the call
+of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of
+despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint
+of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from
+pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to
+being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay,
+with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in that
+category, were it not for their songs when the love passion makes
+optimists even of them. The strain of the hermit thrush which floats
+down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but
+more as the shades of night are falling--what does this pure, serene,
+exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words,
+
+  God's in his heaven--
+  All's right with the world!
+
+The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone, but what puts it
+into his heart to do that? Certainly it is good to have a mate and a
+brood!
+
+A new season brings new experiences with the same old familiar birds, or
+new thoughts about them. This season I have had new impressions of our
+cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen. Of the two species, the
+black-billed and the yellow-billed, the former prevails in the latitude
+of New England, and the latter farther south. We cannot hail our
+black-billed as "blithe newcomer," as Wordsworth does his cuckoo.
+"Doleful newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing cheery or
+animated in his note, and he is about as much a "wandering voice" as is
+the European bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of flowers. He is
+a prophet of the rain, and the country people call him the rain crow.
+All his notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His nesting-instincts
+seem to lead him, or rather her, to the thorn-bushes as inevitably as
+the grass finch's lead her to the grass.
+
+The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and inefficient bird that it is
+interesting to see it doing things. One of our young poets has a verse
+in which he sings of
+
+  The solemn priestly bumble-bee
+  That marries rose to rose.
+
+He might apply the same or similar adjectives to the cuckoo. Solemn and
+priestly, or at least monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and
+suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights, or is gay and
+cheerful like our other birds, I have yet to witness it.
+
+During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by my
+door toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill.
+One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch very
+still and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on the
+tentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh,
+guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two he
+began to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose the
+nest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped or
+flitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note every
+minute or two.
+
+After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thorny
+branches which separated the thicket from the meadow and stepped
+outside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the nest
+on an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was covering
+her half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off,
+withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls.
+
+In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, while
+another barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened,
+while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The most
+mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if
+petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents
+was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke
+the parents up and they got down to real work in caring for their
+charge.
+
+The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellow
+stripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell.
+
+That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo--how long in the
+history of its race since it mastered it and became its own
+nest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is.
+Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree,
+with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs a
+foot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking
+nest and nursery I ever beheld--a mere platform of twigs about four
+inches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material,
+looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this very
+thorn.
+
+In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, which
+is their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green
+worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest worm
+that is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in
+force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of the
+worms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a day
+with a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it is
+doing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is a
+solemn creature; its note is almost funereal.
+
+Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive about its nesting-habits
+as any of the sparrows. The male bird seems to know that his brilliant
+color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far away from the nest,
+singing at all hours of the day in a circle around it, the radius of
+which must be more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest was near
+the house, almost under the clothes-line, in a low blackberry-bush,
+partly masked by tall-growing daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass
+near it, when off went the little brown bird with her sharp, chiding
+manners. She is a very emphatic creature. It is yea and nay with her
+every time.
+
+The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is not a very pleasing
+singer, but an all-day one and an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer
+birds. In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows and
+goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds. Their range of
+food is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them taking
+food of any kind.
+
+How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if we
+look closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
+woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on a
+cushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smooth
+exposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself up
+to a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping or
+looping along.
+
+I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of my
+straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
+an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind
+legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt
+for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for
+a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping
+worm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a little
+silvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a brief
+season of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitable
+place and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some other
+bird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and on
+dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.
+
+A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and a
+quarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother of
+the green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousand
+times, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have--a traveling
+arch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than your
+head, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standing
+twenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is a
+puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose.
+
+With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go
+looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to
+go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By
+chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes
+looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
+of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig,
+six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it the
+creature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, then
+turns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. This
+it explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, then
+loops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored,
+profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measures
+off another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves.
+
+Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way like
+this? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but
+has there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm?
+The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth into
+surrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to be
+sure that no chance to make a new connection is missed.
+
+Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet,
+lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it
+would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night
+posing as a twig.
+
+Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a
+hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes short
+work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemed
+to be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs
+or bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yards
+from me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy
+bird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart of
+all the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the winged
+jewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders--it came
+like a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly.
+
+All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of their own, all except the
+woodchuck; wherever he is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is
+known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a real sylvan frog, as
+pretty as a bird, the color of the dry leaves, slender and elegant in
+form and quick and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one in the bed
+of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand toward him and stroked his back
+with a twig. If you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put a spell
+upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized. He was instantly responsive to my
+passes. He began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my finger
+instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly, rose up more upon his
+feet, and bowed his head. As I continued the titillation he began to
+give forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if he were going to
+break out in song. He did not, but he seemed loath to go his way. How
+different he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in large numbers
+make a multitudinous croaking and clucking in the little wild pools in
+spring! He wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in the pools
+celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice is off them, and then in two
+or three days he takes to the open woods and assumes the assimilative
+coloring of the dry leaves.
+
+The little orange-colored salamander, a most delicate and highly colored
+little creature, is as harmless as a baby, and about as slow and
+undecided in its movements. Its cold body seems to like the warmth of
+your hand. Yet in color it is as rich an orange as the petal of the
+cardinal flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an outside color;
+it is a glow, and renders the creature almost transparent, an effect as
+uniform as the radiance of a precious stone. Its little,
+innocent-looking, three-toed foot, or three and a half toed--how
+unreptilian it looks through my pocket glass! A baby's hand is not more
+so. Its throbbing throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes with
+a glint of gold above them--only a close view of these satisfies one.
+
+Here is another remarkable transformation among the small wild folk. In
+the spring he is a dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;
+now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the woods. This is said
+to be an immature form, which returns to the ponds and matures the next
+season; but whether it is the male or the female that assumes this
+bright hue, or both, I do not know. The coat seems to be its midsummer
+holiday uniform which is laid aside when it goes back to the marshes to
+hibernate in the fall.
+
+Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means of protection that do
+not at once appear. In the case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or
+other disagreeable secretion, which would cause any animal to repent
+that took it in its mouth. It is even less concerned at being caught
+than is the skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.
+
+In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon the domain of another
+sylvan denizen, the chipmunk. One afternoon one suddenly came up from
+the open field below me with his pockets full of provender of some sort;
+just what sort I wondered, as there was no grain or seeds or any dry
+food that it would be safe to store underground for the winter.
+
+Beholding me sitting there within two yards of his den was a great
+surprise to him. He eyed me a long time--squirrel time--making little,
+spasmodic movements on the flat stone above his den. At a motion of my
+arm he darted into his hole with an exultant chip. He was soon out with
+empty pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little tocsin of
+distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan folk might hear. As I made no
+sign, he soon ceased and went about his affairs.
+
+All this time, behind and above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposed
+that lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of her
+chrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fern
+screen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless as
+the snow, and her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and delicate
+as--well, as only those of a luna moth can be. It is as immaculate as an
+angel. With a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple
+sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her for the night.
+
+While I was loitering there on the threshold of the woods, observing the
+small sylvan folk, about a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was
+a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than a score of years,
+the nest of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Some friends were camping
+there with their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech woods, and
+passed and repassed hourly within a few yards of the nest, and, although
+they each had sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen nor
+heard the birds during the two days they had been there.
+
+While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of a
+thrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food in
+its beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew down
+to a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, about
+ten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flew
+out of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movements
+sent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. I
+parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was the
+nest with two half-fledged young.
+
+A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to a
+sparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chanced
+to see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained
+four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
+carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were
+not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would
+alight upon the wall to make observations.
+
+But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious
+bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked
+into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds
+usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to
+find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
+strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they
+seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them,
+I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them
+and watched.
+
+I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped
+some food into an open mouth and disappeared.
+
+Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the
+woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
+morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy
+basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery,
+brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground
+enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was
+in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown
+solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a
+part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the
+dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders'
+cocoons--all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.
+
+I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths
+instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
+flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and
+uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
+away!" This I soon did.
+
+Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But
+the red-eyed vireo sings on into September--not an ecstatic strain, but
+a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT
+
+
+It was in May during the last term of his Presidency that Roosevelt
+asked me to go with him down to Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him name
+his birds. I stayed with him at the White House the night before we
+started. I remember that at dinner[1] there was an officer from the
+British army stationed in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indian
+affairs. I did not take part in it because I knew nothing about India,
+but Roosevelt was so conversant with Indian affairs and Indian history
+that you would think he had just been cramming on it, which I knew very
+well he had not. But that British officer was put on his mettle to hold
+his own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India and England's relation
+to it than the officer seemed to know. It was amazing to see the
+thoroughness of his knowledge about India.
+
+  [1] Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The
+  incident he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House,
+  just before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903.
+    C. B.
+
+The next morning we started off for Virginia, taking an early train.
+
+Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from Washington. I think we left
+the train at Charlottesville, Virginia, and drove about ten miles to
+Pine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on the edge of the
+woods, a mile from the nearest farmhouse.
+
+Before we reached there we got out of the wagon and walked, as there
+were a good many warblers in the trees--the spring migration was on. It
+was pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the President insisted on
+carrying it. We identified several warblers there, among them the
+black-poll, the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap. He knew
+them in the trees overhead as quickly as I did.
+
+We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but as he was eager for a
+walk we started off, he leading, as if walking for a wager. We went
+through fields and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile or
+more, when we stopped and mopped our brows and turned homeward without
+having seen many birds.
+
+Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when she saw the heated
+condition in which we returned, for not long afterwards he came to me
+and said: "Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we were in too
+much of a hurry." I replied, "No, Mr. President, that isn't the way I
+usually go a-birding." His thirst for the wild and the woods, and his
+joy at returning to these after his winter in the White House, had
+evidently urged him on. He added, "We will try a different plan
+to-morrow."
+
+So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along the highways. Very soon
+we heard a wren which was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren," he said. We
+got out and watched it as it darted in and out of the fence and sang.
+
+I asked him if he knew whether the little gray gnatcatcher was to be
+seen there. I had not seen or heard it for thirty years. "Yes," he
+replied, "I saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run."
+
+We walked over to some plum-trees where there had been a house at one
+time. No sooner had we reached the spot than he cried, "There it is
+now!" And sure enough, there it was in full song--a little bird the
+shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine musical strain.
+
+As we were walking in a field we saw some birds that were new to me.
+Roosevelt also was puzzled to know what they were till we went among
+them and stirred them up, discovering that they were females of the blue
+grosbeak, with some sparrows which we did not identify.
+
+In the course of that walk he showed me a place where he had seen what
+he had thought at the time to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described
+how they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the tree where they
+alighted. I was skeptical, for it had long been thought that wild
+pigeons were extinct, but that fact had not impressed itself upon his
+mind. He said if he had known there could be any doubt about it, he
+would have observed them more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as
+it was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable evidence. We
+talked with the colored coachman about the birds, as he also had seen
+them. His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had seen wild
+pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts. Subsequently Roosevelt
+wrote me that he had come to the conclusion that they had been mistaken
+about their being pigeons.
+
+One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, I
+chanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the
+ground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention to
+it and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop your
+hat over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and crept up on the
+bird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when the
+bird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this
+bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almost
+succeeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time to
+save itself from his hand.
+
+One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seen
+and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry
+grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not
+appear.
+
+During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and
+fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He
+taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the
+swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine
+warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been
+one ahead of me.
+
+I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for
+the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor,
+I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes.
+
+"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I
+do."
+
+"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is an
+able and amiable man, he is not a born leader."
+
+(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of the
+proposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt's
+estimate of him.)
+
+Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in the
+lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the
+man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her
+needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a
+bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a
+slightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what _is_ the matter?"
+
+He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished
+an African lion.
+
+It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President
+of the United States to be so unprotected--without a guard of any
+kind--in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to
+him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.
+
+"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and
+they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."
+
+Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night
+sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost
+immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from
+the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking
+of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every
+night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day
+at a farmhouse in that vicinity. She did not let the President know of
+this because it would irritate him.
+
+The only flower we saw there which was new to me was the Indian pink.
+Roosevelt seemed to know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink
+moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were common in that
+locality.
+
+On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being on the train, Roosevelt
+threw himself into the dictation of many letters, the wrens and the
+warblers already sidetracked for the business of the Administration.
+
+I passed another night at the White House, and in the morning early we
+went out on the White House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming
+to attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by.
+
+"They often stare at me as though they thought me crazy," he said, "when
+they see me gazing up into the trees."
+
+"Well, now they will think I am your keeper," I said.
+
+"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.
+
+When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds that we had seen
+while at Pine Knot and hoped that I would sometime write up the trip; in
+fact, for years after, whenever we would meet, almost the first thing he
+would say was, "Have you written up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?"
+And his disappointment at my failure to do so was always
+unmistakable.[2]
+
+  [2] The following letter may be of interest in this
+  connection.
+    C. B.
+
+  DEAR OOM JOHN:
+
+  Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration? If
+  not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will
+  include in your coming volume of sketches a little account
+  of the time you visited us at Pine Knot, our little
+  Virginia camp, while I was President. I am very proud of
+  you, Oom John, and I want the fact that you were my guest
+  when I was President, and that you and I looked at birds
+  together, recorded there--and don't forget that I showed
+  you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's wren, and almost
+  all the other birds I said I would!
+
+  Ever yours,
+
+  THEODORE ROOSEVELT
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY
+
+
+One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a two
+weeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie--joy-riders with a
+luxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.
+
+We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. I
+confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I
+can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great
+Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew
+it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with
+younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not
+warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was
+younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter
+half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in
+order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new
+scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more
+strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.
+
+Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, so
+forest-clad--the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys
+cutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and rural
+homesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturing
+interests in the western, the source of noble rivers; and the storehouse
+of many of Nature's most useful gifts to man.
+
+The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of least
+resistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and it
+goes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a
+sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lighter
+cars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents,
+nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for the
+heavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its great
+namesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or through
+gives the automobilist pause.
+
+As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I remember
+with the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army trucks
+we met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on that
+Lincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb,
+khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host of
+them, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded with
+soldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous
+resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-off
+land. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were converging
+toward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim,
+processions--how impressive they were!
+
+Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of
+brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the
+hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever
+did in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at times
+driving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. It
+might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening and
+blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of
+destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire
+seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them--much that
+suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the
+lake bottoms.
+
+We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from
+entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic
+history of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power,
+and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are all
+gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white
+coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much
+more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may
+never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the
+mountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the
+silver age will displace the iron age.
+
+The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer has
+only to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out his
+winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and grassy
+the hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it
+seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly
+care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black
+remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling
+and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying
+down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that
+wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out.
+
+Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast of
+Pittsburgh, an ideal place--a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence
+well carpeted with grass, with wood and water in abundance. But the
+night was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily
+warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with
+plenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. She
+tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got
+up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the
+"long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth
+was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.
+
+The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of
+many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was
+the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days
+Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand
+information, which he did to our great comfort.
+
+Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we
+slept indoors.
+
+On the following day one of the big cars had an accident--the fan broke,
+and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be
+delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made
+our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the
+best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the
+only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no
+way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a
+chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves,
+he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of
+drills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed arms
+to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled
+car was again in running order.
+
+On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek
+in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road
+from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the
+widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of
+roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had
+experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even
+when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison
+was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of
+the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring,
+eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our
+mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual
+tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
+But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants.
+Pure elements--air, water, earth--these settle the question; Camp
+Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first
+view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting--a bird rarely seen north of
+the Potomac.
+
+An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, with
+a huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the
+wheel and had our pictures taken.
+
+At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girl
+appeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invited
+her into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all of
+her apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled the
+new one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She did
+not look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed her
+about many things and got straight, clear-cut answers--a very firm,
+level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told her
+the names of some of the members of the party, and after she had
+returned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down upon
+us. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any of
+the local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and mills
+were something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. I
+do not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom we
+gave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train five
+times, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead and
+her father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with her
+grandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and
+ever so many miles."
+
+The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all the
+way from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or
+Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed--stately, hardy growths, and very
+pleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and the
+eupatorium with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.
+
+August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clear
+mountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Every
+mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. It
+was flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We were
+working south and east.
+
+We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club,
+on the banks of the river--an ideal spot. The people at the big
+clubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. I
+found the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much like
+those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate even
+colder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they
+had a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines of
+big trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse told
+the story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently Cheat
+River deserves a better name.
+
+The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a marked
+contrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed
+down and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part in
+shaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped,
+while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep that
+they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on the
+tops of the broad, rounded hills, though we passed through some broad,
+open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms in
+which hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were large
+fields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming with
+bees.
+
+Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape,
+I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in these
+mountains during the great Ice Age.
+
+We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d--a famous spring, and a
+beautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some of
+the party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned the
+overflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek,
+not far from the Narrows--a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximity
+to the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of a broad,
+limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horses
+disturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have only
+pleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.
+
+We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many times
+the border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, all
+the time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views from
+mountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm
+Springs, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet Water
+Springs. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineral
+water and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. This
+part of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in the
+building, and the elements are unevenly distributed.
+
+I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazy
+proposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. We
+certainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent--or
+with its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplex
+affair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places,
+but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth is
+more like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many
+sections.
+
+One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm.
+One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in
+bringing wood and doing other errands.
+
+A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did the
+others, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked up
+here and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger towns
+we could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old.
+When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four exciting
+years, one is lost when cut off from them.
+
+Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark,
+especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain,
+near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hill
+below the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and
+Firestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtful
+success. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on with
+broad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle
+tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedly
+an equivocal smile--the trick was not so easy as it looked. Evidently
+Mr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm in
+Michigan.
+
+Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences you
+have, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background.
+Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemical
+problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he
+were reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps has
+few, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on
+mechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing a
+master discuss his own art.
+
+A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge into
+the Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and
+people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For
+the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the
+roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stone
+road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates
+appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the
+cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way,
+driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy
+on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or
+returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback,
+on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus
+my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.
+
+The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature.
+One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are
+made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature,
+indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the
+South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with
+poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive
+bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the
+South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near
+which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of
+whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late
+August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.
+
+No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurrying
+tourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolina
+a youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a few
+feet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blank
+curiosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent
+interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of a
+five-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain
+districts of the South--good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, and
+industrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outside
+world, their unsophistication is shocking to see.
+
+It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition
+going forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms--dust,
+rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents--is pretty sure to
+come to those who go a-gypsying in the South. But discomfort, after all,
+is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our
+luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization,
+and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully
+endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights,
+just to touch naked reality once more.
+
+Our two chief characters presented many contrasts: Mr. Ford is more
+adaptive, more indifferent to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest
+in the stream is in its potential water-power. He races up and down its
+banks to see its fall, and where power could be developed. He never
+ceases to lament so much power going to waste, and points out that if
+the streams were all harnessed, as they could easily be, farm labor
+everywhere, indoors and out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon
+the benefit that would accrue to every country neighborhood if the
+water-power that is going to waste in its valley streams were set to
+work in some useful industry, furnishing employment to the farmers and
+others in the winter seasons when the farms need comparatively little
+attention. He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to the
+greatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of the
+great mass of the people. As with his touring-car, so with his tractor
+engine, he has had the same end in view. Nor does he forget the
+housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing power into every household
+that will greatly lighten the burden of the women-folk.
+
+Partly owing to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his
+meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active
+than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make
+camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or
+curl up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while Mr. Ford would
+inspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr.
+Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenged some of
+the party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and from
+every camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk
+half-hour walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all occasions, and
+his optimism in regard to all the great questions, are remarkable. His
+good-will and tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his practical
+turn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanical arts and of business
+methods, he is through and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, he
+is much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life like
+a philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work more
+completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and his
+tractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, less
+expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and
+universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities
+which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Those
+who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, and
+the crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause
+in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely
+to a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent human
+force, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of
+universal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only brought
+pleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and written
+large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the business
+man--that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling
+passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his
+humanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, and
+has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of his
+great enterprise--a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are
+so often used to enslave or destroy.
+
+In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison:
+his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make life
+easier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, a
+trenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life,
+though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature--a
+practical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight.
+And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings.
+A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hair
+disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and can
+rough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so
+little that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts or
+turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards,
+as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the open
+and for wild nature.
+
+Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type--the clean,
+clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, always
+ready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at the
+service of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative,
+devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas--a
+manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen.
+
+It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip.
+All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In
+retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I
+was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant,
+and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at
+this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon
+the whole trip with unmixed pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+UNDER GENIAL SKIES
+
+
+I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND
+
+The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West,
+differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the
+coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of
+a world made up of three elements--sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific
+stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating
+floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon
+the Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of the
+Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I saw
+of them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down.
+They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. The
+mountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are of
+the same character. They are young, and while they carry their heads
+very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with the
+granite of our coast.
+
+As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep
+lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains
+wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their
+unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the
+conceit all out of them.
+
+The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what it
+is on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiously
+adapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there under
+arid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlantic
+seaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably less
+than ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of a
+large lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture of
+small and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soil
+does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours would
+almost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a good
+tillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as if
+it were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it has
+virtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown here
+have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothing
+in the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous
+and tough.
+
+I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songs
+here, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of
+climate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocal
+cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrasts
+with that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies
+contrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land.
+
+
+II. LAWN BIRDS
+
+To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to
+have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty
+spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and
+plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves--not so highly
+colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black
+phœbe flits about your porch and arbor vines.
+
+Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other
+variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the
+tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are
+next in number.
+
+Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a
+solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the
+American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual
+trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks
+about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a
+teetering motion of the hind part of the body.
+
+While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found
+the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was
+tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain
+such as Alaska alone can afford.
+
+But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the
+ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more
+of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the
+spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a
+few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that
+curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their
+shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and
+powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air--all arrest your
+attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the
+furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings.
+They fly around the world.
+
+The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity
+from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial
+creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the
+motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in
+its behavior?
+
+However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all
+do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are
+all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass,
+but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods
+are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He
+scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making
+frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the
+prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same
+judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and
+evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go
+its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their
+food-supplies.
+
+On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the
+tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and
+pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look
+upon--airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as
+to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white
+and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh
+water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail
+themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which
+discharge on the beach.
+
+There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown
+pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves,
+shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for
+a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at it
+were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air
+for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and
+forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore
+birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the
+water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for
+his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
+down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb
+style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
+creature as before.
+
+A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a bird
+that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--is
+the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the
+face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.
+
+I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above
+the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
+In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate
+to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
+them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of
+the shore.
+
+
+III. SILKEN CHAMBERS
+
+The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting
+bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner
+near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of
+uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows
+of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to
+the place.
+
+The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My
+guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed,
+found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's
+touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of
+detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground
+and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet
+of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how,
+fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with
+my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown
+earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. I
+stooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long
+needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soil
+nearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on the
+straight side of it, and behold--the entrance to the spider's castle! I
+was not prepared for anything so novel and artistic--a long silken
+chamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a
+silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side of
+the door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, and
+its top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, and
+slightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaring
+or beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner could
+have done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine as
+a hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was held
+open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.
+
+Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, I
+gave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My
+guide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point them
+put to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to find
+them unaided.
+
+We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no
+mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in
+two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself
+(as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance
+surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often
+danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enough
+to allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes farther
+down in her burrow.
+
+Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a young
+spider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from their
+tunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made of
+straws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws lifted
+up, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found the
+straw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in the
+night.
+
+As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects,
+such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright
+specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so small
+they probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I think
+these spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense.
+They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unless
+they have a sixth sense of which we know nothing.
+
+All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well as
+all their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection with
+their extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-histories
+a difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer and
+harder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on the
+spot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, and
+working it up into a finer product.
+
+The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the hinge, and is then
+discarded and a new door manufactured. We saw many nests with the old
+door lying near the entrance. The door is made of several layers of silk
+and clay, and is a substantial affair.
+
+The spider families all have the gift of genius. Of what ingenious
+devices and arts are they masters! How wide their range! They spin, they
+delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original spinners. They have
+probably been on their job since carboniferous times, many millions of
+years before man took up the art. And they can spin a thread so fine
+that science makes the astonishing statement that it would take four
+millions of them to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of our
+head--a degree of delicacy to which man can never hope to attain.
+
+Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems, secrets and betrayals,
+and this species of the arachnids is proficient in all these things.
+
+The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes of
+this spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in all
+such cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. It
+is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast--the soil for cañons
+and the rectangular watercourses, and for the trap-door spider. It is a
+tough, fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does not crumble or
+disintegrate; the cohesion of particles is such that sun-dried brick are
+easily made from it.
+
+This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Jamaica. It
+belongs to the family of _Mygalidae_. It resembles in appearance the
+tarantula of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many of the same
+habits; but its habitation is a much more ingenious and artistic piece
+of workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has no
+door to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind of
+breastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from this
+fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than does
+our spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, her
+fangs, and lines it with silk from her own body.
+
+Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect of
+her kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance--no visible
+drills for such rough work--one wonders how she excavates a burrow six
+inches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and
+how she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has been
+surprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weapons
+with which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the
+_cheliceræ_. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, says
+Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon's
+scalpel." And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet
+at a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest.
+Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a
+hole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth.
+
+One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turned
+over, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants of
+the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started the
+construction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed as
+if the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out a
+semicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice,
+each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surrounded
+it, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. I
+read somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit of
+ground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made the
+soil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss like
+the old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in the
+first case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seems
+to know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know."
+
+On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size,
+but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more artfully
+concealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completely
+covered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, and
+had so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eye
+was baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet it
+seemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick I
+found a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Day
+after day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at it
+on the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer of
+the soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength.
+
+Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, according
+to Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they are
+very active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping up
+the supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun,
+Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and the
+organic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can take
+at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and it
+seems to be so, it is most extraordinary.
+
+In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering,
+it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insect
+world and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinck
+has forgotten to point out, is this:
+
+In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondary
+part. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female is
+supreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him.
+Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is the
+female mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider that
+spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with the
+female. The female spider eats up the male after he has served her
+purpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the male
+in the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survives
+the winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on the
+window-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud,
+but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed by
+the female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate,
+but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In
+the vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey that the female
+is the larger and bolder; the care of the young devolves largely upon
+her. Yes, there is another exception: Among the fishes, the females are,
+as a rule, larger than the males; the immense number of eggs which they
+carry brings this about.
+
+There are always exceptions to this dominance of the female in the
+insect world. We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She would
+not be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male that
+dominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground,
+always in the larval state.
+
+In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold the
+showy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the
+willows, and other trees. The stamens of most flowers are numerous and
+conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries its panicle of pollen high above
+the silken tresses which mother the future ear.
+
+One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by a spider with her brood of
+young ones. I took up a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or
+more, and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I kept it in the
+house under observation for a week, hoping that at some hour of day or
+night the spider would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious
+friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance over the door which he
+had used successfully before. But the latch was never lifted. Madam
+Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at the bottom of her den. At the end
+of a week I broke open the nest and found her alone. She had evidently
+devoured all her little ones.
+
+I kept two nests with a spider in each in the house for a week, and in
+neither case did the occupant ever leave its nest.
+
+Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests of their own when they
+are about half-grown. As to where they stay, or how they live up to that
+time, I have no clue. The young we found in several nests were very
+small, not more than an eighth of an inch long. Of the size and
+appearance of the male spider, and where he keeps himself, I could get
+no clue.
+
+One morning I went with my guide down to the spider territory, and saw
+him try to entice or force a spider out of her den. The morning previous
+he had beguiled several of them to come up to the opening by thrusting a
+straw down the burrow and teasing them with it till in self-defense they
+seized it with their fangs and hung on to it till he drew them to the
+surface. But this morning the trick would not work. Not one spider would
+keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at the end in the shape of
+a hook, he finally lifted one out upon the ground. How bright and clean
+and untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of the thorax were as
+black as jet and shone as if they had just been polished. No lady in her
+parlor could have been freer from any touch of soil or earth-stain than
+was she. On the ground, in the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost.
+We turned her around and tried to induce her to enter the nest again;
+but over and over she ran across the open door without heeding it. In
+the novel situation in which she suddenly found herself, all her wits
+deserted her, and not till I took her between my thumb and finger and
+thrust her abdomen into the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of
+that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and she backed quickly
+into it and disappeared.
+
+Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider has I do not know. I never
+saw a nest that had been broken into or in any way disturbed, except
+those which we had disturbed in our observations.
+
+
+IV. THE DESERT NOTE
+
+I often wonder what mood of Nature this world of cacti which we run
+against in the great Southwest expresses. Certainly something savage and
+merciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor. How well she tempers
+her daggers and bayonets! How hard and smooth and sharp they are! How
+they contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and leaves which bear
+them! It is a desert mood; heat and drought appear to be the exciting
+causes. The scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to store up
+water in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates men to build great
+dams and reservoirs. These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But why
+spines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly cannot be for
+protection or defense; the grass and other vegetation upon which the
+grazing animals feed are not armed with spines.
+
+If the cacti were created that grazing animals in the desert might have
+something to feed upon, as our fathers' way of looking at things might
+lead us to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated by the armor
+of needles and spines?
+
+Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures this broad, mittened
+hand like a cruel joke. It smites like a serpent and stings like a
+scorpion. The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert! Beware! Agonies
+are one of her garments.
+
+All we can say about it is that Nature has her prickly side which
+drought and heat aggravate. In the North our thistles and thorns and
+spines are a milder expression of this mood. The spines on the
+blackberry-bush tend against its propagation for the same reason. Among
+our wild gooseberries, there are smooth and prickly varieties, and one
+succeeds about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees in rough or
+barren places that have a severe struggle for life, often develop sharp,
+thorny branches. It is a struggle of some kind which begets something
+like ill-temper in vegetation--heat and drought in the desert, and
+browsing animals and poor soil in the temperate zones. The devil's club
+in Alaska is one mass of spines; why, I know not. It must just be
+original sin. Our raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but the
+large, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed.
+
+Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert expresses the belief that
+thorns and spines are given to the desert plants for protection; and
+that if no animal were there that would eat them, they would not have
+these defenses. But I believe if there had never been a browsing animal
+in the desert the cacti would have had their thorns just the same.
+
+Nature certainly arms her animal forms against one another. We know the
+quills of the porcupine are for defense, and that the skunk carries a
+weapon that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that any plant form
+is armed against any creature whose proper food it might become. Cacti
+carry formidable weapons in the shape of spines and thorns, but the
+desert conditions where they are found, heat and aridity, are no doubt
+their primary cause. The conditions are fierce and the living forms are
+fierce.
+
+We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From our point of view she often
+seems partial and inconsistent. But I would just as soon think that
+Nature made the adobe soil in the arid regions that the human dwellers
+there might have material at hand with which to construct a shelter, as
+that she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable forms to
+secure their safety. One may confute Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth.
+He says:
+
+  Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of a
+  family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive
+  armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn
+  like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert to the
+  high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is plenty
+  of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to
+  thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the
+  thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and
+  the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their
+  cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a
+  soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.
+
+But are they not just as much exposed to browsing animals in the high
+table-lands as in the desert, if not more so?
+
+Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous about the species
+than about the individual. She is no more solicitous about the one than
+the other. The same conditions apply to all. But the species are
+numerous; a dozen units may be devoured while a thousand remain. A
+general will sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will sacrifice
+one man to save ten, but Nature's ways are entirely different. Both
+contending armies are hers, and she is equally solicitous about both.
+She wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the desert animals to
+survive, and she favors both equally. All she asks of them is that they
+breed and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke,
+Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yet
+confesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless
+true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla--fruit, stem, and
+trunk--though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the human
+hand at the slightest touch."
+
+This question of spines and thorns in vegetation is a baffling one
+because Nature's ways are so unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in
+his theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded upon the idea
+that Nature selects as man selects. You cannot put Nature into a
+formula.
+
+Behold how every branch and twig of our red thorn bristles with cruel
+daggers! But if they are designed to keep away bird or beast from eating
+its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own ends! If no creature
+ate its little red apples and thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would
+rot on the ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red thorns
+would not increase. And increase alone is Nature's end.
+
+It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the animal kingdom is
+full of design. Every part and organ of our bodies has its purpose which
+serves the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any character of
+bird or beast, fish or insect, that does not show purpose, but in the
+plant world Nature seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not work
+on so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ash
+serve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry
+bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, and
+thrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry do
+not save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. In
+fact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow their
+seeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in a
+spiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We know
+that hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedling
+pear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why.
+
+The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe
+(_Agave americana_), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and
+fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no more
+edible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defense
+question about spines.
+
+
+V. SEA-DOGS
+
+There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front of
+me that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have
+their rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, and
+keep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like a
+group of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed
+by the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem to
+show above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time.
+
+Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of
+green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in
+the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea,
+until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or
+hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it
+has a half-muffled, smothered sound.
+
+They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems something
+incongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep--badgers
+or marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt their
+prey in the sea.
+
+Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell us
+what they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony
+of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any new
+species is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and
+the short span of human life, or of the whole human history, gives us no
+adequate vantage-ground from which to solve the problem.
+
+I can easily believe that these hair seals are close akin to the dog.
+They have five digits; they bolt their food like dogs; their sense of
+smell is said to be very acute, though how it could serve them in the
+sea does not appear. The young are born upon the land and enter the
+water very reluctantly.
+
+This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence of the dog and
+attaches itself to its master as does the dog. Its sense of direction
+and locality is very acute. This group of seals in front of me, day
+after day, and week after week, returns to the same spot in the
+ever-changing waters, without the variation of a single yard, so far as
+I can see. The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst, and it
+seems as if some sixth sense must guide them to it. Locality is as
+unreal in the sea as in the sky, but these few square yards of shifting
+waters seem as real to these seals as if they were a granite ledge. They
+keep massed there on the water at that particular point, with their
+flippers protruding above the surface, as if they were as free from
+danger as so many picnickers. Yet something attracts them to this
+particular place. I know of no other spot along the coast for a hundred
+miles or more where the seals congregate as they do here. What is the
+secret of it? Evidently it is a question of security from their enemies.
+At this point the waves break much farther out than usual, which
+indicates a hidden reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow
+water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, from
+stealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear their
+barking in the early part of the night, but long before morning their
+half-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire for
+the night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or more
+out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protection
+from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on
+account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity
+offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning,
+I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the
+unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short
+intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my youth.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES
+
+
+I. NATURE'S WIRELESS
+
+The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to
+give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one
+knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if
+they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like
+community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
+process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an
+impulse.
+
+So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in
+the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The
+members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to
+the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know
+it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated.
+The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and
+coöperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
+without scheme or direction.
+
+This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the
+migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these
+little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to
+commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in
+Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight
+toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When
+the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course.
+Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive
+with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of
+insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal
+life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same
+unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual
+migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the
+flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast
+armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our
+youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They
+came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in
+the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were
+as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our
+flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of
+blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air
+with astonishing precision.
+
+In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I have
+seen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going through
+various intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroom
+quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of men
+try it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and the
+tumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as to
+bring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of their
+breasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a giant
+hand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a
+tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues a
+bird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robin
+dashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactly
+coincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of a
+tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or a
+squirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the same
+machine-like unity.
+
+In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent,
+uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon some
+infusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal,
+the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of action
+as of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity.
+
+How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals!
+How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first day
+of the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seem
+to feel the impending danger.
+
+The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate the
+same law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go South
+and thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in the
+trees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a new
+kind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in the
+spring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley in
+California was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west.
+In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshoppers
+witnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. They
+stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodies
+making the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have made
+them. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one.
+
+This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makes
+up to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what we
+call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathy
+is probably a survival from our earlier animal state.
+
+
+II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE
+
+Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the
+conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more
+intelligent than honey bees:
+
+  If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir
+  John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle
+  down horizontally with its base to the window, you will
+  find that the bees will persist till they die of
+  exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an
+  issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two
+  minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on
+  the opposite side.
+
+The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems of
+life are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers;
+their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few natural
+enemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores of
+flycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. The
+kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally
+snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies;
+the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while,
+besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the
+vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them.
+Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficult
+the trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to
+"swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himself
+and plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready for
+a trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is,
+and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is
+reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crush
+it is as easy as to crush a beetle.
+
+The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle for
+existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our
+skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take
+thought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them.
+
+To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for folly
+so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that
+the more fool you are, the more you know.
+
+Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of
+the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other
+animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free
+intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an
+overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,
+
+  She makes of labor an eternal lust.
+
+Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or
+better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows
+and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.
+
+The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the
+swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.
+
+It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize
+one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees
+from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box,
+when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in
+carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees
+from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they
+have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.
+
+Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon
+during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news
+of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!
+
+Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration,
+and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The
+secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this
+solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not.
+He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the
+explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the
+power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings";
+of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the
+"extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they
+are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring
+outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive
+superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer
+of the dawn,--the early bee,--like the early bird that catches the worm,
+returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming
+to-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay
+with white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "the
+mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the
+bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably
+call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities
+proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the
+sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand
+juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations
+as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine
+liquid."
+
+When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing its
+commands," or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritual
+communications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he is true to his own
+conception.
+
+The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like all
+their other economies--not a matter of thought, but of instinct.
+
+Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake of
+humanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as we
+communicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another this
+and that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters,
+and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous to
+verbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the
+Spirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and coöperate with one
+another as the cells of the body communicate and coöperate in building
+up the various organs. The spirit of the body coördinates all the
+different organs and tissues, making a unit of the body.
+
+If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates into
+the hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it
+lies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object in
+the body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomes
+encysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless.
+
+Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body will
+infuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by the
+bee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from the
+same hive heed it not.
+
+Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another as
+animals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, they
+ruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another world
+of beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form a
+part. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their work
+of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their
+apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not
+personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the
+cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers,
+sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers,
+working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the
+kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These
+little people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; they
+breathe and hear through their legs, their antennæ.
+
+The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instincts
+lead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, and
+they know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, while
+the workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power of
+vision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen in
+her course through the air.
+
+The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fans
+at the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring
+the bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that go
+forth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of the
+hive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and
+crevices--all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive.
+
+After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear us
+out in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of the
+insect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinck
+is the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world in
+his latest volume, "Mountain Paths":
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain
+  earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and
+  amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There
+  is something, on the other hand, about the insect that
+  does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology
+  of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect
+  comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic,
+  more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+  One would think that it was born of some comet that had
+  lost its course and died demented in space.
+
+Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman
+and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of
+hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from
+foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as
+welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they
+attract the attention of one they know _who recognizes their signal by
+thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the
+stranger has departed_." (The italics are mine.) He says the same
+hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their
+arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
+with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in
+camp some time."
+
+Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What
+would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when
+we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them
+lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the
+nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.
+
+
+III. ODD OR EVEN
+
+One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that in
+the inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic world
+by odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampy
+meadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium,
+and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality I
+might have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel,
+or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive
+of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the
+freedom and irregularity of growing things.
+
+One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things.
+Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some
+eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the
+number six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be so
+sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and
+incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly
+odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually have
+three or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and the
+cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We have five fingers and five
+toes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers
+serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganic
+world things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world the
+equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence the
+danger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not be
+driven into a corner.
+
+Well may Emerson ask--
+
+  Why Nature loves the number five,
+  And why the star form she repeats?
+
+The number five rules in all the largest floral families, as in the
+crowfoot family, the rose family (which embraces all our fruit trees),
+the geranium family, the flax family, the campanula family, the
+convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then there is a large number
+of flowers the parts of which go in threes, one of the best known of
+which is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the only form I
+recall based on the number five.
+
+
+IV. WHY AND HOW
+
+One may always expect in living nature variations and modifications. It
+is useless to ask why. Nature is silent when interrogated in this way.
+Ask her how, and you get some results. If we ask, for instance, why the
+sting of the honey bee is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and
+bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth like a needle, so that
+they can sting and sting again, and live to sting another day, while the
+honey bee stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one species
+of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has a powerful electric
+battery; or why the porcupine has an armor of quills while his brother
+rodent the woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on--we make no
+addition to our knowledge.
+
+But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and defenseless an animal as
+the rabbit manages to survive and multiply, we extend our knowledge of
+natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of its wakefulness--by
+never closing its eyes--and by its speed; also by making its home where
+it can command all approaches, and so flee in any direction. Or if we
+ask how our ruffed grouse survives and prospers in a climate where its
+cousin the quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of certain
+trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder and is often cut off by a deep
+fall of snow.
+
+If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get no answer; but if we ask
+how he does it, we find out that he stores up food in his den, hence
+must take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck hibernates, also, but
+he stores up fuel in the shape of fat in his own body. The porcupine is
+above ground and active all winter. He survives by gnawing the bark of
+certain trees, probably the hemlock. We have two species of native mice
+that look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the jumping, or
+kangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is active the season through, over and
+under the snow; the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparently
+accomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely keeping the spark of
+life burning. His fires are banked, so to speak; his temperature is very
+low, and he breathes only at long intervals.
+
+If, then, we ask with Emerson, "_why_ Nature loves the number five," and
+"_why_ the star form she repeats," we shall be put to it for an answer.
+We can only say that with living things odd numbers are more likely to
+prevail, and with non-living, even numbers.
+
+Some seeds have wings and some have not. To ask why, is a blind
+question, but if we ask _how_ the wingless seeds get sown, we may add to
+our knowledge.
+
+In our own practical lives, in which experimentation plays such a part,
+we are often compelled to ask why this result and not that, why this
+thing behaves this way and that thing that way. We are looking for
+reasons or causes. The farmer asks why his planting in this field was a
+failure, while it was a success in the next field, and so on. An
+analysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture will give him the
+answer.
+
+
+V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM
+
+That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and a good and wise man
+admits of no question, but to us, at this distance, it seems strange
+enough that he should have thought that he had hit upon the key to the
+origin of species in the slow and insensible changes which he fancied
+species underwent during the course of the geologic ages, and should
+thus have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had he called his
+work the "Variability of Species," or the "Modification of Species," it
+would not have been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us new
+varieties, but not new species. In fact, of the origin of species we
+know absolutely nothing, no more than we do about the origin of life
+itself.
+
+Of the development of species we know some of the factors that play a
+part, as the influence of environment, the struggle for existence, and
+the competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherent
+tendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution?
+Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originate
+species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening a
+species, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. The record of the
+rocks reveals to us the relation of species, and their succession in
+geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.
+
+Agassiz believed that every species of animal and plant was the result
+of a direct and separate act of the Creator. But the naturalist sees the
+creative energy immanent in matter. Does not one have to believe in
+something like this to account for the world as we see it? And to
+account for us also?--a universal mind or intelligence
+
+  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+  And the round ocean and the living air,
+  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
+
+Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to the Infinite Mystery
+in terms of our own wills and acts. When we think of a Creator and the
+thing created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fire
+and light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could not
+look upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of the
+origin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said,
+speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they
+"have all been produced by laws acting around us," he spoke as a great
+philosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind
+grouping of irrational forces.
+
+
+VI. A LIVE WORLD
+
+It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked
+upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this
+world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive."
+But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a
+disordered mind.
+
+Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on
+the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living
+organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and
+palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms
+do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
+Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held
+in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast
+sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no
+doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding
+to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of
+air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call
+life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and
+bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a
+colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which
+the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be
+measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference
+of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet
+from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the
+throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times.
+They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call
+them, are occurring constantly.
+
+Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which
+translates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors and
+agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty
+feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet
+from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what
+is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions,
+occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds."
+"The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one
+occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible
+earthquake.
+
+Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams
+we know little of.
+
+From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression
+which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky
+planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself.
+Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more
+advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe
+at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of
+Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while both
+Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions,
+which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern
+Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more
+like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The
+flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man
+originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that
+the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival
+the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.
+
+
+VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR
+
+That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems
+to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has
+more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of
+the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the
+fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories
+fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and
+greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly
+made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when
+they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the
+jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the
+strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their
+political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the
+divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact
+that the organic world had reached its present stage of development
+through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these
+ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to
+development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that
+power comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them.
+
+The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of our
+higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous.
+Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the
+Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind,
+in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his
+plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his
+mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his
+simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore
+fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.
+The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code.
+Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of the
+territory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in the
+fields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had the
+sanction of natural law, that was enough; they were quite oblivious to
+the fact that with man's moral nature had come in a new biological law
+which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with, but which has
+tremendous authority and survival value--the law of right, justice,
+mercy, honor, love.
+
+We do not look for the Golden Rule among swine and cattle, or among
+wolves and sharks; we look for it among men; we look for honor, for
+heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of these things are
+involved in the Darwinian hypothesis. There is no such thing as right or
+wrong in the orders below man. These are purely human distinctions. It
+is not wrong for the wolf to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass,
+but an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the farthest star.
+Germany's assault upon the peace and prosperity of the world was a crime
+against the very heavens.
+
+Darwin occupied himself only with the natural evolution of organic
+forms, and not with the evolution of human communities. He treated man
+as an animal, and fitted him into the zoölogical scheme. He removed him
+from the realm of the miraculous into the plane of the natural. For all
+purposes of biological discussion, man is an animal, but that is not
+saying he is only an animal, and still under the law of animal
+evolution. The European man is supposed to have passed the stage of
+savagery, in which the only rule of right is the rule of might. To have
+made Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is to have debased a
+sound natural philosophy to a selfish and ignoble end.
+
+Germany lifted the law to the human realm and staked her all upon it,
+and failed. The moral sense of the world--the sense of justice, of fair
+play--was against her, and inevitably she went down. Her leaders were
+morally blind. When the rest of the world talked of moral standards, the
+German leaders said, "We think you are fools." But these standards
+brought England into the war--the sacredness of treaties. They brought
+the United States in. We saw a common enemy in Germany, an enemy of
+mankind. We sent millions of men to France for an ideal--for justice and
+fair play. To see our standards of right and justice ignored and
+trampled upon in this way was intolerable. The thought of the world
+being swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said to myself from the
+first, "The Allies have got to win; there is no alternative." And what
+astonishes me is that certain prominent Englishmen, such as Lord Morley,
+and others, did not see it. Would they have sat still and watched
+Germany destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel and make ready
+to destroy England? The very framework of our moral civilization would
+have been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his natural selection
+theory was to lead.
+
+
+VIII. THE ROBIN
+
+Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or best
+stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility,
+adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous
+feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From
+cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the
+only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks
+upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most
+diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on a
+horizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your
+porch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or under
+the shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground
+above a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on a
+projecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said
+he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days.
+
+He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a
+dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in
+September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word--a typical
+American in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first I
+hear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there are
+twenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The song
+sparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is far
+behind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows or
+bluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as well
+as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins.
+Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is
+near at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or New
+England. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a
+plebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one would
+not like to miss.
+
+The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be a
+runner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"--it starts "in
+high" and stops "in high."
+
+
+IX. THE WEASEL
+
+In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the
+strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red
+squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red
+squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel
+would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave
+him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both.
+Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at
+work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them.
+Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it
+released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by
+stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The
+bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many
+yards and then had pulled it down.
+
+Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a
+weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and
+round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and
+looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the
+squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the
+squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would
+not have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of my
+neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and
+took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then
+dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such
+terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy
+prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form,
+that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell
+upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a
+hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my
+foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its
+methods are a kind of _Schrecklichkeit_ in the animal world. It is the
+incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.
+
+
+X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE
+
+We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption that
+her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among
+plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool
+from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we
+want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk,
+irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want
+butter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains
+and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object
+with as little waste and delay as possible.
+
+Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her
+fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she
+subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her
+one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will
+be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize
+fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.
+
+Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are
+necessary for the survival of the species--strength, speed, sharpness of
+eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.
+
+Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the
+crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and
+can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey
+wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing
+that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons
+that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and
+cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and
+unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's
+hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?
+
+Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no
+concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly
+to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow
+sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the
+obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume that
+Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle
+of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He
+wants some particular good--a race-horse, a draft-horse--better quality
+or greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with
+her progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts with
+her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The
+stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She
+pits one species of plant or animal against another--heads I win, tails
+you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles
+their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are
+unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of
+mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage,
+but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass because
+it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.
+
+
+XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE
+
+We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or
+by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical
+or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the
+earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling
+up and pulling down--aggregating and accumulating, and separating and
+disintegrating.
+
+It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in
+inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process,
+but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an
+obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and
+monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Cañon and in the
+Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other
+aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and
+structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking
+forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to
+liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were
+not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the
+leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the
+earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and
+suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of
+them in the Grand Cañon! It looks as though titanic architects and
+sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand
+and a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologic
+ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the
+river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the
+material it took out of this chasm! But it could not--poetry at one end
+of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form
+of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains--material for a new series
+of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Cañons may be
+carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders of
+the mountains are only ordinary workmen.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+RUMINATIONS
+
+
+I. MAN A PART OF NATURE
+
+This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of
+as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its
+own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature
+external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call
+nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its
+crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little
+way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very
+limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are
+things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.
+
+It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as
+distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the
+world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals
+are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization
+is the separating of one thing from another and classifying and
+organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are
+absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be
+savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We
+improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own
+purposes. All the forces we use--wind, water, gravity, electricity--are
+still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to
+the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane
+soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty
+miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter
+projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the
+hammer because he greatly outweighs it.
+
+
+II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH
+
+Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of
+the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is
+like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is
+unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of
+the body the component elements--water, lime, iron, phosphorus,
+magnesia, and so on--remain the same, but their organization is changed.
+Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page,
+the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist
+independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then
+not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter
+in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it
+is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the
+brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds
+of our neighbor or friend--his character, his personality--exists after
+he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?
+
+We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or
+even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its
+ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the
+same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character,
+personality, mentality--do not these escape your analysis? and are they
+not also real?
+
+
+III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE
+
+Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter
+of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that
+same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His
+interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself
+also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his
+literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase
+of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic
+orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so
+that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well
+interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because
+the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew
+into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new
+enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and
+the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and
+our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting
+Nature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart and
+mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and
+his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives
+the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the
+perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical
+order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night
+prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there
+is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows
+and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they
+are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature
+interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her
+terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her
+presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
+emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him
+his susceptibility to beauty.
+
+It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in
+the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall
+into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the
+flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in
+the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
+and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot
+of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn,
+the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no
+resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it.
+We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the
+laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of
+brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.
+
+The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul
+through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's
+color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is
+in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and
+the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of
+physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the
+perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that
+apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret
+the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in
+the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the
+huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or
+Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
+mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's
+mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.
+
+All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an
+unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of
+chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as if
+they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own
+minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we
+habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be
+annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though
+theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's
+mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.
+
+The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine
+and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines
+of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit which
+the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt
+prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the
+attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official
+prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no
+avail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that the
+prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and
+clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for
+the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to
+reach one's hands for the moon.
+
+
+IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES
+
+The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are,
+in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the
+libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to
+the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the
+fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those
+forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence
+cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the
+air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at
+first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the
+vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in
+direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life
+possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its
+chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant,
+or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.
+
+The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for their
+religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to
+Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth
+inspires them.
+
+
+V. THE COSMIC HARMONY
+
+The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man
+produces or aims to produce in his work--the order and harmony that will
+give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic
+order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and
+circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are
+the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the
+spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles
+round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one
+law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends;
+and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently
+celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make
+their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, which
+undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as
+they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star
+suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a
+star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly
+grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic
+accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough,
+would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it
+even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the
+world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are
+the exception--else there would be no living world. Organic evolution
+reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious
+course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its
+course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels
+ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable
+life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a
+living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that
+disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we
+call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the
+orderly development of life.
+
+The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds
+tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she
+diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures,
+she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on the
+other hand, tends to multiply the mouths.
+
+Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work in
+deforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions of
+drought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations.
+
+
+VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS
+
+The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean are not merely the
+result of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is in
+them. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic
+than terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment which
+the sun and moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to side. Only
+the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The great
+inland bodies of water are unresponsive to them--they are too small for
+the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that only
+great souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What a
+puzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford of
+the cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in their
+net! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tied
+to the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters--how they follow the sun
+and moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round the world"! The
+land feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobile
+clouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of the
+sun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious of
+it. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.
+
+
+VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE
+
+It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and
+Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or
+unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the
+Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I
+saw in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado where they were laid down
+horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a
+mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series
+of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living
+bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms.
+Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure
+silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many
+exquisite forms, _Foraminiferæ_. The Pyramids are said to be built of
+rocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animal
+kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at present
+contributing, so largely as has the _Foraminiferæ_ to the formation of
+the earth's crust." In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem
+Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the
+continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh
+waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the
+"bordering primordial seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the mark.
+There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living
+organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them,
+but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring
+another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists
+usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter
+begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with
+myriads of animal forms.
+
+
+VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE
+
+Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to
+her ends." She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written
+large--written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of
+that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so
+of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal
+parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many
+trees yield fruit only every other year.
+
+I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most.
+Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses
+in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as
+of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts--butternuts,
+hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the
+agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the
+wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than
+they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she
+offers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find the
+service its own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and woods
+hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery
+arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries,
+and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels
+doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds
+have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with
+strychnine.
+
+We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few,
+extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western
+farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own account
+in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are
+stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD
+
+
+As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in
+Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again,
+which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the
+rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more
+familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I
+detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect
+to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in
+the whole performance.
+
+
+I. SUNRISE
+
+The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the
+rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his
+coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the
+forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes
+very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become
+conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly
+increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten
+minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge--the gold turns to silver.
+After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to
+appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a
+minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon
+line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me
+blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One
+realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its
+axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day.
+The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil"
+to describe this moment?--"Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks
+of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I
+watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It
+is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning.
+Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the
+heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually
+enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest
+veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down.
+His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the
+morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or
+storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
+are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as
+if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and
+yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this
+mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it
+could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God
+to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and
+particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.
+
+
+II. NATURE'S METHODS
+
+Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his
+inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The
+first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies
+hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed
+steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
+her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models.
+There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case
+of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with
+those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term.
+She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal
+and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is
+like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.
+
+The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the
+secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of
+the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the
+original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one
+another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one
+case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one
+overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and
+no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat
+rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the
+origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
+of the animal species.
+
+The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is
+analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated
+sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the
+other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of
+high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must
+have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and,
+while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
+approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it
+is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.
+
+We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in
+the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and
+tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned
+instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was
+developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as
+indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in
+the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
+that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or
+are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have
+slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from
+the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes
+and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things.
+The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought
+their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they
+graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for
+us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels;
+they teach us what to shun.
+
+How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for
+instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and
+elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They
+are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their
+horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our
+common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does
+not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.
+
+Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose
+and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.
+
+What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footed
+mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special
+tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use
+his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet
+have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it
+back with his nose.
+
+Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows
+its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition
+it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just
+beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven
+inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its
+conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.
+
+A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner,
+demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly
+distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in
+one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my
+answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural
+law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his
+letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.
+
+There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to
+scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command--to
+increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is
+limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs.
+Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum
+to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the
+fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
+robin--in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers--may
+and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.
+
+The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is
+mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on
+all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds
+do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be
+"fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail
+as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak
+many advantages.
+
+There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another--the
+fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and
+sharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with the
+blunt of scent--which we call natural competition; but the slow, the
+stupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and
+thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to
+be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and
+sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent
+secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the
+antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have
+speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful
+because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the gray
+squirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunk
+below him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows in
+the ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store of
+nuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates the
+rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels.
+
+The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, the
+cold, the heat--the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment,
+survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life than
+those who fall by the way.
+
+
+III. HEADS AND TAILS
+
+I have heard a story of a young artist who, after painting a picture of
+a horse facing a storm, was not satisfied with it, and, feeling that
+something was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly the great
+artist said to him, "Turn the horse around."
+
+The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse turns his tail. Why this
+difference? Because each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and
+its anatomy. How much better suited is the broad, square head of the
+cow, with its heavy coating of hair and its ridge of bone that supports
+its horns, to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous and
+sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast between their noses and
+their mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the
+grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off and
+loves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile and
+sensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and the
+equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow a
+feeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, the
+cow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. The
+tail of the cow is of less protection to her than is that of the horse
+to him. Her great need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the
+rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then her bony stern,
+with its ridges and depressions and thin flanks, is less fit in any
+encounter with storm or with beast than is her head. On the other hand,
+the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with their huge masses
+of muscles, his smooth flanks, and his tail--an apron of long, straight,
+strong hair--are well designed to resist storm and cold. What animal is
+it in Job whose neck is clothed with thunder? With the horse, it is the
+hips that are so clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.
+
+
+IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT
+
+If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I suppose the breath
+of the obscene fungus by any other name would smell as rank. The
+defensive weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would probably not be
+less offensive if we called him by that name alone, instead of the
+common one by which he is universally known.
+
+While in southern California last winter I heard of one that took up his
+abode in the basement of a house that stood on the side of a hill in the
+edge of the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where all sorts of
+odds and ends had accumulated. On some shelves was a box of
+miscellaneous articles, such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old
+toothbrushes, bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire, chips of wood,
+and the dried foot and leg of a hen. One morning, on opening the door of
+the basement, the mistress of the house was surprised to see the whole
+collection of trash laid out in a line across the floor. The articles
+were placed with some degree of regularity covering a space about
+fifteen inches wide and ten feet in length. There were sixty-one
+articles in the row.
+
+Having such an unsavory creature in the basement of one's house is
+rather ticklish business; not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet
+fraught with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away the exhibit and
+left the door open, hoping their uninvited guest would take his
+departure. But he did not. A few nights later he began another
+collection, finding a lot of new material--among other things a box with
+old atomizer bulbs, four of which bulbs he arranged here and there, in
+the row--a motley array.
+
+What is his object? I confess I do not know. No one has seen him do it,
+as he works at night, but there is little doubt that it is his work.[3]
+The Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger than a gray
+squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.
+
+  [3] Later investigations point to this having been the
+  work of a wood rat instead of a skunk.--C. B.
+
+I wish some one would tell me why this night prowler so often seems to
+spray the midnight air with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He
+never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our Eastern species is
+as free from odor as a squirrel or a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by
+day or night in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground that
+lasts for months. While at a friend's house in the Catskills last August
+a wood pussy came up behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap. We
+saw him from the window in the early evening, and we smelled him. For
+some reason he betrayed his presence. Late that night I was awakened by
+a wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose smart, yet in the
+morning no odor could be detected anywhere about the place. Of course
+the smell is much more pronounced in the damp night air than by day, yet
+this does not seem an adequate explanation. Does he signal at night to
+his fellows by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I have never
+heard him make a vocal sound. When caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs
+in a stone wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping his feet. He
+is the one American who does not hurry through life. I have no proof
+that he ever moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he ever
+experiences the feeling of fear, so common to nearly all our smaller
+animals. His track upon the snow is that of a creature at peace with all
+the world.
+
+
+V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE
+
+Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of some animals than of
+others. The frog and the toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn
+thousands, but most birds lay only five or six eggs.
+
+A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a miser with the other. She
+lets loose an army of worms upon the forests, and then sends an
+ichneumon-fly to check them. She wastes no perfume or color upon the
+flowers which depend upon the wind to scatter their pollen.
+Cross-fertilization is dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways
+to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will rob the bones of the
+fowl of their lime to perfect the shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or
+cunning on the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has already
+endowed each of them with a perfect means of defense.
+
+Two things Nature is not chary of--fear and pain. She heaps the measure
+here because fear puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them
+from many real dangers. What dangers have lurked for man and for most
+wild things in the dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a
+fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic. Pain, too,
+safeguards us; it shields us against real dangers. The pains of
+childbirth are probably no check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of
+procreation, especially on the part of the male, overcomes all other
+considerations.
+
+
+VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS
+
+Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and ticks for the South--this
+seems to be Nature's decree, at least in this country. The mosquitoes of
+the Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously, while our Jersey
+mosquitoes hesitate and parley and make exasperating feints and passes.
+On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a swarm of these
+insects rose out of the grass as if they had been waiting for me all the
+years (as they had) and were so hungry that they could not stand upon
+the order of their proceeding, but came headlong.
+
+In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to death by the fleas. They
+were the most sorry, forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life was
+evidently a burden to them. I remember that Lewis and Clark, in their
+journey across the continent, were greatly pestered by fleas. I have
+found that our woodchucks, when they "hole up" in the fall, are full of
+fleas.
+
+
+VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
+
+I have just been reading, for the third time, Dana's "Two Years Before
+the Mast," my sojourn near San Diego for a few months, where so many of
+the scenes and events he describes took place, having given me a renewed
+interest in the book.
+
+It is very evident that the climate of southern California has greatly
+changed since Dana was here in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in
+1832 and 1833. The change has been from wet to dry. At that time his
+ship collected, and others engaged in the same trade collected, hundreds
+of thousands of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from cattle
+grown by the missions between San Diego and Santa Barbara. This fact
+implies good pasturage. The cattle grazed on the hills and plains that
+are now, during a large part of the year, as dry as a bone. At present
+cattle left to their own devices on this coast would soon starve to
+death.
+
+Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain, mainly from the
+southeast, which the ship, anchored a few miles off the coast, or
+cruising up and down, experienced at all times of year--one or more
+storms each week, often lasting for days. One December he describes it
+as raining every hour for the whole month. The dread of the southeasters
+was ever present with the sailors. One of these, lasting three days,
+which came out of a cloudless sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays a
+southeast storm of half a day is, according to my experience, an
+uncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely a drop of rain falls here from
+April till November, yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August. At
+present, in some of the interior valleys, where they grow alfalfa by
+means of irrigation, I see herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the season
+of rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle do well, but during
+the long dry season there is no pasturage save dry pasturage.
+
+Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season here, I have been
+here during three seasons and have so far seen only light rains. To-day
+(December 16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as you care to
+dig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in grain, and a great cloud of dust
+streamed out behind him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavy
+rainfall in this locality that inundated large sections of the country
+and destroyed much property, the dry San Diego River getting out of
+bounds and carrying away bridges and floating houses on its banks. But
+it has been as dry as a highway ever since. It is clear that when the
+big rains do come they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly.
+
+
+VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE
+
+Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on my home acres in the
+Catskills, I noticed that the wild strawberry-vines sent out their
+runners over the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the turf,
+just as over the ground. Of course they could not take root, but they
+went through all the motions of taking root; the little clusters of
+leaves developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their points or stood
+at "attention," and the runners pushed out two or three feet over the
+barren surface and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the desert
+whose strength begins to fail. The first knot, or, one might say, the
+first encampment, was about one foot from the last one upon the turf,
+the next one about eight inches farther in; then the distance dropped to
+six inches, then to four. I think the runner finally gave it up and
+stopped reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently draws its main
+sustenance from the one next behind it, and when this one fails to reach
+the soil it loses heart and can give little succor to the next in front.
+The result is that the stools become smaller and smaller, and the
+distances between them less and less, down the whole line.
+
+Nature's methods are seen in the little as well as in the big, and these
+little purple runners of the vine pushing out in all directions show the
+all-round-the-circle efforts of Nature as clearly as do the revolving
+orbs in sidereal space. Her living impulses go out in all directions.
+She scatters her seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots.
+She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as upon the land. She
+knows not our parsimony nor our prudence. We say she is blind, but
+without eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live to
+particular ends, and are limited to particular spheres, have need of
+eyes. Nature has all time and all space and all ends. Delays and failure
+she knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do not reach their
+goal, the trouble corrects itself; they finally stop searching for it in
+that direction, and the impulse of the plant goes out stronger and
+fuller on other sides.
+
+If the rains were especially designed to replenish our springs and
+supply our growing crops, the clouds might reasonably be expected to
+limit their benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the rains are
+older than are we and our crops, and it is we who must adjust ourselves
+to them, not they to us.
+
+The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized vision. Does the
+blood need eyes to find its way to the heart and lungs? Does the wind
+need eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop its winged seeds?
+It drops them upon all spots, and each kind in due time finds its proper
+habitat, the highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants,
+hitting their marks as surely as do others.
+
+Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps are numbered and must
+go in a particular direction, but the goal of all-seeing Nature is
+everywhere, and she arrives before she starts. She has no plan and no
+method, and she is not governed.
+
+These conceptions express too little, not too much. Nature's movements
+are circular; her definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The
+rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no more an end than is
+the rising vapor. Each is a part of the great circuit of beneficent and
+malevolent forces upon which our life (and all life) depends, upon which
+the making of the soil of the earth and the shaping of the landscape
+depend; all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and perfume of the
+world, all the glory of cloud and sky, all the hazards of flood and
+storm, all the terror of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit
+of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back again through the rivers
+to the sea. In our geologic time there is, in this circuit of the
+waters, more that favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say,
+we should not be here. The enormous destruction of human life, of all
+life, which has taken place and will continue to take place, in this
+beneficent circuit, is only an incident in the history of the globe; the
+physical forces are neither for nor against it; they are neutral; life
+to be here at all has to run these risks; has to run the gantlet of
+these forces, and to get many a lash and gash in the running. Against
+the suffering and death incident thereto there is no insurance save in
+the wit of man himself. All this wit has been developed and sharpened by
+much waste and suffering. We learn to deal with difficulties through the
+discipline of the difficulties themselves. If man were finally to learn
+to control the rains and the floods, it would be through the experience
+which they themselves bring him. The demons that destroy him are on his
+side when he strikes with the strength which they give him. Gravity,
+which so often crushes and overthrows him, is yet the source of all his
+might. The fire that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same fire
+that warms him and drives his engines across the continent.
+
+There is no god that pities us or weeps over our sufferings, save the
+god in our own breasts. We have life on heroic terms. Nature does not
+baby us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take our chances with
+all other forms of life. Our special good fortune is that we are capable
+of a higher development, capable of profiting to a greater extent by
+experience, than are the lower forms of life. And here is the mystery
+that has no solution: we came out of the burning nebulæ just as our
+horse and dog, but why we are men and they are still horse and dog we
+owe to some Power, or, shall I say, to the chance working of a multitude
+of powers, that are beyond our ken. That some Being willed it, designed
+it, no; yet it was in some way provided for in the constitution of the
+world.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Agassiz, Louis, 168, 169.
+
+  Air, light and heavy, 72, 73.
+
+  Albatross, 38.
+
+  Animal life, abundance, 11, 12.
+
+  Antlers, 201.
+
+  Ants, 11.
+
+  Army trucks, 110, 111.
+
+  Arum, 196.
+
+  Automobile trip, 109-26.
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis, 186.
+
+  Barton, W. Va., 119.
+
+  Bee, honey, spirit of the hive, 152, 158-62;
+    intelligence, 156, 157;
+    communication, 159, 160;
+    their world, 161;
+    sting, 165.
+
+  Bee, leaf-cutter, 14, 15.
+
+  Beech, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Birds, living with, 31;
+    flight, 32-38;
+    and cats, 56;
+    nesting near houses, 54-59;
+    home sense, 59;
+    nests of most species built by the females, 64, 65;
+    and dead trees, 84, 85;
+    song, 86;
+    at Pine Knot, Va., 102-05;
+    of southern California, 129-32;
+    community of mind in flocks, 153, 154.
+
+  Birds' nests, finding, 79-81.
+
+  Bluebird, endearing qualities, 43;
+    nesting, 43, 44, 54;
+    experience with a pair, 44-48.
+
+  Bobolink, song flight, 38, 85.
+
+  Bolar Springs, 117.
+
+  Brain, as organ of the mind, 22, 23.
+
+  Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc, 157.
+
+  Bumble-bee, carpenter, 36.
+
+  Bunting, indigo, nesting, 90, 91.
+
+  Bunting, painted, 114.
+
+  Butterflies, flight, 34;
+    flocking, 155.
+
+  Butterfly, monarch, 34, 35, 155.
+
+  Buzzard, turkey, 32-34.
+
+
+  Cacti, 143-48.
+
+  California, southern, observations in, 127-51;
+    coast, 127;
+    mountains, 127, 128;
+    climate and soil, 128;
+    bird-song, 128, 129;
+    birds, 129-32;
+    change of climate in, 210-12.
+
+  Cambium layer, 5, 6.
+
+  Carpenter, W. B., quoted, 194.
+
+  Catbird, 30;
+    stealthiness, 60, 67, 68;
+    experience with a pair, 60-66;
+    fondness for butter, 66;
+    theatrical, 68;
+    notes, 87.
+
+  Caterpillars, 91-94.
+
+  Causes, 165-67.
+
+  Cedar-bird, 65.
+
+  Chance, in animal life, 208, 209.
+
+  Cheat River, W. Va., 116.
+
+  Chipmunks, two in a den, 11;
+    storing currants, 17;
+    carrying provender, 96, 97.
+
+  Chippie. _See_ Sparrow, chipping.
+
+  Chlorophyll, 190, 191.
+
+  Chrysalis, 12.
+
+  Condor, 33, 34.
+
+  Connellsville, Pa., 113.
+
+  Cormorant, 132.
+
+  Cosmos, the, order and harmony of, 191-93.
+
+  Cow, 205.
+
+  Crow, flight, 37;
+    needs no great wing-power, 180.
+
+  Crow, fish, 55, 56, 68.
+
+  Cuckoo, 71, 72, 87;
+    solemnity, 88;
+    nesting, 88, 89;
+    young, 89;
+    nest, 90;
+    food, 90.
+
+  Cuckoo, black-billed, notes, 87, 88;
+    nesting-habits, 88.
+
+  Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 87.
+
+
+  Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., at San Diego, 210, 211.
+
+  Darwin, Charles, quoted, 5,17, 18, 33;
+    his eager study of natural history, 17, 18;
+    observations during the voyage of the Beagle, 18, 19;
+    failure of his theory, 147, 167-69;
+    his mind, 173;
+    treated man as an animal, 174.
+
+  Darwin, George Howard, on the tides, 169, 170.
+
+  Darwinism, a cause of the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Death, an analogy of, 185, 186.
+
+  Desert, vegetation of the, 143-48.
+
+  Dove, mourning, _or_ turtle-dove, 86.
+
+
+  Earth, the, quiverings of the surface, 169-71;
+    the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Edison, Thomas A., 114, 119;
+    contrasted with Mr. Ford, 122-25.
+
+  Elm, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 69, 165, 186.
+
+  Erosion, as sculpture, 181-83.
+
+
+  Fabre, Jean Henri, 162;
+    quoted, 139.
+
+  Far-away, the, 39.
+
+  Fear in animals, 58, 59, 154, 155, 209.
+
+  Fireflies, 19.
+
+  Firestone, H. S., 119, 125.
+
+  Fish, schools of, 154.
+
+  Fleas, 210.
+
+  Flies, intelligence, 156, 157.
+
+  Foraminiferæ, 194.
+
+  Ford, Henry, 113, 114, 119, 120;
+    contrasted with Mr. Edison, 122-24.
+
+  Foxes, 180.
+
+  Frog, wood, 94, 95.
+
+
+  Germans, Darwinism, and the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Giraffe, 200.
+
+  Girls, two West Virginia, 115.
+
+  Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 103.
+
+  God, man appropriating, 199.
+
+  Goldfinch, flight, 37, 42;
+    chorus singing, 40-42;
+    notes, 42;
+    notes of young, 43;
+    nesting, 43.
+
+  Grand Cañon, 182, 194.
+
+  Grass, the wonder of, 74, 75.
+
+  Grasshoppers, 155.
+
+  Great Smoky Mts., 109.
+
+  Greensborough, Pa., 112.
+
+  Grosbeak, rose-breasted, nesting, 65.
+
+  Grouse, ruffed, 166.
+
+  Gull, herring, 131.
+
+  Gulls, flight, 38.
+
+
+  Hawk, red-tailed, 32.
+
+  Hawks, flight, 35.
+
+  Haymaking, 69-76.
+
+  Hen-hawk, flight, 35.
+
+  Hornets, 163.
+
+  Horns, 201, 202.
+
+  Horse, 205, 206.
+
+  Horseshoe Run, W. Va., 114.
+
+  Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 64;
+    bathing in dew, 13;
+    nest, 79;
+    a fairy bird, 94.
+
+  Hurley, Edward N., 113.
+
+  Huxley, Thomas Henry, 27;
+    quoted, 8, 25.
+
+
+  Ibis, white, 32, 153, 154.
+
+  Insects, their world, 23-25, 162;
+    senses, 24;
+    reaction to heat,
+    cold, and vibrations, 25;
+    antennæ, 25;
+    the ruling sex among, 140, 141.
+
+  Interpretation, 186-90.
+
+  Ironweed, 116.
+
+
+  James, William, 22.
+
+  Jay, blue, notes, 87.
+
+  Joe-Pye-weed, 116.
+
+  Junco, young, 19, 20;
+    nesting, 81;
+    abundance, 82.
+
+
+  Kepler, Johann, 169.
+
+  Killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Kingbird, flight, 37;
+    and bees, 156.
+
+
+  Leaves, autumn, 1-3.
+
+  Lemmings, 152, 153.
+
+  Life, origin of, 194, 195.
+
+  Life, human, analogies, 25-27.
+
+  Lightning-bugs. _See_ Fireflies.
+
+  Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 5.
+
+  Lubbock, Sir John, quoted, 156.
+
+
+  McCarthy, Denis Aloysius, quoted, 157.
+
+  Maeterlinck, Maurice, quoted, 23, 162;
+    on the bee, 156-63.
+
+  Man, and Darwinism, 174;
+    a part of nature, 184-86;
+    interpretation of nature and of himself, 186-90;
+    mystery of his evolution, 216.
+
+  Maple, sugar, susceptibility to atmospheric changes, 72, 73.
+
+  Maples, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Marcus Aurelius, quoted, 185.
+
+  Meadowlark, song flight, 37.
+
+  Measuring-worm, 91, 92.
+
+  Mice, wild, 16;
+    barking trees, 27, 28.
+
+  Microphone, 170, 171.
+
+  Microseisms, 170.
+
+  Mind, community of, 152-55.
+
+  Mockingbird, 68.
+
+  Moose, 200.
+
+  Mosquitoes, 210.
+
+  Moth, luna, 97.
+
+  Mouse, jumping, 166, 167.
+
+  Mouse, white-footed, 166.
+
+  Mullets, 154.
+
+
+  Natural history about home, 39, 40.
+
+  Nature, her methods unlike ours, 179-81, 199;
+    interpreting, 186-90;
+    lavishness and parsimony, 195, 196, 209;
+    puzzling and contradictory, 201, 202;
+    all-seeing, 212-14;
+    her movements circular, 214-16.
+
+  Nighthawk, 104.
+
+  Nonpareil, _or_ painted bunting, 114.
+
+  North Carolina, a countryman of, 121.
+
+  Northern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+
+  Oak, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Odd and even numbers, 163-65.
+
+  Oriole, Baltimore, 30, 56;
+    nest, 48-52, 64.
+
+  Oriole, Bullock's, nest, 52.
+
+  Oriole, orchard, nest, 52.
+
+  Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on the origin of life, 194, 195.
+
+  Ostrich, 200.
+
+  Owl, screech, 45-47.
+
+
+  Pacific Ocean, 127.
+
+  Pain, 209.
+
+  Pear-trees, autumn color, 1.
+
+  Pelican, California brown, 131, 132.
+
+  Pennsylvania, motor trip through, 109-13.
+
+  Pewee, wood, nest, 52, 64;
+    its plaint, 87.
+
+  Phœbe, flight, 37;
+    nest, 52-54, 56, 59, 60, 64, 79, 80.
+
+  Pigeon, wild, 103, 104.
+
+  Pine Knot, Va., visit to, 101-08.
+
+  Pipit, American, 129;
+    nest, 129, 130.
+
+  Pittsburgh, 111.
+
+  Plover, killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Porcupine, 166.
+
+
+  Rabbit, its protection, 166;
+    caught by a weasel, 177, 178.
+
+  Rainbow tints, in dew, etc., 13, 14.
+
+  Rat, wood, 207 _note_.
+
+  Reasons, 165-67.
+
+  Redstart, 29.
+
+  Road-mending, 11.
+
+  Robin, young, 19;
+    nest, 53-55, 64, 176;
+    fear of man, 57, 58;
+    fittest to survive, 175, 176;
+    versatility, 176;
+    a hustler, 176;
+    danger of a plague of robins, 177;
+    a runner, 177.
+
+  Rocks, origin of the secondary, 200.
+
+  Roosevelt, Theodore, visit to Pine Knot, Va., with, 101-08;
+    knowledge of India, 101;
+    opinion of Taft, 105;
+    killing a mosquito, 105, 106;
+    protection of the President, 106;
+    bird-gazing, 107;
+    letter from, 107, 108.
+
+
+  Salamander, orange-colored, 95, 96.
+
+  San Diego, Cal., 210-12.
+
+  Sandstone, in the Catskills, 20.
+
+  Sap, 6-8.
+
+  Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Scorpion, 23.
+
+  Seals, hair, in California, 148-51.
+
+  Sex, the ruling, 140, 141.
+
+  Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, 169;
+    on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Shrew, 16.
+
+  Skunk, 206-08.
+
+  Snakes, 11.
+
+  Sources, original, 190, 191.
+
+  South, characteristics of the, 120, 121.
+
+  Southern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+  Sparrow, story of a nest, 98, 99.
+
+  Sparrow, chipping _or_ social, nest, 53, 54.
+
+  Sparrow, song, song flight, 37;
+    nesting, 54;
+    singing, 85, 86.
+
+  Sparrow, vesper, nesting, 80-84;
+    its names, 82;
+    appearance and habits, 82, 83;
+    courted by a skylark, 83.
+
+  Species, origin of, an insoluble problem, 167-69, 199.
+
+  Spider, trap-door, 132-43.
+
+  Spiders, 12, 23;
+    genius of, 136.
+
+  Spider-webs, rainbows in, 13, 14.
+
+  Squirrel, gray, caught by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Squirrel, red, chased by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Strawberry-vines, wild, 212-14.
+
+  Struggle, 203, 204.
+
+  Sunrise, 197, 198.
+
+  Survival of the fit, 201, 203.
+
+  Swallow, bank, 78.
+
+  Swallow, barn, 71;
+    parental anxiety, 76, 77;
+    notes, 76, 77;
+    pleasing qualities, 77, 78.
+
+  Swallow, cliff, 77.
+
+  Swallow, tree, 78.
+
+  Swallows, feeding, 15, 16;
+    hibernation, 78.
+
+  Swift, chimney, 36.
+
+  Sycamore, autumn color, 3.
+
+
+  Taft, William Howard, 105.
+
+  Telepathy, 155.
+
+  Thistle, Canada, 202.
+
+  Thorns, the use of, 143-48.
+
+  Thrasher, brown, 67, 68.
+
+  Thrush, Alaska hermit, 129.
+
+  Thrush, hermit, song, 87.
+
+  Thrush, olive-backed, 30.
+
+  Thrush, Wilson's. _See_ Veery.
+
+  Thrush, wood, 30, 64;
+    manners, 67, 68.
+
+  Tides, the, 169, 170, 193, 194.
+
+  Titlark. _See_ Pipit.
+
+  Trees, leaves, 1-3;
+    mechanism of growth, 4-8;
+    roots and rootlets, 4-6;
+    what man has in common with, 9, 10.
+
+  Tree-toad, 71.
+
+  Turnip, Indian, 196.
+
+  Turtle-dove. _See_ Dove, mourning.
+
+
+  Uniontown, Pa., 113.
+
+  Universe. _See_ Cosmos.
+
+
+  Van Dyke, John C., on desert plants, 145, 146.
+
+  Veery, nesting, 97, 98.
+
+  Vireo, nest, young, and mother, 99, 100.
+
+  Vireo, red-eyed, 86, 100.
+
+  Vireo, yellow-throated, 30.
+
+  Vital principle, 8, 9.
+
+
+  Warbler, Audubon's, 129.
+
+  Warbler, Canada, 29.
+
+  Warbler, mourning, 29, 31.
+
+  Wasp, a solitary, 12, 13.
+
+  Water-thrush, _or_ water accentor, 79.
+
+  Waxwing, Bohemian, 21.
+
+  Weasel, catching rabbits and squirrels, 177, 178;
+    an inspirer of terror, 178, 179.
+
+  Weather, prophesying the, 20-22.
+
+  West Virginia, motor trip through, 114-19.
+
+  Whitman, Walt, quoted, 9, 193.
+
+  Wolf Creek, 117.
+
+  Woodcock, flight song, 32, 37.
+
+  Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Woodpeckers, flight, 37.
+
+  World War, Darwinism a cause of the, 172-75.
+
+  Wren, Bewick's, 103.
+
+  Wren, house, 86;
+    and nesting-box, 29.
+
+  Wren, winter, nest, 79.
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+  CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
+  U · S · A
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under the Maples
+
+Author: John  Burroughs
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2009 [EBook #30246]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE MAPLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Turgut Dincer, Joseph Cooper and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  +-----------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Note:                     |
+  | Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy |
+  | has been retained as it appears in the  |
+  | original publication.                   |
+  +-----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: _Copyright, 1921, by Charles F. Lummis.
+     All rights reserved._
+
+  THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  (March 23, 1921; six days before his death)
+  Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time
+  friend Charles F. Lummis]
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+  BY
+  JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  [Illustration: The Riverside Press]
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and looking
+out upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples at
+Riverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last two
+years of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near his
+Hudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering in
+Southern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breaking
+up on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds,
+the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there in
+spirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the veranda
+of the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busy
+with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.
+
+Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees and
+dripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind,
+one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, he
+suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it _Under the Maples_!"
+
+His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit upon
+this title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among his
+miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows
+It was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It
+looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on my
+fire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as a
+lily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory
+wood to handle--a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning without
+snapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain,
+hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shade
+tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its
+veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the
+year round."
+
+  CLARA BARRUS
+
+    _The Nest at Riverby_
+  _West Park on the Hudson_
+      _New York_
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. THE FALLING LEAVES                                     1
+
+   II. THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST                         11
+
+  III. THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS                                   32
+
+   IV. BIRD INTIMACIES                                       39
+
+    V. A MIDSUMMER IDYL                                      69
+
+   VI. NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE                               79
+
+  VII. WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT                          101
+
+ VIII. A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY                                  109
+
+   IX. UNDER GENIAL SKIES                                   127
+       I. A Sun-Blessed Land                                127
+      II. Lawn Birds                                        129
+     III. Silken Chambers                                   132
+      IV. The Desert Note                                   143
+       V. Sea-Dogs                                          148
+
+    X. A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES                              152
+       I. Nature's Wireless                                 152
+      II. Maeterlinck on the Bee                            156
+     III. Odd or Even                                       163
+      IV. Why and How                                       165
+       V. An Insoluble Problem                              167
+      VI. A Live World                                      169
+     VII. Darwinism and the War                             172
+    VIII. The Robin                                         175
+      IX. The Weasel                                        177
+       X. Misinterpreting Nature                            179
+      XI. Natural Sculpture                                 181
+
+   XI. RUMINATIONS                                          184
+       I. Man a Part of Nature                              184
+      II. Marcus Aurelius on Death                          185
+     III. The Interpreter of Nature                         186
+      IV. Original Sources                                  190
+       V. The Cosmic Harmony                                191
+      VI. Cosmic Rhythms                                    193
+     VII. The Beginnings of Life                            194
+    VIII. Spendthrift Nature                                195
+
+  XII. NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD                      197
+       I. Sunrise                                           197
+      II. Nature's Methods                                  199
+     III. Heads and Tails                                   205
+      IV. An Unsavory Subject                               206
+       V. Chance in Animal Life                             208
+      VI. Mosquitoes and Fleas                              210
+     VII. The Change of Climate in Southern California      210
+    VIII. All-Seeing Nature                                 212
+
+   INDEX                                                    217
+
+
+
+
+UNDER
+THE MAPLES
+
+I
+
+THE FALLING LEAVES
+
+
+The time of the falling of leaves has come again. Once more in our
+morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and
+bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures
+while we slept.
+
+How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of light and color are
+their last days! There are exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of
+the fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously. They bequeath
+their heritage of color to their fruit. Upon it they lavish the hues
+which other trees lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often an
+exception. I have seen pear orchards in October painting a hillside in
+hues of mingled bronze and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, it
+is so chary of color upon its fruit.
+
+But in October what a feast to the eye our woods and groves present! The
+whole body of the air seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They
+are giving back the light they have been absorbing from the sun all
+summer.
+
+The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so clean and delicate when
+it first covers the paths and the highways that one almost hesitates to
+walk upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw down his cloak for
+Queen Elizabeth to walk upon? See what a robe the maples have thrown
+down for you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to soil it! The
+summer robes of the groves and the forests--more than robes, a vital
+part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have
+captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar
+rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when
+they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark,
+the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When
+the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what
+sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands
+reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a
+union and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the old
+trees suddenly become! what suppleness and grace invest their branches!
+The leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the cambium layer beneath
+the bark is the girdle of perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial
+expression of the same quality. The leaves have their day and die, but
+the last leaf that comes to the branch is as young as the first. The
+leaves and the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go, yet they
+age not; under the magic touch of spring the miracle is repeated over
+and over.
+
+The maples perhaps undergo the most complete transformation of all the
+forest trees. Their leaves fairly become luminous, as if they glowed
+with inward light. In October a maple-tree before your window lights up
+your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days its presence helps to
+dispel the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess in a much less
+degree that quality of luminosity, though certain species of oak at
+times are rich in shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees just
+named for the most part turn brown before they fall. The great leaves of
+the sycamore assume a rich tan-color like fine leather.
+
+The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals with which to capture her
+prey, but the net is not a part of herself as the leaf is a part of the
+tree. The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree never repairs its
+leaves. It may put forth new leaves, but it never essays to patch up the
+old ones. Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves that a few more
+or less or a few torn and bruised ones do not seem to matter. When the
+leaf surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some insect pest,
+or some form of leaf-blight, or by the ravages of a hail-storm, the
+growth of the tree and the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked.
+To denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession usually
+proves fatal. The vitality of the tree declines year by year till death
+ensues.
+
+To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy
+of the mechanism by which it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets
+at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top. The
+rootlets absorb the water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and
+the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree
+were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its
+vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds,
+on the other--earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic
+sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold
+upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they
+are; but all are delicate feeders in their mechanism of absorption from
+the earth and air.
+
+The tree touches the inorganic world at the two finest points of its
+structure--the rootlets and the leaves. These attack the great crude
+world of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only the microscope
+can fully reveal them to us. The animal world seizes its food in masses
+little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable,
+through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its
+nourishment molecule by molecule.
+
+A tree does not live by its big roots--these are mainly for strength
+and to hold it to the ground. How they grip the rocks, fitting
+themselves to them, as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's life
+is in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the roots. Darwin says
+those rootlets behave as if they had minute brains in their extremities.
+They feel their way into the soil; they know the elements the plant
+wants; some select more lime, others more potash, others more magnesia.
+The wheat rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the pea
+rootlets select more lime: the pea does not need the silica. The
+individuality of plants and trees in this respect is most remarkable.
+The cells of each seem to know what particular elements they want from
+the soil, as of course they do.
+
+The vital activity of the tree goes on at three points--in the leaves,
+in the rootlets, and in the cambium layer. The activity of the leaf and
+rootlet furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this generative
+layer--the milky, mucilaginous girdle of matter between the outer bark
+and the wood through which the tree grows and increases in size.
+Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have called
+it the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annually
+renewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeed
+the tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may die
+and fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact that
+its cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, is still
+youthful and doing its work. It is this layer that the yellow-bellied
+woodpecker, known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours, thus
+drawing directly upon the vitality of the tree. But his ravages are
+rarely serious. Only in two instances have I seen dead branches on an
+apple-tree that appeared to be the result of his drilling.
+
+What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no
+vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It
+adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a
+tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged
+in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and
+adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a
+plant or a tree are like the laborers in the field that produce for us
+the raw material of our food, while the leaves are like our many devices
+for rendering it edible and nourishing. The rootlets continue their
+activity in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and thus gorge the
+tree with fluid against the needs of the spring. In the growing tree or
+vine the sap, charged with nourishment, flows down from the top to the
+roots. In the spring it evidently flows upward, seeking the air through
+the leaves. Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always flows
+upward, while the nutritive sap flows downward, thus giving the tree a
+kind of double circulation.
+
+A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful when we have come to a
+knowledge of all its hidden processes, but it certainly is no less so.
+We do not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the bark, nor of
+the roots and rootlets, when we gaze upon a noble oak or an elm; we
+admire it for its form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin to
+ourselves; it is the work of a vast community of cells like those that
+build up our own bodies; it is a fountain of living matter rising up out
+of the earth and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a spray of
+leaves and flowers; and if we could see its hidden processes we should
+realize how truly like a fountain it is. While in full leaf a current of
+water is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward against
+gravity. This stream of water is truly its life current; it enters at
+the rootlets under the ground and escapes at the top through the leaves
+by a process called transpiration. All the mineral salts with which the
+tree builds up its woody tissues,--its osseous system, so to speak,--the
+instruments with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon which it
+obtains from the air, are borne in solution in this stream of water. Its
+function is analogous to that of the rivers which bring the produce and
+other material to the great cities situated upon their banks. A cloud of
+invisible vapor rises from the top of every tree and a thousand
+invisible rills enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The trees
+are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters from the earth to the
+clouds. Our own bodies and the bodies of all living things perform a
+similar function. Life cannot go on without water, but water is not a
+food; it makes the processes of metabolism possible; assimilation and
+elimination go on through its agency. Water and air are the two ties
+between the organic and the inorganic. The function of the one is mainly
+mechanical, that of the other is mainly chemical.
+
+As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows out at the top, to which
+point it rises by capillary attraction and a process called osmosis.
+Neither of them is a strictly vital process, since both are found in the
+inorganic world; but they are in the service of what we call a vital
+principle. Some physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a vital
+principle. Huxley thought we might as well talk about the principle of
+aqueosity in water. We are the victims of words. The sun does not shoot
+out beams or rays, though the eye reports such; but it certainly sends
+forth energy; and it is as certain that there is a new activity in
+matter--some matter--that we call vital.
+
+Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up new compounds and begets
+myriads of new forms not found in the inorganic world, till it finally
+builds up the body and mind of man. Death puts an end to this activity
+alike in man and tree, and a new kind of activity sets in--a
+disorganizing activity, still with the aid of water and air and living
+organisms. It is like the compositor distributing his type after the
+book is printed. The micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but they
+are of a different kind from those which build up the body in the first
+instance. But the living body as a whole, with its complex of
+coördinating organs and functions--what attended to that? The cells
+build the parts, but what builds the whole?
+
+How many things we have in common with the trees! The same mysterious
+gift of life, to begin with; the same primary elements--carbon,
+nitrogen, oxygen, and so on--in our bodies; and many of the same vital
+functions--respiration, circulation, absorption, assimilation,
+reproduction. Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell is
+the architect that builds up the bodies of both. Trees are rooted men
+and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through
+the minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillæ, and the animal body
+absorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, called
+lacteals.
+
+Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my
+mind. They are the words of a poet who sees hidden relations and
+meanings everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all animate nature
+is. The trees are wrapped in a kind of slumber in winter, and they are
+reservoirs of living currents in summer. If all living bodies came
+originally out of the sea, they brought a big dower of the sea with
+them. The human body is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held in
+solution by several gallons of water. The ashes of the living tree bulk
+small in comparison with the amount of water it holds. Yes, "the
+slumbering and liquid trees." They awaken from their slumber in the
+spring, the scales fall from their buds, the fountains within them are
+unsealed, and they again become streams of living energy, breaking into
+leaf and bloom and fruit under the magic of the sun's rays.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST
+
+
+I
+
+How closely every crack and corner of nature is packed with life,
+especially in our northern temperate zone! I was impressed with this
+fact when during several June days I was occupied with road-mending on
+the farm where I was born. To open up the loosely piled and decaying
+laminated rocks was to open up a little biological and zoölogical
+museum, so many of our smaller forms of life harbored there. From
+chipmunks to ants and spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the
+chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more beneath the loosely
+piled rocks. There were two of them in a soft, warm nest of dry,
+shredded maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned out of doors, but
+when they heard the racket overhead bolted precipitately. Two living
+together surprised me, as heretofore I had never known but one in a den.
+Near them a milk snake had stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the
+little earthquake which we set up got badly crushed. Two little
+red-bellied snakes about one foot long had also found harbor there.
+
+The ants rushed about in great consternation when their eggs were
+suddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under every
+stone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which they
+picked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-building
+spiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball of
+eggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body.
+This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about held
+between her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand,
+sheltered the chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was attached
+to it at its tail. It was surprising to see this enshrouded creature,
+blind and deaf, wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with its
+wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would about as soon expect to see
+an egg protest.
+
+Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to
+him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to
+eye or ear.
+
+The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or
+summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his
+pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open
+before him and he has only to turn the leaves.
+
+A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory rocking-chair the other day
+was annoyed by one of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want to
+occupy the chair. It held a small worm in its legs. She would "shoo" it
+away, only to see it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it did
+not want to sting her, but that its nest was somewhere in the chair.
+And, sure enough, as soon as she quieted down, it entered a small
+opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and deposited its worm, and
+presently was back with another, and then a third and a fourth; and
+before the day was done it came with little pellets of mud and sealed up
+the opening.
+
+
+II
+
+My morning walk up to the beech wood often brings me new knowledge and
+new glimpses of nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird taking its bath
+in the big dewdrops on a small ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe
+in the dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not before know that
+the hummer bathed at all.
+
+I also discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when
+saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning,
+exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute
+spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow.
+In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a
+pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I
+could not see the completed bow in so small an area. These fragments are
+as unapproachable as the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a
+suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays rainbow tints, you can
+see only one at a time--to the right or left of you. It also is a
+fragment of a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a great
+display of prismatic effects in the foliage of trees, or in the grass
+after a shower, are not to be credited. You may see the drops glistening
+in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit prismatic tints.
+In only one at a time will you see rainbow tints. Change your position,
+and you may see another, but never a great display of prismatic tints at
+one time.
+
+In my walk the other morning I turned over a stone, looking for spiders
+and ants. These I found, and in addition there were two cells of one of
+our solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called "sweat bees," because
+they came around us and would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if
+in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about the size of a honey
+bee, of lighter color, and its abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It
+carries its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs. These cells
+were of a greenish-brown color; each of them was like a miniature barrel
+in which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egg
+hatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment.
+These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits of
+leaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon the
+other. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings from
+leaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, a
+dozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the most
+workmanlike manner.
+
+In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out her
+nesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she had
+cut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and,
+holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen her
+carry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About the
+period of hatching, I do not know.
+
+
+III
+
+Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their game
+up as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which they
+drive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings ago
+the air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the
+size of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happened
+to be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep
+past. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a very
+conspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How
+many hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day!
+Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and other
+insect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!
+
+
+IV
+
+We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. We
+see little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures are
+cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookout
+for them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which,
+except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the night
+prowlers--skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls--yes, and mice.
+
+The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know is
+active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called
+the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to
+suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later it
+was literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.
+
+Turn over a stone in the fields and behold the consternation among the
+small folk beneath it,--ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders,--all
+objecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil,
+but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As I
+write these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the
+roadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants which
+grew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment and
+rot, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep,
+and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of the
+nuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesser
+rodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts.
+
+
+V
+
+In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature,
+Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:
+
+  Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+  inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean
+  ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains--warm mineral
+  springs--the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the
+  upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of
+  perpetual snow--all support organic beings.
+
+Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In the
+earth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the
+mud--he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was never
+scanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardships
+to add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the
+comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys of
+hundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions to
+glean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany or
+zoölogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a great
+altitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which they
+called "puna," and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with a
+twinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossil
+shells."
+
+His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge.
+Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biological
+facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere his
+insatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a different
+purpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read him
+for that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils,
+in reptiles, in volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with each of
+these subjects in mind. I recently had in mind the problem of the
+soaring condor, and I re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had
+studied and mastered that subject, too. If you are interested in seeing
+how the biological characteristics of the two continents, North and
+South America, agree or contrast with each other, you will find what
+you wish to know. You will learn that in South America the
+lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North
+America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps
+itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that
+the obscene fungus, or _Phallus_, taints the tropical forests, as a
+similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and
+that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders
+for their young, just as in North America. Of course there are new
+species of animal and plant life, but not many. The influence of
+environment in modifying species is constantly in his mind.
+
+
+VI
+
+The naturalist can content himself with a day of little things. If he
+can read only a word of one syllable in the book of nature, he will make
+the most of that. I read such a word the other morning when I perceived,
+when watching a young but fully fledged junco, or snowbird, that its
+markings Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young of birds
+always for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parent
+stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have
+speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco
+shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral
+white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper
+sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the
+white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of its
+forbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields,
+but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in the
+woods, and constructs a very artistic nest of dry grass and hair which
+is so well hidden that the passer-by seldom detects it.
+
+Another small word I read about certain of the rocks in my native
+Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray sandstone, that when you have split
+them open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown them up with
+dynamite, instead of the gray fresh surface of the rock greeting you, it
+is often a surface of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled or
+electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from the first muddy day of
+creation. I have such a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It is
+amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of doorstones fall upon it
+with soap and hot water, and utterly fail to make any impression upon
+it. Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with primal mud. The
+fresh-water origin of the Catskill rocks no doubt in some way accounts
+for it.
+
+
+VII
+
+We are all interested students of the weather, but the naturalist
+studies it for some insight into the laws which govern it. One season I
+made my reputation as a weather prophet by predicting on the first day
+of December a very severe winter. It was an easy guess. I saw in Detroit
+a bird from the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the Bohemian
+waxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above the Arctic Circle and is common
+to both hemispheres. I said, When the Arctic birds come down, be sure
+there is a cold wave behind them. And so it proved.
+
+When the birds fail to give one a hint of the probable character of the
+coming winter, what reliable signs remain? These remain: When December
+is marked by sudden and violent extremes of heat and cold, the winter
+will be broken; the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that the
+hum of the bee in December is the requiem of winter. But when the season
+is very evenly spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing through
+November and December, no hurry, no violence, then be prepared for a
+snug winter.
+
+As to wet and dry summers, one can always be guided by the rainfall on
+the Pacific coast; a shortage on the western coast means an excess on
+the eastern. For four or five years past California has been short of
+its rainfall; so much so that quite general alarm is felt over the
+gradual shrinkage of their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs;
+and during the summer seasons the parts of New England and New York with
+which I am acquainted have had very wet seasons--floods in midsummer,
+and full springs and wells at all times. The droughts have been
+temporary and local.
+
+We say, "As fickle as the weather," but the meteorological laws are
+pretty well defined. All signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail in
+a wet season. At one time the south wind brings no rain, at another time
+the north and northwest winds do bring rain. The complex of conditions
+over a continental area of rivers and lakes and mountain-chains is too
+vast for us to decipher; it inheres in the nature of things. It is one
+of the potencies and possibilities which matter possesses. We can take
+no step beyond that.
+
+
+VIII
+
+There seems to me to be false reasoning in the argument from analogy
+which William James uses in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The
+brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but may only sustain the
+relation to it, he says, which the wire sustains to the electric current
+which it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water which it
+conveys.
+
+Now the source and origin of the electric current is outside the wire
+that transmits it, and it could sustain no other than a transient
+relation to any outside material through which it passed. But if we
+know anything, we know that the human mind or spirit is a vital part of
+the human body; its source is in the brain and nervous system; hence, it
+and the organ through which it is manifested are essentially one.
+
+The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo in which the current
+originates is the only logical or permissible one.
+
+
+IX
+
+Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life,
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
+  earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something, on
+  the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to
+  the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One
+  would be inclined to say that the insect comes from
+  another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more
+  insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+
+Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, for
+instance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. The
+scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our land
+animals outside the insect world.
+
+The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have little
+conception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these little
+people. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecular
+constitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by our
+coarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarse
+and fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If they
+exceed three thousand a second, they become too shrill for our ears. It
+is thought that the world of sound with the insects begins where ours
+leaves off. The drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute. What
+would to us be a continuous sound is to them a series of separate blows.
+We begin to hear blows as continuous sounds when they amount to about
+thirty a second. The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; the
+cabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; and
+some species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin to
+think in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and
+vibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed the
+same microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed! We
+might see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies, or hear
+the hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so
+much that disturbs us must escape the insects, because their senses are
+too fine to take it in. Doubtless they do not hear the thunder or feel
+the earthquake.
+
+The insects are much more sensitive to heat and cold than we are, and
+for reasons. The number of waves in the ether that gives us the
+sensation of heat is three or four million millions a second. The number
+of tremors required to produce red light is estimated at four hundred
+and seventy-four million millions a second, and for the production of
+violet light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions a second. No
+doubt the insects react to all these different degrees of vibration.
+Those marvelous instruments called antennæ seem to put them in touch
+with a world of which we are quite oblivious.
+
+
+X
+
+To how many things our lives have been compared!--to a voyage, with its
+storms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with its
+morning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer,
+autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle.
+
+In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of
+chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each
+piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully.
+The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
+universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.
+But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a
+game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over
+an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess
+will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle
+where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more
+vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life
+is coöperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I
+suppose business is more often like a game than is life--your gain is
+often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
+rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that
+suggests a game of any kind.
+
+We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three
+things--money, goods, labor--and the greatest of these is labor. Labor
+is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires
+to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, the
+latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe and
+in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from nature
+what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands or
+under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us from
+obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us.
+
+The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen to
+whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their
+problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful
+suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen,
+artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through
+experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many persons
+who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces and
+conditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have of
+the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?
+
+Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastly
+more logical force in his figures than in those of most writers.
+
+Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a
+mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and
+noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then
+its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life
+that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to
+many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructive
+force.
+
+
+XI
+
+I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted to know why the
+meadow, or field, mice gnawed or barked the apple-trees when there was a
+deep coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because they found it
+difficult to get up through the deep, frozen snow to the surface to get
+seeds to eat? He did not seem to know that meadow mice are not
+seed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots and keep well hidden
+beneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snow
+coming up out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday life
+beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls, and hawks.
+Life then becomes a sort of picnic. They build new nests on the surface
+of the ground and form new runways, and disport themselves apparently in
+a festive mood. The snow is their protection. They bark the trees and
+take their time. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at an
+end, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flat
+stones, and lead once more the life of fear.
+
+
+XII
+
+Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my blanket, recovering from a
+slight indisposition, I was in a mood to be interested in the everyday
+aspects of nature before me--in the white and purple lilacs, in the
+maple-leaves nearly full grown, in the pendent fringe of the
+yellowish-white bloom of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of the
+grapevines, and so forth. All these things formed only a setting or
+background for the wild life near by.
+
+The birds are the little people that peep out at me, or pause and regard
+me curiously in this great temple of trees,--wrens, chippies, robins,
+bluebirds, catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants. A few
+days earlier, for a moment, a mourning ground warbler suddenly appeared
+around the corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and glanced
+hastily up at me. When I arose and looked over the railing, it had gone.
+Then the speckled Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringa
+branches and gave me several good views. The bay-breasted warbler was
+reported in the evergreens up by the stone house, but he failed to
+report to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart, however, came
+several times to the gravel walk below me, evidently looking for
+material to begin her nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren,
+was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying nesting-material
+into the box on the corner of the veranda. How intense and emphatic she
+is! And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with song! Yesterday an
+interloper appeared. He or she climbed the post by the back way, as it
+were, and hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as if to see
+that the coast was clear. He acted as if he felt himself an intruder.
+Quick as a flash there was a brown streak from the branch of a maple
+thirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after him. The culprit
+did not stop to argue the case, but was off, hotly pursued. I must not
+forget the pair of wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maple
+fifty or more feet away. How I love to see them on the ground at my
+feet, every motion and gesture like music to the eye! The head and neck
+of the male fairly glows, and there is something fine and manly about
+his speckled breast.
+
+A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry bushes at the south end
+of the house, and are in evidence at all hours. But when the nest is
+completed, and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out of the public
+eye as much as possible. From the front of the stage they retreat behind
+the curtain.
+
+One day as I sat here I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush down
+in the currant-bushes below me. Instantly I was transported to the deep
+woods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills. I heard the murmuring
+water and felt the woodsy coolness of those retreats--such magic hath
+associative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated vireo sang
+briefly in the maple, a harsh note; and the oriole with its insistent
+call added to the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the oriole. He
+has not one musical note, and in grape time his bill is red, or purple,
+with the blood of our grapes.
+
+But the most of these little people are my benefactors, and add another
+ray of sunshine to the May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacle
+of that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of the porch,
+like a little fairy, and then vanishing.
+
+The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere knowledge of them, is not
+enough. You must live with the birds, so to speak; have daily and
+seasonal associations with them before they come to mean much to you.
+Then, as they linger about your house or your camp, or as you see them
+in your walks, they are a part of your life, and help give tone and
+color to your day.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS
+
+
+To what widely different use birds put their power of flight! To the
+great mass of them it is simply a means of locomotion, of getting from
+one point to another. A small minority put their wing-power to more
+ideal uses, as the lark when he claps his wings at heaven's gate, and
+the ruffed grouse when he drums; even the woodcock has some other use
+for his wings than to get from one point to another. Listen to his
+flight song in the April twilight up against the sky.
+
+Our small hawks use their power of flight mainly to catch their prey, as
+does the swallow skimming the air all day on tireless wing, but some of
+the other hawks, such as our red-tailed hawk, climb their great spirals
+apparently with other motives than those which relate to their daily
+fare. The crow has little other use for his wings than to gad about like
+a busy politician from one neighborhood to another. In Florida I have
+seen large flocks of the white ibis performing striking evolutions high
+up against the sky, evidently expressive of the gay and festive feeling
+begotten by the mating instinct.
+
+The most beautiful flyer we ever see against our skies is the unsavory
+buzzard. He is the winged embodiment of grace, ease, and leisure.
+Judging from appearances alone, he is the most disinterested of all the
+winged creatures we see. He rides the airy billows as if only to enjoy
+his mastery over them. He is as calm and unhurried as the orbs in their
+courses. His great circles and spirals have a kind of astronomic
+completeness. That all this power of wing and grace of motion should be
+given to an unclean bird, to a repulsive scavenger, is one of the
+anomalies of nature. He does not need to hurry or conceal his approach;
+what he is after cannot flee or hide; he has no enemies; nothing wants
+him; and he is at peace with all the world.
+
+The great condor of South America, in rising from the ground, always
+faces the wind. It is often captured by tempting it to gorge itself in a
+comparatively narrow space. But if a strong enough wind were blowing at
+such times, it could quickly rise over the barrier. Darwin says he
+watched a condor high in the air describing its huge circles for six
+hours without once flapping its wings. He says that, if the bird wished
+to descend, the wings were for a moment collapsed; and when again
+expanded, with an altered inclination, the momentum gained by the rapid
+descent seemed to urge the bird upwards with the even and steady
+movement of a paper kite. In the case of any bird _soaring_, its motion
+must be sufficiently rapid for the action of the inclined surface of
+its body on the atmosphere to counterbalance its gravity. The force to
+keep up the momentum of a body moving in a horizontal plane in the air
+(in which there is so little friction) cannot be great, and this force
+is all that is wanted. The movement of the neck and body of the condor,
+we must suppose, is sufficient for this. However this may be, it is
+truly wonderful and beautiful to see so great a bird, hour after hour,
+without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain and
+river.
+
+The airplane has a propelling power in its motor, and it shifts its
+wings to take advantage of the currents. The buzzard and condor do the
+same thing. They are living airplanes, and their power is so evenly and
+subtly distributed and applied, that the trick of it escapes the eye.
+But of course they avail themselves of the lifting power of the
+air-currents.
+
+All birds know how to use their wings to propel themselves through the
+air, but the mechanism of the act we may not be able to analyze. I do
+not know how a butterfly propels itself against a breeze with its
+quill-less wings, but we know that it does do it. As its wings are
+neither convex nor concave, like a bird's, one would think that the
+upward and downward strokes would neutralize each other; but they do
+not. Strong winds often carry them out over large bodies of water; but
+such a master flyer as the monarch beats its way back to shore, and,
+indeed, the monarch habitually flies long distances over salt water when
+migrating along our seacoast in spring and fall.
+
+At the moment of writing these paragraphs, I saw a hen-hawk flap heavily
+by, pursued by a kingbird. The air was phenomenally still, not a leaf
+stirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat his wings vigorously. No
+soaring now, no mounting heavenward, as I have seen him mount till his
+petty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and returned to earth. But
+the next day, with a fairly good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks for
+many minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the skies, till they
+became very small objects against the clouds, and not once did they flap
+their wings! Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top and sailed
+straight into the face of the wind, till he was probably over his mate
+or young, when, with half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-tops
+like an arrow.
+
+In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the air may be divided into
+three grand classes: those which use their wings simply to transport
+themselves from one place to another,--the same use we put our legs
+to,--those which climb the heavens to attain a wide lookout, either for
+the pleasure of soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to scan a
+wide territory in search of food or prey, and those which feed as they
+fly. Most of our common birds are examples of the first class. Our hawks
+and buzzards are examples of the second class. Swallows, nighthawks, and
+some sea-birds are examples of the third class. A few of our birds use
+their wings to gain an elevation from which to deliver their songs--as
+the larks, and some of the finches; but the robins and the sparrows and
+the warblers and the woodpeckers are always going somewhere. The hawks
+and the buzzards are, comparatively speaking, birds of leisure.
+
+Every bird and beast is a master in the use of its own tools and
+weapons. We who look on from the outside marvel at their skill. Here is
+the carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about the verge-board of
+my porch-roof as I write this. It darts swiftly this way and that, and
+now and then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of whirring wings,
+as often does the hummingbird. How it does it, I do not know. I cannot
+count or distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At the same time,
+the chimney swifts sweep by me like black arrows, on wings apparently as
+stiff as if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air, now sailing.
+In some way they suggest winged gimlets. How thin and scimitar-like
+their wings are! They are certainly masters of their own craft.
+
+In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far below the body as
+they do above it. Note the crow flapping his way through the air. He is
+a heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His wings probably
+move through an arc of about ninety degrees. The phoebe flies with a
+peculiar snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird, with a mincing
+and hovering flight; it tiptoes through the air. The woodpeckers gallop,
+alternately closing and spreading their wings. The ordinary flight of
+the goldfinch is a very marked undulatory flight; a section of it, the
+rise and the fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The bird goes half
+that distance or more with wings closed. This is the flight the male
+indulges in within hearing distance of his brooding mate. During the
+love season he occasionally gives way to an ecstatic flight. This is a
+level flight, performed on round, open wings, which beat the air
+vertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song season is common to
+many of our birds. I have seen even the song sparrow indulge in it,
+rising fifty feet or more and delivering its simple song with obvious
+excitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock, inspired by the grand passion,
+rises upon whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and floats and
+circles at an altitude of a hundred feet or more, and in rapid
+smackering and chippering notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasy
+with our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight and is sharp and
+hurried, both flight and song differing radically from its everyday
+performance. One thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually on
+the wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk of all our singing
+birds. His season is brief but hilarious. In his level flight he seems
+to use only the tips of his wings, and we see them always below the
+level of his back. Our common birds that have no flight-song, so far as
+I have observed, are the bluebird, the robin, the phoebe, the social
+sparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the wood warblers, and
+most of the ground warblers.
+
+Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines had this to say about
+the flight of sea-gulls: "Sweeping around in circles, occasionally
+elevating themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide down and up
+the aerial inclines without apparently any effort whatever. But a close
+observation will show that at every turn the angle of inclination of the
+wings is changed to meet the new conditions. There is continual movement
+with power--by the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine only
+through mechanism obeying a mind not nearly so well instructed."
+
+The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing round and round, in a
+brisk breeze, on unbending wing, only now and then righting itself with
+a single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides upon the storm.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+BIRD INTIMACIES
+
+
+When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination to seek out new lands
+in my own country, or in other countries, to see what Nature is doing
+there, and what guise she wears, something prompts me to pause, and
+after a while to say to myself: "Look a little closer into the nature
+right at your own door; do a little intensive observation at home, and
+see what that yields you. The enticement of the far-away is mostly in
+your imagination; let your eyes and your imagination play once more on
+the old familiar birds and objects."
+
+One season in my walks to the woods I was on the lookout for a natural
+bracket among the tree-branches, to be used in supporting a book-shelf.
+I did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree, within a few feet
+from the corner of my own house, I found what I was searching for,
+perfect in every particular--the right angle and the supporting brace,
+or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have not forgotten.
+
+I find that one has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness and
+indifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild life
+about him to realize how much interesting natural history is being
+enacted every day before his very eyes--in his own garden and dooryard
+and apple-orchard and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and
+sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one rides or walks or sits
+under the trees, or loiters about the fields or woods, the play of wild
+life is going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed with the
+seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available for his instruction and
+entertainment. On every farm in the land a volume of live natural
+history goes to waste every year because there is no historian to note
+the happenings.
+
+The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens--a screen of
+leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert
+and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere
+fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that
+take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course
+of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have!
+The drama of wild life is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the
+stage before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other stages.
+
+I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing along the road
+between my place and the railway station one early May day became aware
+that a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees over their
+heads. It was the annual _sängerfest_ of the goldfinches--one of the
+prettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musical
+reunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, many
+hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and in
+the groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to
+the surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to account
+for. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birds
+sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it is difficult to
+identify the singers. It is a minor strain, but multitudinous, and fills
+all the air. The males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if to
+celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which, with the elm-trees,
+afford them their earliest food-supply. While they are singing they are
+busy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down to
+the ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut up
+to ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal flowering
+when they become spheres of fragile silver down.
+
+Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called a
+dandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bring
+the sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss to
+decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days as
+well as on fair. It all has a decidedly festive air, like the fête-days
+of humans. I know of nothing like it among other birds. It is the
+manifestation of something different from the flocking instinct; it is
+the social and holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a brief
+season, as if in celebration of some special event or purpose. I have
+observed it in my vicinity every spring for many years, usually in April
+or early May, and it is the prettiest and most significant bird episode,
+involving a whole species, known to me.
+
+The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one of our most amiable birds.
+So far as my knowledge goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. His
+tones are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring reunions they
+are joyous. In the peculiar flight-song in which he indulges in the
+mating season, beating the air vertically with his round, open wings,
+his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to his mate when she is
+brooding, and when he circles about her in that long, billowy flight,
+the crests of his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling,
+"Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee," as if he were saying, "For love of thee,
+for love of thee," and she calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"--his
+tones at such times express contentment and reassurance.
+
+When any of his natural enemies appear--a hawk, a cat, a jay--his tones
+are plaintive and appealing. "Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and not
+in anger.
+
+When with his mate he leads their brood about the August thistles, the
+young call in a similar tone. When in July the nesting has begun, the
+female talks the prettiest "baby talk" to her mate as he feeds her. The
+nest-building rarely begins till thistledown can be had--so literally
+are all the ways of this darling bird ways of softness and gentleness.
+The nest is a thick, soft, warm structure, securely fastened in the fork
+of a maple or an apple-tree.
+
+None of our familiar birds endear themselves to us more than does the
+bluebird. The first bluebird in the spring is as welcome as the blue sky
+itself. The season seems softened and tempered as soon as we hear his
+note and see his warm breast and azure wing. His gentle manners, his
+soft, appealing voice, not less than his pleasing hues, seem born of the
+bright and genial skies. He is the spirit of the April days incarnated
+in a bird. He has the quality of winsomeness, like the violet and the
+speedwell among the flowers. Not strictly a songster, yet his every note
+and call is from out the soul of harmony. The bluebird is evidently an
+offshoot from the thrush family, and without the thrush's gift of song;
+still his voice affords us much of the same pleasure.
+
+How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer
+them suitable nesting-retreats! Bring them something from nature,
+something with the bark on--a section of a dry beech or maple limb in
+which the downy woodpecker has excavated his chamber and passed the
+winter or reared his brood; fasten it in early spring upon the corner of
+your porch, or on the trunk of a near-by tree, and see what interesting
+neighbors you will soon have. One summer I brought home from one of my
+walks to the woods a section, two or three feet long, of a large yellow
+birch limb which contained such a cavity as I speak of, and I wired it
+to one of the posts of the rustic porch at Woodchuck Lodge. The next
+season a pair of bluebirds reared two broods in it. The incubation of
+the eggs for the second brood was well under way when I appeared upon
+the scene in early July. My sudden presence so near their treasures, and
+my lingering there with books and newspapers, disturbed the birds a good
+deal. The first afternoon the mother bird did not enter the cavity for
+hours. I shall always remember the pretty and earnest manner in which
+the male tried to reassure her and persuade her that the danger was not
+so imminent as it appeared to be, probably encouraging a confidence in
+his mate which he did not himself share. The mother bird would alight at
+the entrance to the chamber, but, with her eye fixed upon the man with
+the newspaper, feared to enter. The male, perched upon the telegraph
+wire fifty feet away, would raise his wings and put all the love and
+assurance in his voice he was capable of, apparently trying to dispel
+her fears. He would warble and warble, and make those pretty wing
+gestures over and over, saying so plainly: "It is all right, my dear,
+the man is harmless--absorbed there in his newspaper. Go in, go in, and
+keep warm our precious eggs!" How long she hesitated! But as night grew
+near she grew more and more anxious, and he more and more eloquent.
+Finally she alighted upon the edge of the overhanging roof and peered
+down hesitatingly. Her mate applauded and encouraged till finally she
+made the plunge and entered the hole, but instantly came out again; her
+heart failed her for a moment; but she soon returned and remained
+inside. Then her mate flew away toward the orchard, uttering a cheery
+note which doubtless she understood.
+
+The birds soon became used to my presence and their household matters
+progressed satisfactorily. Both birds took a hand in feeding the young,
+which grew rapidly. When they were nearly ready to leave the nest, a
+cruel fate befell them: I slept upon the porch, and one night I was
+awakened by the cry of young bluebirds, and the sound of feet like those
+of a squirrel on the roof over me. Then I heard the cry of a young bird
+proceed from the butternut-tree across the road opposite the house. I
+said to myself, "A squirrel or an owl is after my birds." The cry coming
+so quickly from the butternut-tree made me suspect an owl, and that the
+bird whose cry I heard was in his talons. I was out of my cot and up to
+the nest in a moment, but the tragedy was over; the birds were all gone,
+and the night was silent. In the morning I found that a piece of the
+brittle birch limb had been torn away, enlarging the entrance to the
+cavity so that the murderous talons of the owl could reach in and seize
+the young birds. I had been aroused in time to hear the marauder on the
+roof with one, and then hear its cry as he carried it to the tree. In
+the grass in front I found one of the young, unable to fly, but
+apparently unhurt. I put it back in the nest, but it would not stay. The
+spell of the nest was broken, and the young bird took to the grass
+again. The parent birds were on hand, much excited, and, when I tried to
+return the surviving bird to the nest, the male came at me fiercely,
+apparently charging the whole catastrophe to me.
+
+We had strong proof the previous season that an owl, probably the
+screech owl, prowled about the house at night. A statuette of myself in
+clay which a sculptor was modeling was left out one night on the porch,
+and in the morning its head was unusually bowed. The prints of a bird's
+talons upon the top told what had happened. In the bronze reproduction
+of that statuette the head has more of a droop than the artist at first
+planned to give it.
+
+The next season the bluebirds occupied the cavity in the birch limb
+again, but before my arrival in July the owls had again cleaned them
+out. In so doing they had ripped the cavity open nearly to the bottom.
+For all that, early the following May bluebirds were occupying the
+cavity again. It held three eggs when I arrived. I looked over the
+situation and resolved to try to head off the owl this time, even at the
+risk of driving the bluebirds away. I took a strip of tin several inches
+wide and covered the slit with it and wired it fast. Then I obtained a
+broad strip of dry birch-bark, wrapped it about the limb over the tin,
+and wired it fast, leaving the entrance to the nest in its original
+form. I knew the owl could not slit the tin; the birch-bark would hide
+it and preserve in a measure the natural appearance of the branch. When
+the bluebirds saw what had happened to their abode, they were a good
+deal distressed; they could no longer see their eggs through the slit
+which the owl had made, and they refused to enter the cavity. They hung
+about all day, uttering despondent notes, approaching the nest at times,
+but hesitating even to alight upon the roof above it. Occasionally the
+female would fly away toward the distant woods or hills uttering that
+plaintive, homesick note which seemed to mean farewell. The male would
+follow her, calling in a more cheery and encouraging tone. Once the
+couple were gone three or four hours, and I concluded they had really
+deserted the place. But just before sundown they were back again, and
+the female alighted at the entrance to the nest and looked in. The male
+called to her cheerily; still she would not enter, but joined him on the
+telephone wire, where the two seemed to hold a little discussion.
+Presently the mother bird flew to the nest again, then to the roof above
+it, then back to the nest, and entered it till only her tail showed,
+then flew back to the wire beside her mate. She was evidently making up
+her mind that the case was not hopeless. After a little more
+maneuvering, and amid the happy, reassuring calls of her mate, she
+entered the nest cavity and remained, and I was as well pleased as was
+her mate.
+
+No owls disturbed them this time, and the brood of young birds was
+brought off in due season. In July a second brood of four was
+successfully reared and sent forth on their career.
+
+The oriole nests in many kinds of trees--oaks, maples, apple-trees,
+elms--but her favorite is the elm. She chooses the end of one of the
+long drooping branches where a group of small swaying twigs affords her
+suitable support. It is the most unlikely place imaginable for any but a
+pendent nest, woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical twigs,
+and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests are so secure, so hidden, and
+so completely sheltered from the rains by the drooping leaves above and
+around it. It is rarely discoverable except from directly beneath it. I
+think a well-built oriole's nest would sustain a weight of eight or ten
+pounds before it would be torn from its moorings. They are also very
+partial to the ends of branches that swing low over the highway. One May
+I saw two female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five feet
+above our State Road, where automobiles and other vehicles passed nearly
+every minute all the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far from
+highways and dwellings is a rare occurrence.
+
+Birds of different species differ as widely in skill in nest-building as
+they do in song. From the rude platform of dry twigs and other coarse
+material of the cuckoo, to the pendent, closely woven pouch of the
+oriole, the difference in the degree of skill displayed is analogous to
+the difference between the simple lisp of the cedar-bird, or the little
+tin whistle of the "chippie," and the golden notes of the wood thrush,
+or the hilarious song of the bobolink.
+
+Real castles in the air are the nests of the orioles; no other nests are
+better hidden or apparently more safe from the depredations of crows and
+squirrels. To start the oriole's nest successfully is quite an
+engineering feat. The birds inspect the branches many times before they
+make a decision. When they have decided on the site, the mother bird
+brings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches it to a twig by
+winding it around and around many times, leaving one or both ends
+hanging free. I have nests where these foundation strings are wound
+around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings and tuckings and
+loopings the bird occasionally ties a substantial knot, but it is never
+the result of a deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but purely
+a matter of chance. When she uses only wild vegetable fibers, she
+fastens it to the twig by a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about the
+craziest kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastened
+many lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds to
+span the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her claws
+clasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping up
+and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest
+looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she
+did it, but all I could see was the bird standing astride the chasm she
+was trying to bridge, and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze
+of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom of the nest thickens,
+till some morning you see the movement of the bird inside it; her beak
+comes through the sides from within, like a needle or an awl, seizes a
+loose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightens
+it. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of any
+particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it were
+the work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no conscious
+method of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is not
+something builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethought
+enter; it is the result of the blind groping of instinct which rarely
+errs, but which does not see the end from the beginning, as reason does.
+The oriole sometimes overhands the rim of her nest with strings and
+fibers to make it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perch
+upon, but it is like the pathetic work which an untaught blind child
+might do under similar conditions. The birds use fine, strong strings in
+their nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results from it. I
+have an oriole's nest sent me from Michigan on the outside of which is a
+bird's dried foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it. It would
+be difficult to tie so complicated a knot. The tragedy is easy to read.
+Another nest sent me from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of
+fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them. But there is no sign
+that the bird came to grief using this dangerous material. Where the
+lives of the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always a
+danger-line to them. They are partakers of our bounty in many ways, but
+they pay a tax to fate in others.
+
+The orioles in my part of the country always use the same material in
+the body of their nests--a kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which they
+apparently get from some species of everlasting flower. Woven together
+and quilted through with strings and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm,
+feltlike walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the walls are made of
+something that suggests brown human hair, except that it is too hard and
+brittle for hair.
+
+Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest, but not so deep and
+pocketlike as that of the Baltimore oriole, and showing no such
+elaborate use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of some sort of
+dried grass, very elaborately woven together.
+
+Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely of the long,
+strong threads which it draws out of the palm-leaves. The only one I
+have seen was suspended from the under side of one of those leaves.
+
+I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except the nest of the
+hummingbird, is that of the wood pewee. It is as smooth and compact and
+symmetrical as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike
+substance. Of course, the phoebe's artistic masonry under the shelving
+rocks, covered with moss and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry
+grass and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and beyond the reach
+of four-footed prowlers, is almost ideal. It certainly is a happy
+thought.
+
+The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, the
+indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders, each with a style of its own.
+
+About the most insecure nest in our trees is that of the little social
+sparrow, or "chippie." When the sudden summer storms come, making the
+tree-tops writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest amid the
+tossing branches. Pass through the grove or orchard after the tempest is
+over, and you are pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon the
+ground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of nest-building in trees.
+She is a poor architect. She should have kept to the ground or to the
+low bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their nests fast to the
+branches, but "Chippie" does not; she simply arranges her material
+loosely between them, where the nest is supported, but not secured. She
+seems pathetically ignorant of the fact that there are such things as
+wind and storm. Hence her frail structure is more frequently dislodged
+from the trees than that of any other bird.
+
+Recently, after a day of violent northwest wind, I found a wrecked
+robin's nest and eggs upon the lawn under a maple--not a frequent
+spectacle. The robin's firm masonry is usually proof against wind and
+rain, but in this case the nest was composed almost entirely of dry
+grass; there was hardly a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible and
+yielding, and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently the second
+nest of the pair this season, and the second nest in summer of any
+species of bird is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first nest
+in spring. Comparatively few of our birds attempt to bring off a second
+brood unless the first attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sure
+to bring off two, and may bring off three. But the robin is a hustler,
+probably the most enterprising of all our birds. I recall a mother robin
+that, in late June, repaired a nest in a climbing rosebush which her
+first brood had vacated only a week before. A brood of wood thrushes
+which left their nest about the same time was still being fed by their
+parents about the place.
+
+The song sparrow, the social sparrow, the phoebe, the bluebird, all
+build a second nest. The first brood of the bluebird will be looked
+after by the father in some near-by grove or orchard, while the mother
+starts a new family in the old nest. If all goes well with them, those
+two bluebird families will unite and keep together in a loose flock till
+they migrate in the fall.
+
+So many of our birds nest about our houses and lawns and gardens and
+along our highways, that at first sight it seems as if they must be
+drawn there by a sense of greater security for their eggs and young. The
+robin has become almost a domestic institution. It is rarely that one
+finds a robin's nest very far from a human habitation. One spring there
+were four robins' nests on my house and outbuildings--in the vines, on
+window-sills, or other coigns of vantage. There were at the same time at
+least fifteen robins' nests on my lot of sixteen acres, and I am quite
+certain that I have not seen all there were. They were in sheds and
+apple-trees and spruces and cedars, in the ends of piles of grape-posts,
+in rosebushes, in the summer-house, and on the porch. We did not expect
+to get one of the early cherries, and might count ourselves lucky if we
+got any of the later ones.
+
+A robin has built her nest in my summer-house. She abuses me so when I
+try to tarry there, after incubation has begun, that I take no comfort
+and presently withdraw. Until her brood has flown, I am practically a
+stranger in my open-air rest-house and study.
+
+When the fish crows come egging in the spruces and maples about the
+house, and I hear the screaming of the robins, I seize my gun and rush
+out to protect them, but am not always successful, as the mischief is
+often done before I get within reach; I am not sure but that the robins
+think--if they think at all--that I am in league with the crows to
+despoil them. I was not in time to save the eggs of the wood thrush the
+other morning, when I heard the alarm calls of the birds, but I had the
+satisfaction of seeing the black marauder go limping over the hill,
+dropping quills from his wings at nearly every stroke. I am sure he will
+not come back. The fish crow is one of the most active enemies of our
+small birds. Of course, he only obeys his instincts in hunting out and
+devouring their eggs and young, but I fancy I obey something higher than
+instinct when I protest with powder and shot.
+
+The birds do not mind the approach of the domestic animals, such as the
+cow, the horse, the sheep, the pig, and they are only a little
+suspicious of the dog, but the appearance of the cat fills them with
+sudden alarm. I think that birds that have never before seen a cat join
+in the hue and cry. What alarms one alarms all within hearing. The
+orioles are probably the most immune from the depredations of crows and
+jays and owls of all our birds, and yet they will join in the cry of
+"Thief, thief!" when a crow appears. (The alarm cry of birds will even
+arrest the attention of four-footed beasts, and often bring the
+sportsman's stalking to naught.)
+
+I fancy that Phoebe selects our sheds and bridges and porticoes for
+her nesting-sites because they are so much more numerous than the
+overhanging rocks where her forbears built. For the same reason certain
+of the swallows and the swifts select our barns and chimneys.
+
+If the birds themselves are not afraid to draw near us, why should their
+instinct lead them to feel that their enemies will be afraid of us? How
+do they know that a jay or a crow or a red squirrel will be less timid
+than they are? And why also, if they have such confidence in us, do they
+raise such a hue and cry when we pass near their nests? The robin in my
+summer-house knew, if she knew anything, that I had never raised a
+finger against her. On the contrary, my hoe in the garden had unearthed
+many a worm and slug for her. Still she sees in me only a possible
+enemy, and tolerate me with my book or my newspaper near her nest she
+will not. Another robin has built her nest in a rosebush that has been
+trained to form an arch over the walk that leads to the kitchen door and
+only a few yards from it; but whenever we pass and repass she scurries
+away with loud, angry protests and keeps it up as long as we are in
+sight, so that we do not feel at all complimented by her settling down
+so near us. If one's appearance is so alarming, even when he is going to
+hoe the garden, why did the intolerant bird set up her household gods so
+near? If I keep away her enemies, why will she not be gracious enough to
+regard me as her friend? The robin that trusted her brood to the
+sheltering vines of the woodshed, and lined her nest with the hair of
+our old gray horse--why should she scream, "Murder!" whenever any of us
+go to the well a few feet away?
+
+What is the real explanation of the fact that so many of our birds nest
+so near our dwellings and yet show such unfriendliness when we come near
+them? Their apparent confidence, on the one hand, contradicts their
+suspicion on the other. Is it because we have here the workings of a new
+instinct which has not yet adjusted itself to the workings of the older
+instinct of solicitude for the safety of the nest and young? My own
+interpretation is that birds are not drawn near us by any sense of
+greater security in our vicinity. It is evident from the start that
+there is an initial fear of us to be overcome. How, then, could the
+sense of greater safety in our presence arise? Fear and trust do not
+spring from the same root. How should the robins and thrushes know that
+their enemies--the jays, the crows, and the like--are more afraid of
+human beings than they are themselves? Hunted animals pursued by wolves
+or hounds will at times take refuge in the haunts of men, not because
+they expect human protection, but because they are desperate, and
+oblivious to everything save some means of escape. If the hunted deer or
+fox rushes into an open shed or a barn door, it is because it is
+desperately hard-pressed, and sees and knows nothing but some object or
+situation that it may place between itself and its deadly enemy. The
+great fear obliterates all minor fears.
+
+The key to the behavior of the birds in this respect may be found in the
+Darwinian theory of natural selection. From the first settlement of the
+country a few of the common birds, attracted by a more suitable or more
+abundant food-supply, or other conditions, must inevitably have nested
+near human dwellings. These birds would thrive better and succeed in
+bringing off more young than those that nested in more exposed places.
+Hence, their progeny would soon be in the ascendancy. All animals seem
+to have associated memory. These birds would naturally return to the
+scenes and conditions of their youth, and start their nests there. It
+would not be confidence in men that would draw them; rather would the
+truth be that the fear of man is inadequate to overcome or annul this
+home attraction.
+
+The catbird does not come to our vines on the veranda to nest from
+considerations of safety, but because her line of descent runs through
+such places. The catbirds and robins and phoebe-birds that were reared
+far from human habitations doubtless return to such localities to rear
+their young. The home sense in birds is strong. I have positive proof in
+a few instances of robins and song sparrows returning successive years
+to the same neighborhood. It is very certain, I think, that the
+phoebe-birds that daub our porches with their mud, and in July leave
+a trail of minute creeping and crawling pests, were not themselves
+hatched and reared in the pretty, moss-covered structure under the
+shelving rocks in the woods, or on the hillsides.
+
+How different from the manners of the robins are the manners of a pair
+of catbirds that have a nest in the honeysuckle against the side of the
+first-floor sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from the nature of the
+catbird than the hue and cry which the robin at times sets up. The
+catbird is sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline _mew_ is her
+characteristic note. She never raises her voice like the town-crier, as
+the robin does, perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold him.
+The catbird peers and utters her soft protest from her hiding-place in
+the bushes. This particular pair of catbirds appeared in early May and
+began slyly to look over the situation in the vines and bushes about the
+house. All their proceedings were very stealthy; they were like two dark
+shadows gliding about, avoiding observation--no tree-tops or house-tops
+for them, but coverts close to the ground. We hoped they would divine
+safety in the shadow of the cottage, but tried to act as if oblivious of
+their goings and comings. We saw them now and then stealthily inspecting
+the tangle of honeysuckle on the east side of the veranda, where a robin
+last season reared a brood, and the low hedge of barberry-bushes on the
+south side of the cottage, where a song sparrow had her nest. If they
+come, which will they take, we wondered. Several times in the early
+morning I heard the male singing vivaciously and confidently in the
+thick of the honeysuckle. I guessed that the honeysuckle was the choice
+of the male, and that his song was a pæan in praise of it, addressed to
+his mate. But it was nearly a week before his musical argument prevailed
+and the site was apparently agreed upon.
+
+When the nest-building actually began, the birds were so shy about it
+that, watch as I might, I failed to catch them in the act. One morning I
+saw the mother bird in the garden with nesting-material in her beak, but
+she failed to come to the honeysuckle with it while I watched from a
+near-by covert. At the same time robins were flying here and there with
+loaded beaks, and wood thrushes were going through the air trailing long
+strips of white paper behind them, but the catbird was an emblem of
+secrecy itself. She, too, brought fragments of white paper to her nest,
+but no one saw her do it. Like other nest-builders, she apparently put
+in her big strokes of work in the early morning before the sleepers on
+the veranda were stirring. A few times my inquisitive eye, cautiously
+peering over the railing, started her from the vine, but I never saw her
+enter it with leaf, stick, or straw; yet slowly the nest grew and came
+into shape, and finally received its finishing touches. So cautiously
+had the birds proceeded that, were they capable of concepts like us, I
+should fancy they flattered themselves that we had not the least
+suspicion of their little secret. The male ceased to sing near the house
+after the nest was begun. So much time elapsed after the finishing of
+the nest before the first egg appeared in it that some members of the
+household feared the birds had deserted it, especially as they were not
+seen about the premises for several days. But the weather was wet and
+cool, and the eggs ripened slowly. Then one morning the birds were seen
+again, and one blue-green egg was discovered in the nest. The next
+morning another egg was added, and a third egg on the third morning, and
+a fourth on the fourth morning. In due time incubation began, and
+thenceforth all went well with our dusky neighbors.
+
+It is an anxious moment for all birds when their young leave the nest.
+One noontime by the unusual mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure that
+the critical time had come. Sure enough, there sat one of the young on a
+twig a few inches above the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty
+response to the agitated cry of the mother, as is usually the case with
+the robin. "No publicity" is the watchword of the young catbirds as well
+as of the old. An hour or two later another young one was perched on a
+branch, and before night, when no one was looking, they both
+disappeared, leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The next morning
+early, without any signs of alarm or agitation on the part of the old
+birds, they took the important step. It could hardly have been much of a
+flight with any of them, as their wing-quills were only partially
+developed, and their tails were mere stubs. For several days afterward
+no sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard. They were probably
+keeping well concealed in the near-by trees or in the vines and
+currant-bushes in the vineyard. In about a week the whole family
+appeared briefly in upper branches of the maples near the house. The
+young were distinguishable from the old only by their shorter tails. A
+few days later the parent birds were seen moving stealthily through the
+vines and bushes about the house, or perching on the near-by stakes that
+supported the wire netting. Are they coming back for a second brood? was
+the question in our minds.
+
+Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the male, then one morning a
+regular old-time burst of joy from him in the vine that held the old
+nest. Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window on the south side
+of the cottage, and both birds were soon seen paying frequent visits to
+the bush. We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether or not the
+first brood were now shifting for themselves, we did not know; they
+never again appeared upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of the
+Fourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was started in the
+syringa-bush three feet from the ground, and barely four feet from the
+window!
+
+We had a view of the proceedings that the first site did not afford us.
+The old nest appeared to be in perfect condition, but there was
+evidently no thought with the birds of using it again, as the robins
+sometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff swallows always do. A new nest,
+built of material almost identical with that of the old, and in a more
+exposed position, was decided upon. It progressed rapidly, and I was
+delighted to find that the male assisted in the building. Indeed, he was
+fully as active as the female. Very often they were both in the nest
+with material at the same moment. They seemed to agree perfectly. At
+first I got the impression that the male was not quite as decided as the
+female, and hesitated more, once or twice bringing material that he
+finally rejected. But he soon warmed up to the work and certainly did
+his share.
+
+With most species of our birds the nest is entirely built by the female.
+With the robin, the wood thrush, the phoebe, the oriole, the
+hummingbird, the pewee, and many others, the male is only an interested
+spectator of the proceeding. He usually attends his mate in her quest
+for material, but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the cock
+wren assists in nest-building. I know the male cedar-bird does, and
+probably the male woodpeckers do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeak
+assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing upon the nest. It seems
+fair to infer that he assists in the nest-building also, but I am not
+certain that he does, and I have heard another observer state that in a
+nest which he watched the female apparently did it all.
+
+My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon at least, being on their
+job as late as seven o'clock. In three days the nest was done, all but
+touching up the interior. During the construction I laid out pieces of
+twine and bits of white paper on the bushes and wire netting, also some
+loose material from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly used.
+How much labor the birds would have saved themselves had they pulled the
+old nest to pieces and used the material a second time! I have known the
+oriole to start a nest, then change her mind, and then detach some of
+her strings and fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once saw a
+"chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull the old nest to pieces and
+rebuild it in a tree a hundred feet away.
+
+The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking than his mate,
+but we could easily tell her by her often simulating the actions of a
+young bird when she came with material in her beak; she would alight on
+a near-by post and slightly spread and quiver her wings in a tender,
+beseeching kind of way. She would do this also when bringing food to her
+first brood. When one of the parent birds of any species simulates by
+voice or manner the young birds, it is always the female; her heart
+would naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation than that of the
+male.
+
+On the fifth day the nest was completed and received its first egg.
+There was considerable delay with the second egg, but it appeared on the
+second or third day, and the third egg the following day. Then
+incubation began. In twenty days from the day the nest was begun, the
+birds were hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly left the
+nest.
+
+A friend of mine who has a summer home on one of the trout-streams of
+the Catskills discovered that the catbird was fond of butter, and she
+soon had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room window for
+its lump of fresh butter, and finally entering the dining-room, perching
+on the back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter from a fork
+held in the mistress's hand. I think the butter was unsalted. My friend
+was convinced after three years that the same pair of birds returned to
+her each year, because each season the male came promptly for his
+butter.
+
+The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird contrast strongly with
+the frank, open manners of the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrasher
+goes skulking about in much the same way, flirting from bush to bush
+like a culprit escaping from justice. But he does love to sing from the
+April tree-tops where all the world may see and hear, if said world does
+not come too near. In the South and West the thrasher also nests in the
+vicinity of houses, but in New York and New England we must look for him
+in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of any bad traits that go with
+the thrasher's air of suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that
+goes with the catbird's--I have seen her perch on the rim of another
+bird's nest and deliberately devour the eggs. But only once. Whether or
+not she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If she does, she is
+doubtless so sly about it that she escapes observation.
+
+I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so attractive a neighbor as
+the wood thrush. She has none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace.
+She skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the wood thrush stands
+up before you or perches upon a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoat
+toward you in the most open and trusting manner. In fact, few birds have
+such good manners as the wood thrush, and few have so much the manner of
+a Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The flight of the wood
+thrush across the lawn is such a picture of grace and harmony, it is
+music to the eye. The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I told you
+so, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!" But the courteous thrush
+(just here I heard the excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry caw
+of a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow fly away from the
+maple in front of the Study, pursued by a mob of screeching robins. He
+took refuge in the spruces above the house where the collected robins
+abused him from surrounding branches. On my appearance he flew away, and
+the robins dispersed)--but the courteous thrush, I say, invites the
+good-breeding in you which he himself shows. The thrush never has the
+air of a culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other air. But I
+welcome them both. One shall stand for the harmony and repose of bird
+life, and the other for its restlessness and curiosity. The songs and
+the manners of birds correspond. The catbird, the brown thrasher, and
+the mockingbird are all theatrical in their manners--full of gestures of
+tail and wings, and their songs all imply an audience, while the serene
+melody of the thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of their
+behavior.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A MIDSUMMER IDYL
+
+
+As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the wide-open doors of a
+big hay-barn, busy with my pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my
+farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I idly contrast his harvest
+with mine. I have to admit that he succeeds with his better than I do
+with mine, though he can make hay only while the sun shines, while I can
+reap and cure my light fancies nearly as well in the shade as in the
+sun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. But
+I have this advantage over him--I might make literature out of his
+haymaking, or might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest he
+never dreamed of. What does Emerson say?
+
+  One harvest from the field
+    Homeward bring the oxen strong;
+  A second crop thine acres yield,
+    Which I gather in a song.
+
+But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only where he has sown, and if
+Emerson had not scattered his own heart in the fields his Muse would not
+reap much there. Song is not one of the instruments with which I gather
+my harvest, but long ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving
+the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself there, and whatever
+comes back to me now from that source is honestly my own. The second
+crop which I gather is not much more tangible than that which the poet
+gathers, but the farmer as little suspects its existence as he does that
+of the poet. I can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies, his
+buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow, his meadow-rue, serve my
+purpose better than they do his. They look better on the printed page
+than they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy and clover have their
+literary uses, and his new-mown hay may perfume a line in poetry. When
+one of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod round his quiet bed,"
+he makes better use of this weed than the farmers can.
+
+Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with all its sights and
+sounds, its singing birds, its skimming swallows, its grazing or
+ruminating cattle, its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes from
+the meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with his men and teams
+busy with the harvest, has material for the literary artist. A good hay
+day is a good day for the writer and the poet, because it has a certain
+crispness and pureness; it is positive; it is rich in sunshine; there is
+a potency in the blue sky which you feel; the high barometer raises your
+spirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You can sit in a circle
+of shade beneath a tree in the fields, or in front of the open hay-barn
+doors, as I do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature all
+about you. The brimming meadows seem fairly to purr as the breezes
+stroke them; the trees rustle their myriad leaves as if in gladness; the
+many-colored butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the swallows' backs
+glistens in the sun as they skim the fields; and the mellow boom of the
+passing bumble-bee but enhances the sense of repose and contentment that
+pervades the air. The hay cures; the oats and corn deepen their hue; the
+delicious fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the breeze; your
+mental skies are lucid, and life has the midsummer fullness and charm.
+
+As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of the scarlet tanager in
+the maple woods that crown a hill above me, and in the loft overhead two
+broods of swallows are chattering and lining up their light-colored
+breasts on the rims of their nests, or trying their newly fledged wings
+while clinging to its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound is the
+call of the cuckoo, which I hear and have heard at nearly all hours for
+many days, and which surely bodes rain. The countryman who first named
+this bird the "rain crow" hit the mark. The cuckoo is a devourer of
+worms and caterpillars, and why he should be interested in rain is hard
+to see. The tree-toad calls before and during a shower, mainly, I think,
+because he likes to have his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like
+the cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a mystery, unless the
+rain and the shadows are congenial to the gloomy mood in which he
+usually seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery of our birds,
+and the part of doleful prophet in our bird drama suits him well.
+
+A high barometer is best for the haymakers and it is best for the human
+spirits. When the smoke goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likely
+to soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons who do not like
+to get up in the morning till the day has been well sunned and aired
+evidently thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do seem better
+ventilated, and our lungs take in fuller draughts of air. How curious it
+is that the air should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light when
+it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days when it is an effort to move,
+and the grasshopper is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the
+trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we are on its crest, and are
+buoyed up both in mind and in body, on the crisp, bright days when the
+air seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the heavier salt
+sea-water buoys us up more than the fresh river or pond water, but we do
+not feel in the same way the lift of the high barometric wave. Even the
+rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring are quickly susceptible to
+these atmospheric changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine and
+crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as to make hay. Let the high
+blue-domed day with its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer,
+overcast, humid day from the south, and the flow of sap lessens at once.
+It would seem as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their dry
+bark, they respond to the change so quickly. There is no sap without
+warmth, and yet warmth, without any memory of the frost, stops the flow.
+
+The more the air presses upon us the lighter we feel, and the less it
+presses upon us the more "logy" we feel. Climb to the top of a mountain
+ten thousand feet high, and you breathe and move with an effort. The air
+is light, water boils at a low temperature, and our lungs and muscles
+seem inadequate to perform their usual functions. There is a kind of
+pressure that exhilarates us, and an absence of pressure that depresses
+us.
+
+The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy work, sets one up, while the
+idle, the unemployed, has a deficiency of hæmoglobin in his blood. The
+Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the man so over-employed that the
+pressure upon him is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled
+with compressed air.
+
+Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of the
+harvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day--the high
+blue dome, the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still white
+in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, the
+clover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds
+of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds still
+vocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. Very soon it
+will begin to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become dry and
+harsh, the clover will fade, the girlish daisies will become coarse and
+matronly, the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the pastures
+will turn brown, and the haymakers will find the hay half cured as it
+stands waiting for them in the meadows.
+
+What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common, so abundant, so various,
+a green summer snow that softens the outlines of the landscape, that
+makes a carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields, and that
+furnishes food to so many and such various creatures! More than the
+grazing animals live upon the grass. All our cereals--wheat, barley,
+rye, rice, oats, corn--belong to the great family of the grasses.
+
+Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment of the hills. It
+gives us the meadow, a feature in the northern landscape so common that
+we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once when we enter a
+tropical or semi-tropical country. In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw
+no meadows and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the genial,
+mellow look which our landscape presents. Harshness, rawness, aridity,
+are the prevailing notes.
+
+From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows with their boundary line of
+stone fences that are like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover.
+They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in the breeze, the green
+inundation seems about to overwhelm its boundaries, all the surface
+inequalities of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and stones are
+hidden, the woodchucks make their roads through it, immersed like
+dolphins in the sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowing
+beneficence of our temperate zone it all presents! Nature in her kinder,
+gentler moods, dreaming of the tranquil herds and the bursting barns.
+Surely the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for the most part
+noiseless, peace-yielding victories that gladden the eye and
+tranquillize the heart.
+
+The meadow presents a pleasing picture before it is invaded by the
+haymakers, and a varied and animated one after it is thus invaded; the
+mowing-machine sending a shudder ahead of it through the grass, the
+hay-tedder kicking up the green locks like a giant, many-legged
+grasshopper, the horserake gathering the cured hay into windrows, the
+white-sleeved men with their forks pitching it into cocks, and, lastly,
+the huge, soft-cheeked loads of hay, towering above the teams that draw
+them, brushing against the bar-ways and the lower branches of the trees
+along their course, slowly winding their way toward the barn. Then the
+great mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the fields, and the battle
+is won. Milk and cream are stored up in well-cured hay, and when the
+snow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills them in summer, the
+tranquil cow can still rest and ruminate in contentment.
+
+As the swallows sweep out and in near my head they give out an angry
+"Sleet, sleet," as if my presence had suddenly become offensive to them.
+I know what makes the change in their temper. The young are leaving
+their nests, and at such eventful times the parent birds are always
+nervous and anxious. When any of our birds launch a family into the
+world they would rather not have spectators, and you are pretty sure to
+be abused if you intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a good deal
+of sharp emphasis into that "Sleet, sleet," though she is not armed to
+make any of her threats good. Who knows that all will go well with them
+when they first make the plunge into space with their untried wings? A
+careful parent should keep the coast clear.
+
+They have been testing their wings for several days, clinging to the
+sides of the nest and beating the wings rapidly. And now comes the
+crucial moment of letting go and attempting actual flight. Several of
+them have already done it, and I see them resting on the dead limbs of a
+plum-tree across the road. But more are to follow, and parental anxiety
+is still rife. I shall be sorry when the spacious hayloft becomes
+silent. That affectionate "Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing
+squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged companionship. The
+old barn is the abode of friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of
+them and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of poetry and
+romance to these familiar scenes.
+
+Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest of birds? Known to the
+poets and sages and prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless
+and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, the
+child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in
+the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly
+food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly
+coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape
+of a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have got
+that steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of course
+I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of the
+sky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, and its shape
+and motions less arrowy. More varied in color, its hues yet lack the
+intensity, and its flight the swiftness, of those of its brother of the
+haylofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows are pleasing, but they
+are much more local and restricted in their ranges than the
+barn-frequenters. As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the barn
+swallows the summer always brought.
+
+After all, there is but one swallow; the others are particular kinds
+that we specify. How curious that men should ever have got the notion
+that this airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams, spends
+the winter hibernating in the mud of ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of
+newts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of the
+blindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain of
+the rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the
+fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would as
+soon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow
+follows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, where
+it hibernates on the wing, buried in tropical sunshine.
+
+Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the swallows, a good day for
+the haymakers, and a good day for him who sits before his open barn door
+and weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this slight literary
+fabric.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE
+
+
+The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own way
+so quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate an
+interest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a line
+of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. One
+thing is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surer
+way to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In the
+blackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest or
+the indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed my
+fish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled the
+branch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. I
+unwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbled
+upon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; on
+still another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossy
+softness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log.
+
+Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fisherman
+often sees the nest of the phoebe-bird, which does not cease to please
+for the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry.
+On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far less
+pleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
+the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.
+
+Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight
+on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye
+upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the
+roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her
+secret--a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the
+finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited
+her first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season.
+Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably her
+first brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added an
+egg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out,
+the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said when
+she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they were
+mildewed.
+
+These ground-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the great
+common of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every
+hour--the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels,
+coons by night, and crows and hawks by day--what bird-lover does not
+experience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
+nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly;
+he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate.
+Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves a
+purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it is
+placed. What a center of solicitude and forethought.
+
+Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road,
+is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any other
+ground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden.
+The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only a
+nest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blind
+man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A little
+screen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of the
+nest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand did
+the mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with drooping
+wings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting up
+the whole performance.
+
+A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of the
+male many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
+one male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stone
+wall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford a
+hint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a very
+successful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall and
+in the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usually
+precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and
+breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.
+
+When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself
+into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
+her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays
+of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the
+hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be
+considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely
+placed in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of
+Canada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few square
+yards, the grazing is very poor. I do not think that the chances are one
+in fifty that the hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that the
+problem presented itself to the bird as it does to me, but her instinct
+was as sure a guide as my reason is to me--or a surer one.
+
+The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by a New England bird-lover,
+Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned writer on our birds, fifty or more years
+ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by our earlier
+writers. It haunts the hilly pastures and roadsides in the Catskill
+region. It is often called the road-runner, from its habit of running
+along the road ahead when one is driving or walking--a very different
+bird, however, from the road-runner of the Western States. The vesper is
+larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and russet, and does not
+frequent our gardens and orchards as does the latter. In color it
+suggests the European skylark; the two lateral white quills in its tail
+enhance this impression. One season a stray skylark, probably from Long
+Island or some other place where larks had been liberated, appeared in a
+broad, low meadow near me, and not finding his own kind paid court to a
+female vesper sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt pestered
+her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately and seemed much
+embarrassed by the attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.
+
+When the young of any species appear, the solicitude and watchfulness of
+the mother bird are greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the
+vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of my harmless
+character now for several weeks and, one would think, must know that her
+precious secret is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in her
+beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards away, she maneuvers
+around for a minute or two, flying up to the telephone wire or a few
+yards up or down the road, and finally approaches the nest with much
+hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her in the act. When she comes
+again and again and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.
+
+After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the half-fledged young were
+lying on the ground in front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous
+marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I could not divine.
+
+What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently so wise on some
+occasions and so absurd on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food
+to her young, going through the same tactics over and over, learns no
+more than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think;
+hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom of
+nature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to us
+sheer folly under changed conditions.
+
+When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better of her, she often
+devours the food she has in her beak, so fearful is she of betraying her
+precious secret. But the next time she comes she may only maneuver
+briefly before approaching the nest, and then again hesitate and parley
+with her fears and make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I had
+only just appeared upon the scene.
+
+One of the best things a bird-lover can have in front of his house or
+cabin is a small dead tree with numerous leafless branches. Many kinds
+of birds love to perch briefly where they can look around them. I would
+not exchange the old dead plum-tree that stands across the road in front
+of my lodge for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It bears a
+perpetual crop of birds. Of course the strictly sylvan birds, such as
+the warblers, the vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit thrushes,
+do not come, but many kinds of other birds pause there during the day
+and seem to enjoy the unobstructed view.
+
+All the field and orchard and grove birds come. In early summer the
+bobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows
+below, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comes
+and shows his brilliant front. The purple finch, the goldfinch, the
+indigo bunting, the bluebird, the kingbird, the phoebe-bird, the great
+crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee, the high-hole,
+the downy woodpecker, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy,
+pause there in the course of the day, and some of them several times
+during the day. Occasionally the scarlet tanager lights it up with his
+vivid color.
+
+But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song sparrow whose mate
+has a nest not far off. Here he perches and goes through his repertoire
+of three or four different songs from dawn till nightfall, pausing only
+long enough now and then to visit his mate or to refresh himself with a
+little food. He repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening
+his plumage in the intervals. He sings several hundred times a day and
+has been doing so for many weeks. The house wren during the
+breeding-season repeats his song thousands of times a day, while the
+red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning till night for several
+months. How a conscious effort like that would weary our human singers
+and their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious, in our sense, of
+what they are doing.
+
+When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle this singing sparrow
+presents! A little wild bird sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its
+voice in song hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
+
+In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, but
+viewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a song
+of praise and thanksgiving--joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mate
+and brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, a
+voice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving for
+the universal beneficence without which you and I and the little bird
+would not be here? In foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain
+and the cold do not silence him.
+
+There are few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the call
+of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of
+despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint
+of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from
+pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to
+being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay,
+with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in that
+category, were it not for their songs when the love passion makes
+optimists even of them. The strain of the hermit thrush which floats
+down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but
+more as the shades of night are falling--what does this pure, serene,
+exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words,
+
+  God's in his heaven--
+  All's right with the world!
+
+The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone, but what puts it
+into his heart to do that? Certainly it is good to have a mate and a
+brood!
+
+A new season brings new experiences with the same old familiar birds, or
+new thoughts about them. This season I have had new impressions of our
+cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen. Of the two species, the
+black-billed and the yellow-billed, the former prevails in the latitude
+of New England, and the latter farther south. We cannot hail our
+black-billed as "blithe newcomer," as Wordsworth does his cuckoo.
+"Doleful newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing cheery or
+animated in his note, and he is about as much a "wandering voice" as is
+the European bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of flowers. He is
+a prophet of the rain, and the country people call him the rain crow.
+All his notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His nesting-instincts
+seem to lead him, or rather her, to the thorn-bushes as inevitably as
+the grass finch's lead her to the grass.
+
+The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and inefficient bird that it is
+interesting to see it doing things. One of our young poets has a verse
+in which he sings of
+
+  The solemn priestly bumble-bee
+  That marries rose to rose.
+
+He might apply the same or similar adjectives to the cuckoo. Solemn and
+priestly, or at least monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and
+suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights, or is gay and
+cheerful like our other birds, I have yet to witness it.
+
+During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by my
+door toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill.
+One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch very
+still and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on the
+tentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh,
+guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two he
+began to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose the
+nest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped or
+flitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note every
+minute or two.
+
+After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thorny
+branches which separated the thicket from the meadow and stepped
+outside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the nest
+on an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was covering
+her half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off,
+withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls.
+
+In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, while
+another barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened,
+while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The most
+mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if
+petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents
+was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke
+the parents up and they got down to real work in caring for their
+charge.
+
+The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellow
+stripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell.
+
+That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo--how long in the
+history of its race since it mastered it and became its own
+nest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is.
+Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree,
+with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs a
+foot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking
+nest and nursery I ever beheld--a mere platform of twigs about four
+inches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material,
+looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this very
+thorn.
+
+In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, which
+is their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green
+worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest worm
+that is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in
+force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of the
+worms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a day
+with a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it is
+doing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is a
+solemn creature; its note is almost funereal.
+
+Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive about its nesting-habits
+as any of the sparrows. The male bird seems to know that his brilliant
+color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far away from the nest,
+singing at all hours of the day in a circle around it, the radius of
+which must be more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest was near
+the house, almost under the clothes-line, in a low blackberry-bush,
+partly masked by tall-growing daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass
+near it, when off went the little brown bird with her sharp, chiding
+manners. She is a very emphatic creature. It is yea and nay with her
+every time.
+
+The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is not a very pleasing
+singer, but an all-day one and an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer
+birds. In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows and
+goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds. Their range of
+food is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them taking
+food of any kind.
+
+How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if we
+look closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
+woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on a
+cushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smooth
+exposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself up
+to a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping or
+looping along.
+
+I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of my
+straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
+an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind
+legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt
+for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for
+a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping
+worm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a little
+silvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a brief
+season of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitable
+place and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some other
+bird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and on
+dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.
+
+A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and a
+quarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother of
+the green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousand
+times, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have--a traveling
+arch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than your
+head, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standing
+twenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is a
+puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose.
+
+With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go
+looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to
+go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By
+chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes
+looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
+of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig,
+six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it the
+creature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, then
+turns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. This
+it explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, then
+loops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored,
+profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measures
+off another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves.
+
+Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way like
+this? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but
+has there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm?
+The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth into
+surrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to be
+sure that no chance to make a new connection is missed.
+
+Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet,
+lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it
+would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night
+posing as a twig.
+
+Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a
+hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes short
+work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemed
+to be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs
+or bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yards
+from me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy
+bird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart of
+all the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the winged
+jewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders--it came
+like a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly.
+
+All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of their own, all except the
+woodchuck; wherever he is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is
+known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a real sylvan frog, as
+pretty as a bird, the color of the dry leaves, slender and elegant in
+form and quick and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one in the bed
+of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand toward him and stroked his back
+with a twig. If you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put a spell
+upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized. He was instantly responsive to my
+passes. He began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my finger
+instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly, rose up more upon his
+feet, and bowed his head. As I continued the titillation he began to
+give forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if he were going to
+break out in song. He did not, but he seemed loath to go his way. How
+different he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in large numbers
+make a multitudinous croaking and clucking in the little wild pools in
+spring! He wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in the pools
+celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice is off them, and then in two
+or three days he takes to the open woods and assumes the assimilative
+coloring of the dry leaves.
+
+The little orange-colored salamander, a most delicate and highly colored
+little creature, is as harmless as a baby, and about as slow and
+undecided in its movements. Its cold body seems to like the warmth of
+your hand. Yet in color it is as rich an orange as the petal of the
+cardinal flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an outside color;
+it is a glow, and renders the creature almost transparent, an effect as
+uniform as the radiance of a precious stone. Its little,
+innocent-looking, three-toed foot, or three and a half toed--how
+unreptilian it looks through my pocket glass! A baby's hand is not more
+so. Its throbbing throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes with
+a glint of gold above them--only a close view of these satisfies one.
+
+Here is another remarkable transformation among the small wild folk. In
+the spring he is a dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;
+now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the woods. This is said
+to be an immature form, which returns to the ponds and matures the next
+season; but whether it is the male or the female that assumes this
+bright hue, or both, I do not know. The coat seems to be its midsummer
+holiday uniform which is laid aside when it goes back to the marshes to
+hibernate in the fall.
+
+Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means of protection that do
+not at once appear. In the case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or
+other disagreeable secretion, which would cause any animal to repent
+that took it in its mouth. It is even less concerned at being caught
+than is the skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.
+
+In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon the domain of another
+sylvan denizen, the chipmunk. One afternoon one suddenly came up from
+the open field below me with his pockets full of provender of some sort;
+just what sort I wondered, as there was no grain or seeds or any dry
+food that it would be safe to store underground for the winter.
+
+Beholding me sitting there within two yards of his den was a great
+surprise to him. He eyed me a long time--squirrel time--making little,
+spasmodic movements on the flat stone above his den. At a motion of my
+arm he darted into his hole with an exultant chip. He was soon out with
+empty pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little tocsin of
+distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan folk might hear. As I made no
+sign, he soon ceased and went about his affairs.
+
+All this time, behind and above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposed
+that lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of her
+chrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fern
+screen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless as
+the snow, and her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and delicate
+as--well, as only those of a luna moth can be. It is as immaculate as an
+angel. With a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple
+sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her for the night.
+
+While I was loitering there on the threshold of the woods, observing the
+small sylvan folk, about a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was
+a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than a score of years,
+the nest of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Some friends were camping
+there with their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech woods, and
+passed and repassed hourly within a few yards of the nest, and, although
+they each had sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen nor
+heard the birds during the two days they had been there.
+
+While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of a
+thrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food in
+its beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew down
+to a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, about
+ten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flew
+out of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movements
+sent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. I
+parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was the
+nest with two half-fledged young.
+
+A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to a
+sparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chanced
+to see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained
+four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
+carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were
+not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would
+alight upon the wall to make observations.
+
+But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious
+bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked
+into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds
+usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to
+find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
+strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they
+seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them,
+I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them
+and watched.
+
+I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped
+some food into an open mouth and disappeared.
+
+Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the
+woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
+morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy
+basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery,
+brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground
+enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was
+in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown
+solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a
+part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the
+dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders'
+cocoons--all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.
+
+I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths
+instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
+flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and
+uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
+away!" This I soon did.
+
+Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But
+the red-eyed vireo sings on into September--not an ecstatic strain, but
+a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT
+
+
+It was in May during the last term of his Presidency that Roosevelt
+asked me to go with him down to Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him name
+his birds. I stayed with him at the White House the night before we
+started. I remember that at dinner[1] there was an officer from the
+British army stationed in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indian
+affairs. I did not take part in it because I knew nothing about India,
+but Roosevelt was so conversant with Indian affairs and Indian history
+that you would think he had just been cramming on it, which I knew very
+well he had not. But that British officer was put on his mettle to hold
+his own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India and England's relation
+to it than the officer seemed to know. It was amazing to see the
+thoroughness of his knowledge about India.
+
+  [1] Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The
+  incident he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House,
+  just before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903.
+    C. B.
+
+The next morning we started off for Virginia, taking an early train.
+
+Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from Washington. I think we left
+the train at Charlottesville, Virginia, and drove about ten miles to
+Pine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on the edge of the
+woods, a mile from the nearest farmhouse.
+
+Before we reached there we got out of the wagon and walked, as there
+were a good many warblers in the trees--the spring migration was on. It
+was pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the President insisted on
+carrying it. We identified several warblers there, among them the
+black-poll, the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap. He knew
+them in the trees overhead as quickly as I did.
+
+We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but as he was eager for a
+walk we started off, he leading, as if walking for a wager. We went
+through fields and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile or
+more, when we stopped and mopped our brows and turned homeward without
+having seen many birds.
+
+Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when she saw the heated
+condition in which we returned, for not long afterwards he came to me
+and said: "Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we were in too
+much of a hurry." I replied, "No, Mr. President, that isn't the way I
+usually go a-birding." His thirst for the wild and the woods, and his
+joy at returning to these after his winter in the White House, had
+evidently urged him on. He added, "We will try a different plan
+to-morrow."
+
+So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along the highways. Very soon
+we heard a wren which was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren," he said. We
+got out and watched it as it darted in and out of the fence and sang.
+
+I asked him if he knew whether the little gray gnatcatcher was to be
+seen there. I had not seen or heard it for thirty years. "Yes," he
+replied, "I saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run."
+
+We walked over to some plum-trees where there had been a house at one
+time. No sooner had we reached the spot than he cried, "There it is
+now!" And sure enough, there it was in full song--a little bird the
+shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine musical strain.
+
+As we were walking in a field we saw some birds that were new to me.
+Roosevelt also was puzzled to know what they were till we went among
+them and stirred them up, discovering that they were females of the blue
+grosbeak, with some sparrows which we did not identify.
+
+In the course of that walk he showed me a place where he had seen what
+he had thought at the time to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described
+how they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the tree where they
+alighted. I was skeptical, for it had long been thought that wild
+pigeons were extinct, but that fact had not impressed itself upon his
+mind. He said if he had known there could be any doubt about it, he
+would have observed them more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as
+it was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable evidence. We
+talked with the colored coachman about the birds, as he also had seen
+them. His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had seen wild
+pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts. Subsequently Roosevelt
+wrote me that he had come to the conclusion that they had been mistaken
+about their being pigeons.
+
+One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, I
+chanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the
+ground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention to
+it and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop your
+hat over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and crept up on the
+bird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when the
+bird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this
+bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almost
+succeeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time to
+save itself from his hand.
+
+One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seen
+and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry
+grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not
+appear.
+
+During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and
+fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He
+taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the
+swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine
+warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been
+one ahead of me.
+
+I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for
+the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor,
+I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes.
+
+"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I
+do."
+
+"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is an
+able and amiable man, he is not a born leader."
+
+(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of the
+proposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt's
+estimate of him.)
+
+Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in the
+lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the
+man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her
+needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a
+bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a
+slightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what _is_ the matter?"
+
+He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished
+an African lion.
+
+It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President
+of the United States to be so unprotected--without a guard of any
+kind--in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to
+him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.
+
+"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and
+they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."
+
+Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night
+sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost
+immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from
+the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking
+of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every
+night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day
+at a farmhouse in that vicinity. She did not let the President know of
+this because it would irritate him.
+
+The only flower we saw there which was new to me was the Indian pink.
+Roosevelt seemed to know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink
+moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were common in that
+locality.
+
+On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being on the train, Roosevelt
+threw himself into the dictation of many letters, the wrens and the
+warblers already sidetracked for the business of the Administration.
+
+I passed another night at the White House, and in the morning early we
+went out on the White House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming
+to attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by.
+
+"They often stare at me as though they thought me crazy," he said, "when
+they see me gazing up into the trees."
+
+"Well, now they will think I am your keeper," I said.
+
+"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.
+
+When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds that we had seen
+while at Pine Knot and hoped that I would sometime write up the trip; in
+fact, for years after, whenever we would meet, almost the first thing he
+would say was, "Have you written up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?"
+And his disappointment at my failure to do so was always
+unmistakable.[2]
+
+  [2] The following letter may be of interest in this
+  connection.
+    C. B.
+
+  DEAR OOM JOHN:
+
+  Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration? If
+  not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will
+  include in your coming volume of sketches a little account
+  of the time you visited us at Pine Knot, our little
+  Virginia camp, while I was President. I am very proud of
+  you, Oom John, and I want the fact that you were my guest
+  when I was President, and that you and I looked at birds
+  together, recorded there--and don't forget that I showed
+  you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's wren, and almost
+  all the other birds I said I would!
+
+  Ever yours,
+
+  THEODORE ROOSEVELT
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY
+
+
+One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a two
+weeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie--joy-riders with a
+luxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.
+
+We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. I
+confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I
+can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great
+Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew
+it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with
+younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not
+warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was
+younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter
+half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in
+order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new
+scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more
+strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.
+
+Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, so
+forest-clad--the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys
+cutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and rural
+homesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturing
+interests in the western, the source of noble rivers; and the storehouse
+of many of Nature's most useful gifts to man.
+
+The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of least
+resistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and it
+goes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a
+sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lighter
+cars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents,
+nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for the
+heavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its great
+namesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or through
+gives the automobilist pause.
+
+As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I remember
+with the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army trucks
+we met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on that
+Lincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb,
+khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host of
+them, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded with
+soldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous
+resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-off
+land. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were converging
+toward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim,
+processions--how impressive they were!
+
+Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of
+brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the
+hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever
+did in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at times
+driving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. It
+might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening and
+blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of
+destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire
+seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them--much that
+suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the
+lake bottoms.
+
+We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from
+entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic
+history of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power,
+and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are all
+gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white
+coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much
+more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may
+never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the
+mountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the
+silver age will displace the iron age.
+
+The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer has
+only to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out his
+winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and grassy
+the hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it
+seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly
+care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black
+remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling
+and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying
+down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that
+wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out.
+
+Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast of
+Pittsburgh, an ideal place--a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence
+well carpeted with grass, with wood and water in abundance. But the
+night was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily
+warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with
+plenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. She
+tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got
+up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the
+"long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth
+was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.
+
+The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of
+many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was
+the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days
+Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand
+information, which he did to our great comfort.
+
+Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we
+slept indoors.
+
+On the following day one of the big cars had an accident--the fan broke,
+and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be
+delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made
+our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the
+best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the
+only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no
+way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a
+chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves,
+he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of
+drills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed arms
+to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled
+car was again in running order.
+
+On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek
+in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road
+from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the
+widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of
+roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had
+experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even
+when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison
+was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of
+the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring,
+eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our
+mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual
+tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
+But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants.
+Pure elements--air, water, earth--these settle the question; Camp
+Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first
+view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting--a bird rarely seen north of
+the Potomac.
+
+An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, with
+a huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the
+wheel and had our pictures taken.
+
+At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girl
+appeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invited
+her into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all of
+her apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled the
+new one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She did
+not look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed her
+about many things and got straight, clear-cut answers--a very firm,
+level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told her
+the names of some of the members of the party, and after she had
+returned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down upon
+us. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any of
+the local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and mills
+were something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. I
+do not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom we
+gave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train five
+times, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead and
+her father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with her
+grandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and
+ever so many miles."
+
+The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all the
+way from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or
+Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed--stately, hardy growths, and very
+pleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and the
+eupatorium with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.
+
+August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clear
+mountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Every
+mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. It
+was flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We were
+working south and east.
+
+We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club,
+on the banks of the river--an ideal spot. The people at the big
+clubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. I
+found the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much like
+those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate even
+colder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they
+had a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines of
+big trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse told
+the story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently Cheat
+River deserves a better name.
+
+The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a marked
+contrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed
+down and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part in
+shaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped,
+while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep that
+they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on the
+tops of the broad, rounded hills, though we passed through some broad,
+open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms in
+which hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were large
+fields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming with
+bees.
+
+Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape,
+I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in these
+mountains during the great Ice Age.
+
+We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d--a famous spring, and a
+beautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some of
+the party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned the
+overflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek,
+not far from the Narrows--a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximity
+to the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of a broad,
+limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horses
+disturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have only
+pleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.
+
+We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many times
+the border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, all
+the time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views from
+mountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm
+Springs, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet Water
+Springs. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineral
+water and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. This
+part of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in the
+building, and the elements are unevenly distributed.
+
+I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazy
+proposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. We
+certainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent--or
+with its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplex
+affair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places,
+but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth is
+more like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many
+sections.
+
+One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm.
+One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in
+bringing wood and doing other errands.
+
+A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did the
+others, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked up
+here and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger towns
+we could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old.
+When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four exciting
+years, one is lost when cut off from them.
+
+Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark,
+especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain,
+near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hill
+below the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and
+Firestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtful
+success. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on with
+broad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle
+tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedly
+an equivocal smile--the trick was not so easy as it looked. Evidently
+Mr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm in
+Michigan.
+
+Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences you
+have, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background.
+Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemical
+problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he
+were reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps has
+few, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on
+mechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing a
+master discuss his own art.
+
+A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge into
+the Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and
+people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For
+the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the
+roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stone
+road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates
+appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the
+cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way,
+driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy
+on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or
+returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback,
+on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus
+my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.
+
+The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature.
+One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are
+made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature,
+indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the
+South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with
+poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive
+bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the
+South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near
+which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of
+whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late
+August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.
+
+No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurrying
+tourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolina
+a youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a few
+feet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blank
+curiosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent
+interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of a
+five-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain
+districts of the South--good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, and
+industrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outside
+world, their unsophistication is shocking to see.
+
+It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition
+going forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms--dust,
+rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents--is pretty sure to
+come to those who go a-gypsying in the South. But discomfort, after all,
+is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our
+luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization,
+and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully
+endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights,
+just to touch naked reality once more.
+
+Our two chief characters presented many contrasts: Mr. Ford is more
+adaptive, more indifferent to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest
+in the stream is in its potential water-power. He races up and down its
+banks to see its fall, and where power could be developed. He never
+ceases to lament so much power going to waste, and points out that if
+the streams were all harnessed, as they could easily be, farm labor
+everywhere, indoors and out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon
+the benefit that would accrue to every country neighborhood if the
+water-power that is going to waste in its valley streams were set to
+work in some useful industry, furnishing employment to the farmers and
+others in the winter seasons when the farms need comparatively little
+attention. He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to the
+greatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of the
+great mass of the people. As with his touring-car, so with his tractor
+engine, he has had the same end in view. Nor does he forget the
+housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing power into every household
+that will greatly lighten the burden of the women-folk.
+
+Partly owing to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his
+meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active
+than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make
+camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or
+curl up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while Mr. Ford would
+inspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr.
+Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenged some of
+the party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and from
+every camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk
+half-hour walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all occasions, and
+his optimism in regard to all the great questions, are remarkable. His
+good-will and tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his practical
+turn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanical arts and of business
+methods, he is through and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, he
+is much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life like
+a philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work more
+completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and his
+tractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, less
+expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and
+universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities
+which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Those
+who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, and
+the crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause
+in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely
+to a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent human
+force, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of
+universal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only brought
+pleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and written
+large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the business
+man--that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling
+passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his
+humanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, and
+has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of his
+great enterprise--a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are
+so often used to enslave or destroy.
+
+In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison:
+his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make life
+easier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, a
+trenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life,
+though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature--a
+practical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight.
+And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings.
+A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hair
+disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and can
+rough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so
+little that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts or
+turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards,
+as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the open
+and for wild nature.
+
+Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type--the clean,
+clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, always
+ready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at the
+service of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative,
+devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas--a
+manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen.
+
+It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip.
+All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In
+retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I
+was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant,
+and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at
+this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon
+the whole trip with unmixed pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+UNDER GENIAL SKIES
+
+
+I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND
+
+The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West,
+differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the
+coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of
+a world made up of three elements--sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific
+stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating
+floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon
+the Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of the
+Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I saw
+of them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down.
+They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. The
+mountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are of
+the same character. They are young, and while they carry their heads
+very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with the
+granite of our coast.
+
+As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep
+lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains
+wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their
+unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the
+conceit all out of them.
+
+The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what it
+is on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiously
+adapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there under
+arid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlantic
+seaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably less
+than ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of a
+large lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture of
+small and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soil
+does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours would
+almost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a good
+tillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as if
+it were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it has
+virtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown here
+have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothing
+in the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous
+and tough.
+
+I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songs
+here, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of
+climate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocal
+cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrasts
+with that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies
+contrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land.
+
+
+II. LAWN BIRDS
+
+To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to
+have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty
+spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and
+plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves--not so highly
+colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black
+phoebe flits about your porch and arbor vines.
+
+Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other
+variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the
+tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are
+next in number.
+
+Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a
+solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the
+American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual
+trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks
+about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a
+teetering motion of the hind part of the body.
+
+While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found
+the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was
+tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain
+such as Alaska alone can afford.
+
+But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the
+ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more
+of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the
+spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a
+few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that
+curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their
+shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and
+powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air--all arrest your
+attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the
+furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings.
+They fly around the world.
+
+The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity
+from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial
+creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the
+motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in
+its behavior?
+
+However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all
+do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are
+all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass,
+but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods
+are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He
+scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making
+frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the
+prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same
+judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and
+evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go
+its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their
+food-supplies.
+
+On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the
+tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and
+pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look
+upon--airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as
+to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white
+and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh
+water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail
+themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which
+discharge on the beach.
+
+There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown
+pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves,
+shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for
+a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at it
+were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air
+for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and
+forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore
+birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the
+water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for
+his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
+down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb
+style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
+creature as before.
+
+A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a bird
+that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--is
+the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the
+face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.
+
+I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above
+the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
+In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate
+to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
+them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of
+the shore.
+
+
+III. SILKEN CHAMBERS
+
+The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting
+bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner
+near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of
+uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows
+of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to
+the place.
+
+The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My
+guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed,
+found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's
+touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of
+detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground
+and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet
+of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how,
+fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with
+my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown
+earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. I
+stooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long
+needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soil
+nearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on the
+straight side of it, and behold--the entrance to the spider's castle! I
+was not prepared for anything so novel and artistic--a long silken
+chamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a
+silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side of
+the door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, and
+its top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, and
+slightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaring
+or beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner could
+have done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine as
+a hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was held
+open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.
+
+Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, I
+gave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My
+guide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point them
+put to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to find
+them unaided.
+
+We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no
+mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in
+two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself
+(as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance
+surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often
+danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enough
+to allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes farther
+down in her burrow.
+
+Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a young
+spider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from their
+tunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made of
+straws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws lifted
+up, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found the
+straw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in the
+night.
+
+As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects,
+such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright
+specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so small
+they probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I think
+these spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense.
+They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unless
+they have a sixth sense of which we know nothing.
+
+All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well as
+all their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection with
+their extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-histories
+a difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer and
+harder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on the
+spot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, and
+working it up into a finer product.
+
+The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the hinge, and is then
+discarded and a new door manufactured. We saw many nests with the old
+door lying near the entrance. The door is made of several layers of silk
+and clay, and is a substantial affair.
+
+The spider families all have the gift of genius. Of what ingenious
+devices and arts are they masters! How wide their range! They spin, they
+delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original spinners. They have
+probably been on their job since carboniferous times, many millions of
+years before man took up the art. And they can spin a thread so fine
+that science makes the astonishing statement that it would take four
+millions of them to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of our
+head--a degree of delicacy to which man can never hope to attain.
+
+Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems, secrets and betrayals,
+and this species of the arachnids is proficient in all these things.
+
+The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes of
+this spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in all
+such cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. It
+is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast--the soil for cañons
+and the rectangular watercourses, and for the trap-door spider. It is a
+tough, fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does not crumble or
+disintegrate; the cohesion of particles is such that sun-dried brick are
+easily made from it.
+
+This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Jamaica. It
+belongs to the family of _Mygalidae_. It resembles in appearance the
+tarantula of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many of the same
+habits; but its habitation is a much more ingenious and artistic piece
+of workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has no
+door to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind of
+breastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from this
+fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than does
+our spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, her
+fangs, and lines it with silk from her own body.
+
+Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect of
+her kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance--no visible
+drills for such rough work--one wonders how she excavates a burrow six
+inches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and
+how she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has been
+surprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weapons
+with which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the
+_cheliceræ_. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, says
+Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon's
+scalpel." And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet
+at a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest.
+Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a
+hole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth.
+
+One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turned
+over, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants of
+the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started the
+construction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed as
+if the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out a
+semicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice,
+each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surrounded
+it, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. I
+read somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit of
+ground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made the
+soil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss like
+the old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in the
+first case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seems
+to know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know."
+
+On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size,
+but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more artfully
+concealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completely
+covered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, and
+had so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eye
+was baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet it
+seemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick I
+found a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Day
+after day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at it
+on the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer of
+the soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength.
+
+Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, according
+to Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they are
+very active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping up
+the supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun,
+Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and the
+organic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can take
+at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and it
+seems to be so, it is most extraordinary.
+
+In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering,
+it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insect
+world and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinck
+has forgotten to point out, is this:
+
+In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondary
+part. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female is
+supreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him.
+Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is the
+female mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider that
+spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with the
+female. The female spider eats up the male after he has served her
+purpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the male
+in the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survives
+the winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on the
+window-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud,
+but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed by
+the female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate,
+but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In
+the vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey that the female
+is the larger and bolder; the care of the young devolves largely upon
+her. Yes, there is another exception: Among the fishes, the females are,
+as a rule, larger than the males; the immense number of eggs which they
+carry brings this about.
+
+There are always exceptions to this dominance of the female in the
+insect world. We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She would
+not be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male that
+dominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground,
+always in the larval state.
+
+In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold the
+showy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the
+willows, and other trees. The stamens of most flowers are numerous and
+conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries its panicle of pollen high above
+the silken tresses which mother the future ear.
+
+One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by a spider with her brood of
+young ones. I took up a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or
+more, and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I kept it in the
+house under observation for a week, hoping that at some hour of day or
+night the spider would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious
+friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance over the door which he
+had used successfully before. But the latch was never lifted. Madam
+Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at the bottom of her den. At the end
+of a week I broke open the nest and found her alone. She had evidently
+devoured all her little ones.
+
+I kept two nests with a spider in each in the house for a week, and in
+neither case did the occupant ever leave its nest.
+
+Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests of their own when they
+are about half-grown. As to where they stay, or how they live up to that
+time, I have no clue. The young we found in several nests were very
+small, not more than an eighth of an inch long. Of the size and
+appearance of the male spider, and where he keeps himself, I could get
+no clue.
+
+One morning I went with my guide down to the spider territory, and saw
+him try to entice or force a spider out of her den. The morning previous
+he had beguiled several of them to come up to the opening by thrusting a
+straw down the burrow and teasing them with it till in self-defense they
+seized it with their fangs and hung on to it till he drew them to the
+surface. But this morning the trick would not work. Not one spider would
+keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at the end in the shape of
+a hook, he finally lifted one out upon the ground. How bright and clean
+and untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of the thorax were as
+black as jet and shone as if they had just been polished. No lady in her
+parlor could have been freer from any touch of soil or earth-stain than
+was she. On the ground, in the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost.
+We turned her around and tried to induce her to enter the nest again;
+but over and over she ran across the open door without heeding it. In
+the novel situation in which she suddenly found herself, all her wits
+deserted her, and not till I took her between my thumb and finger and
+thrust her abdomen into the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of
+that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and she backed quickly
+into it and disappeared.
+
+Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider has I do not know. I never
+saw a nest that had been broken into or in any way disturbed, except
+those which we had disturbed in our observations.
+
+
+IV. THE DESERT NOTE
+
+I often wonder what mood of Nature this world of cacti which we run
+against in the great Southwest expresses. Certainly something savage and
+merciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor. How well she tempers
+her daggers and bayonets! How hard and smooth and sharp they are! How
+they contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and leaves which bear
+them! It is a desert mood; heat and drought appear to be the exciting
+causes. The scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to store up
+water in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates men to build great
+dams and reservoirs. These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But why
+spines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly cannot be for
+protection or defense; the grass and other vegetation upon which the
+grazing animals feed are not armed with spines.
+
+If the cacti were created that grazing animals in the desert might have
+something to feed upon, as our fathers' way of looking at things might
+lead us to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated by the armor
+of needles and spines?
+
+Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures this broad, mittened
+hand like a cruel joke. It smites like a serpent and stings like a
+scorpion. The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert! Beware! Agonies
+are one of her garments.
+
+All we can say about it is that Nature has her prickly side which
+drought and heat aggravate. In the North our thistles and thorns and
+spines are a milder expression of this mood. The spines on the
+blackberry-bush tend against its propagation for the same reason. Among
+our wild gooseberries, there are smooth and prickly varieties, and one
+succeeds about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees in rough or
+barren places that have a severe struggle for life, often develop sharp,
+thorny branches. It is a struggle of some kind which begets something
+like ill-temper in vegetation--heat and drought in the desert, and
+browsing animals and poor soil in the temperate zones. The devil's club
+in Alaska is one mass of spines; why, I know not. It must just be
+original sin. Our raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but the
+large, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed.
+
+Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert expresses the belief that
+thorns and spines are given to the desert plants for protection; and
+that if no animal were there that would eat them, they would not have
+these defenses. But I believe if there had never been a browsing animal
+in the desert the cacti would have had their thorns just the same.
+
+Nature certainly arms her animal forms against one another. We know the
+quills of the porcupine are for defense, and that the skunk carries a
+weapon that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that any plant form
+is armed against any creature whose proper food it might become. Cacti
+carry formidable weapons in the shape of spines and thorns, but the
+desert conditions where they are found, heat and aridity, are no doubt
+their primary cause. The conditions are fierce and the living forms are
+fierce.
+
+We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From our point of view she often
+seems partial and inconsistent. But I would just as soon think that
+Nature made the adobe soil in the arid regions that the human dwellers
+there might have material at hand with which to construct a shelter, as
+that she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable forms to
+secure their safety. One may confute Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth.
+He says:
+
+  Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of a
+  family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive
+  armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn
+  like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert to the
+  high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is plenty
+  of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to
+  thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the
+  thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and
+  the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their
+  cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a
+  soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.
+
+But are they not just as much exposed to browsing animals in the high
+table-lands as in the desert, if not more so?
+
+Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous about the species
+than about the individual. She is no more solicitous about the one than
+the other. The same conditions apply to all. But the species are
+numerous; a dozen units may be devoured while a thousand remain. A
+general will sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will sacrifice
+one man to save ten, but Nature's ways are entirely different. Both
+contending armies are hers, and she is equally solicitous about both.
+She wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the desert animals to
+survive, and she favors both equally. All she asks of them is that they
+breed and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke,
+Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yet
+confesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless
+true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla--fruit, stem, and
+trunk--though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the human
+hand at the slightest touch."
+
+This question of spines and thorns in vegetation is a baffling one
+because Nature's ways are so unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in
+his theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded upon the idea
+that Nature selects as man selects. You cannot put Nature into a
+formula.
+
+Behold how every branch and twig of our red thorn bristles with cruel
+daggers! But if they are designed to keep away bird or beast from eating
+its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own ends! If no creature
+ate its little red apples and thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would
+rot on the ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red thorns
+would not increase. And increase alone is Nature's end.
+
+It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the animal kingdom is
+full of design. Every part and organ of our bodies has its purpose which
+serves the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any character of
+bird or beast, fish or insect, that does not show purpose, but in the
+plant world Nature seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not work
+on so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ash
+serve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry
+bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, and
+thrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry do
+not save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. In
+fact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow their
+seeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in a
+spiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We know
+that hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedling
+pear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why.
+
+The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe
+(_Agave americana_), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and
+fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no more
+edible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defense
+question about spines.
+
+
+V. SEA-DOGS
+
+There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front of
+me that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have
+their rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, and
+keep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like a
+group of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed
+by the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem to
+show above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time.
+
+Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of
+green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in
+the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea,
+until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or
+hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it
+has a half-muffled, smothered sound.
+
+They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems something
+incongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep--badgers
+or marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt their
+prey in the sea.
+
+Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell us
+what they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony
+of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any new
+species is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and
+the short span of human life, or of the whole human history, gives us no
+adequate vantage-ground from which to solve the problem.
+
+I can easily believe that these hair seals are close akin to the dog.
+They have five digits; they bolt their food like dogs; their sense of
+smell is said to be very acute, though how it could serve them in the
+sea does not appear. The young are born upon the land and enter the
+water very reluctantly.
+
+This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence of the dog and
+attaches itself to its master as does the dog. Its sense of direction
+and locality is very acute. This group of seals in front of me, day
+after day, and week after week, returns to the same spot in the
+ever-changing waters, without the variation of a single yard, so far as
+I can see. The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst, and it
+seems as if some sixth sense must guide them to it. Locality is as
+unreal in the sea as in the sky, but these few square yards of shifting
+waters seem as real to these seals as if they were a granite ledge. They
+keep massed there on the water at that particular point, with their
+flippers protruding above the surface, as if they were as free from
+danger as so many picnickers. Yet something attracts them to this
+particular place. I know of no other spot along the coast for a hundred
+miles or more where the seals congregate as they do here. What is the
+secret of it? Evidently it is a question of security from their enemies.
+At this point the waves break much farther out than usual, which
+indicates a hidden reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow
+water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, from
+stealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear their
+barking in the early part of the night, but long before morning their
+half-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire for
+the night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or more
+out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protection
+from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on
+account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity
+offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning,
+I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the
+unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short
+intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my youth.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES
+
+
+I. NATURE'S WIRELESS
+
+The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to
+give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one
+knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if
+they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like
+community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
+process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an
+impulse.
+
+So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in
+the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The
+members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to
+the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know
+it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated.
+The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and
+coöperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
+without scheme or direction.
+
+This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the
+migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these
+little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to
+commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in
+Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight
+toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When
+the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course.
+Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive
+with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of
+insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal
+life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same
+unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual
+migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the
+flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast
+armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our
+youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They
+came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in
+the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were
+as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our
+flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of
+blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air
+with astonishing precision.
+
+In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I have
+seen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going through
+various intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroom
+quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of men
+try it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and the
+tumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as to
+bring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of their
+breasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a giant
+hand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a
+tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues a
+bird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robin
+dashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactly
+coincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of a
+tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or a
+squirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the same
+machine-like unity.
+
+In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent,
+uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon some
+infusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal,
+the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of action
+as of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity.
+
+How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals!
+How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first day
+of the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seem
+to feel the impending danger.
+
+The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate the
+same law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go South
+and thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in the
+trees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a new
+kind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in the
+spring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley in
+California was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west.
+In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshoppers
+witnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. They
+stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodies
+making the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have made
+them. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one.
+
+This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makes
+up to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what we
+call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathy
+is probably a survival from our earlier animal state.
+
+
+II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE
+
+Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the
+conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more
+intelligent than honey bees:
+
+  If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir
+  John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle
+  down horizontally with its base to the window, you will
+  find that the bees will persist till they die of
+  exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an
+  issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two
+  minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on
+  the opposite side.
+
+The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems of
+life are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers;
+their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few natural
+enemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores of
+flycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. The
+kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally
+snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies;
+the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while,
+besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the
+vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them.
+Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficult
+the trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to
+"swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himself
+and plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready for
+a trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is,
+and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is
+reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crush
+it is as easy as to crush a beetle.
+
+The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle for
+existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our
+skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take
+thought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them.
+
+To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for folly
+so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that
+the more fool you are, the more you know.
+
+Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of
+the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other
+animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free
+intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an
+overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,
+
+  She makes of labor an eternal lust.
+
+Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or
+better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows
+and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.
+
+The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the
+swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.
+
+It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize
+one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees
+from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box,
+when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in
+carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees
+from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they
+have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.
+
+Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon
+during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news
+of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!
+
+Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration,
+and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The
+secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this
+solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not.
+He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the
+explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the
+power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings";
+of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the
+"extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they
+are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring
+outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive
+superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer
+of the dawn,--the early bee,--like the early bird that catches the worm,
+returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming
+to-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay
+with white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "the
+mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the
+bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably
+call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities
+proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the
+sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand
+juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations
+as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine
+liquid."
+
+When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing its
+commands," or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritual
+communications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he is true to his own
+conception.
+
+The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like all
+their other economies--not a matter of thought, but of instinct.
+
+Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake of
+humanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as we
+communicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another this
+and that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters,
+and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous to
+verbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the
+Spirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and coöperate with one
+another as the cells of the body communicate and coöperate in building
+up the various organs. The spirit of the body coördinates all the
+different organs and tissues, making a unit of the body.
+
+If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates into
+the hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it
+lies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object in
+the body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomes
+encysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless.
+
+Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body will
+infuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by the
+bee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from the
+same hive heed it not.
+
+Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another as
+animals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, they
+ruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another world
+of beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form a
+part. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their work
+of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their
+apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not
+personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the
+cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers,
+sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers,
+working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the
+kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These
+little people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; they
+breathe and hear through their legs, their antennæ.
+
+The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instincts
+lead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, and
+they know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, while
+the workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power of
+vision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen in
+her course through the air.
+
+The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fans
+at the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring
+the bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that go
+forth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of the
+hive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and
+crevices--all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive.
+
+After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear us
+out in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of the
+insect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinck
+is the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world in
+his latest volume, "Mountain Paths":
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain
+  earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and
+  amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There
+  is something, on the other hand, about the insect that
+  does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology
+  of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect
+  comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic,
+  more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+  One would think that it was born of some comet that had
+  lost its course and died demented in space.
+
+Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman
+and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of
+hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from
+foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as
+welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they
+attract the attention of one they know _who recognizes their signal by
+thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the
+stranger has departed_." (The italics are mine.) He says the same
+hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their
+arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
+with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in
+camp some time."
+
+Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What
+would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when
+we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them
+lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the
+nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.
+
+
+III. ODD OR EVEN
+
+One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that in
+the inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic world
+by odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampy
+meadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium,
+and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality I
+might have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel,
+or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive
+of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the
+freedom and irregularity of growing things.
+
+One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things.
+Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some
+eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the
+number six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be so
+sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and
+incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly
+odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually have
+three or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and the
+cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We have five fingers and five
+toes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers
+serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganic
+world things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world the
+equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence the
+danger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not be
+driven into a corner.
+
+Well may Emerson ask--
+
+  Why Nature loves the number five,
+  And why the star form she repeats?
+
+The number five rules in all the largest floral families, as in the
+crowfoot family, the rose family (which embraces all our fruit trees),
+the geranium family, the flax family, the campanula family, the
+convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then there is a large number
+of flowers the parts of which go in threes, one of the best known of
+which is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the only form I
+recall based on the number five.
+
+
+IV. WHY AND HOW
+
+One may always expect in living nature variations and modifications. It
+is useless to ask why. Nature is silent when interrogated in this way.
+Ask her how, and you get some results. If we ask, for instance, why the
+sting of the honey bee is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and
+bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth like a needle, so that
+they can sting and sting again, and live to sting another day, while the
+honey bee stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one species
+of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has a powerful electric
+battery; or why the porcupine has an armor of quills while his brother
+rodent the woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on--we make no
+addition to our knowledge.
+
+But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and defenseless an animal as
+the rabbit manages to survive and multiply, we extend our knowledge of
+natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of its wakefulness--by
+never closing its eyes--and by its speed; also by making its home where
+it can command all approaches, and so flee in any direction. Or if we
+ask how our ruffed grouse survives and prospers in a climate where its
+cousin the quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of certain
+trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder and is often cut off by a deep
+fall of snow.
+
+If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get no answer; but if we ask
+how he does it, we find out that he stores up food in his den, hence
+must take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck hibernates, also, but
+he stores up fuel in the shape of fat in his own body. The porcupine is
+above ground and active all winter. He survives by gnawing the bark of
+certain trees, probably the hemlock. We have two species of native mice
+that look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the jumping, or
+kangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is active the season through, over and
+under the snow; the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparently
+accomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely keeping the spark of
+life burning. His fires are banked, so to speak; his temperature is very
+low, and he breathes only at long intervals.
+
+If, then, we ask with Emerson, "_why_ Nature loves the number five," and
+"_why_ the star form she repeats," we shall be put to it for an answer.
+We can only say that with living things odd numbers are more likely to
+prevail, and with non-living, even numbers.
+
+Some seeds have wings and some have not. To ask why, is a blind
+question, but if we ask _how_ the wingless seeds get sown, we may add to
+our knowledge.
+
+In our own practical lives, in which experimentation plays such a part,
+we are often compelled to ask why this result and not that, why this
+thing behaves this way and that thing that way. We are looking for
+reasons or causes. The farmer asks why his planting in this field was a
+failure, while it was a success in the next field, and so on. An
+analysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture will give him the
+answer.
+
+
+V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM
+
+That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and a good and wise man
+admits of no question, but to us, at this distance, it seems strange
+enough that he should have thought that he had hit upon the key to the
+origin of species in the slow and insensible changes which he fancied
+species underwent during the course of the geologic ages, and should
+thus have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had he called his
+work the "Variability of Species," or the "Modification of Species," it
+would not have been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us new
+varieties, but not new species. In fact, of the origin of species we
+know absolutely nothing, no more than we do about the origin of life
+itself.
+
+Of the development of species we know some of the factors that play a
+part, as the influence of environment, the struggle for existence, and
+the competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherent
+tendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution?
+Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originate
+species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening a
+species, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. The record of the
+rocks reveals to us the relation of species, and their succession in
+geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.
+
+Agassiz believed that every species of animal and plant was the result
+of a direct and separate act of the Creator. But the naturalist sees the
+creative energy immanent in matter. Does not one have to believe in
+something like this to account for the world as we see it? And to
+account for us also?--a universal mind or intelligence
+
+  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+  And the round ocean and the living air,
+  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
+
+Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to the Infinite Mystery
+in terms of our own wills and acts. When we think of a Creator and the
+thing created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fire
+and light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could not
+look upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of the
+origin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said,
+speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they
+"have all been produced by laws acting around us," he spoke as a great
+philosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind
+grouping of irrational forces.
+
+
+VI. A LIVE WORLD
+
+It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked
+upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this
+world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive."
+But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a
+disordered mind.
+
+Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on
+the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living
+organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and
+palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms
+do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
+Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held
+in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast
+sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no
+doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding
+to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of
+air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call
+life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and
+bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a
+colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which
+the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be
+measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference
+of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet
+from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the
+throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times.
+They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call
+them, are occurring constantly.
+
+Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which
+translates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors and
+agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty
+feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet
+from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what
+is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions,
+occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds."
+"The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one
+occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible
+earthquake.
+
+Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams
+we know little of.
+
+From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression
+which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky
+planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself.
+Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more
+advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe
+at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of
+Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while both
+Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions,
+which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern
+Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more
+like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The
+flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man
+originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that
+the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival
+the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.
+
+
+VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR
+
+That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems
+to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has
+more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of
+the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the
+fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories
+fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and
+greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly
+made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when
+they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the
+jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the
+strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their
+political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the
+divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact
+that the organic world had reached its present stage of development
+through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these
+ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to
+development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that
+power comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them.
+
+The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of our
+higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous.
+Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the
+Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind,
+in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his
+plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his
+mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his
+simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore
+fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.
+The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code.
+Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of the
+territory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in the
+fields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had the
+sanction of natural law, that was enough; they were quite oblivious to
+the fact that with man's moral nature had come in a new biological law
+which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with, but which has
+tremendous authority and survival value--the law of right, justice,
+mercy, honor, love.
+
+We do not look for the Golden Rule among swine and cattle, or among
+wolves and sharks; we look for it among men; we look for honor, for
+heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of these things are
+involved in the Darwinian hypothesis. There is no such thing as right or
+wrong in the orders below man. These are purely human distinctions. It
+is not wrong for the wolf to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass,
+but an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the farthest star.
+Germany's assault upon the peace and prosperity of the world was a crime
+against the very heavens.
+
+Darwin occupied himself only with the natural evolution of organic
+forms, and not with the evolution of human communities. He treated man
+as an animal, and fitted him into the zoölogical scheme. He removed him
+from the realm of the miraculous into the plane of the natural. For all
+purposes of biological discussion, man is an animal, but that is not
+saying he is only an animal, and still under the law of animal
+evolution. The European man is supposed to have passed the stage of
+savagery, in which the only rule of right is the rule of might. To have
+made Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is to have debased a
+sound natural philosophy to a selfish and ignoble end.
+
+Germany lifted the law to the human realm and staked her all upon it,
+and failed. The moral sense of the world--the sense of justice, of fair
+play--was against her, and inevitably she went down. Her leaders were
+morally blind. When the rest of the world talked of moral standards, the
+German leaders said, "We think you are fools." But these standards
+brought England into the war--the sacredness of treaties. They brought
+the United States in. We saw a common enemy in Germany, an enemy of
+mankind. We sent millions of men to France for an ideal--for justice and
+fair play. To see our standards of right and justice ignored and
+trampled upon in this way was intolerable. The thought of the world
+being swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said to myself from the
+first, "The Allies have got to win; there is no alternative." And what
+astonishes me is that certain prominent Englishmen, such as Lord Morley,
+and others, did not see it. Would they have sat still and watched
+Germany destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel and make ready
+to destroy England? The very framework of our moral civilization would
+have been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his natural selection
+theory was to lead.
+
+
+VIII. THE ROBIN
+
+Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or best
+stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility,
+adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous
+feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From
+cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the
+only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks
+upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most
+diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on a
+horizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your
+porch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or under
+the shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground
+above a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on a
+projecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said
+he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days.
+
+He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a
+dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in
+September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word--a typical
+American in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first I
+hear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there are
+twenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The song
+sparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is far
+behind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows or
+bluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as well
+as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins.
+Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is
+near at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or New
+England. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a
+plebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one would
+not like to miss.
+
+The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be a
+runner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"--it starts "in
+high" and stops "in high."
+
+
+IX. THE WEASEL
+
+In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the
+strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red
+squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red
+squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel
+would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave
+him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both.
+Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at
+work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them.
+Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it
+released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by
+stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The
+bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many
+yards and then had pulled it down.
+
+Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a
+weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and
+round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and
+looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the
+squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the
+squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would
+not have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of my
+neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and
+took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then
+dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such
+terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy
+prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form,
+that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell
+upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a
+hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my
+foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its
+methods are a kind of _Schrecklichkeit_ in the animal world. It is the
+incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.
+
+
+X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE
+
+We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption that
+her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among
+plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool
+from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we
+want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk,
+irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want
+butter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains
+and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object
+with as little waste and delay as possible.
+
+Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her
+fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she
+subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her
+one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will
+be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize
+fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.
+
+Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are
+necessary for the survival of the species--strength, speed, sharpness of
+eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.
+
+Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the
+crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and
+can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey
+wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing
+that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons
+that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and
+cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and
+unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's
+hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?
+
+Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no
+concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly
+to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow
+sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the
+obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume that
+Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle
+of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He
+wants some particular good--a race-horse, a draft-horse--better quality
+or greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with
+her progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts with
+her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The
+stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She
+pits one species of plant or animal against another--heads I win, tails
+you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles
+their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are
+unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of
+mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage,
+but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass because
+it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.
+
+
+XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE
+
+We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or
+by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical
+or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the
+earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling
+up and pulling down--aggregating and accumulating, and separating and
+disintegrating.
+
+It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in
+inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process,
+but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an
+obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and
+monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Cañon and in the
+Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other
+aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and
+structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking
+forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to
+liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were
+not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the
+leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the
+earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and
+suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of
+them in the Grand Cañon! It looks as though titanic architects and
+sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand
+and a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologic
+ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the
+river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the
+material it took out of this chasm! But it could not--poetry at one end
+of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form
+of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains--material for a new series
+of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Cañons may be
+carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders of
+the mountains are only ordinary workmen.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+RUMINATIONS
+
+
+I. MAN A PART OF NATURE
+
+This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of
+as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its
+own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature
+external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call
+nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its
+crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little
+way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very
+limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are
+things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.
+
+It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as
+distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the
+world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals
+are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization
+is the separating of one thing from another and classifying and
+organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are
+absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be
+savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We
+improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own
+purposes. All the forces we use--wind, water, gravity, electricity--are
+still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to
+the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane
+soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty
+miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter
+projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the
+hammer because he greatly outweighs it.
+
+
+II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH
+
+Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of
+the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is
+like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is
+unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of
+the body the component elements--water, lime, iron, phosphorus,
+magnesia, and so on--remain the same, but their organization is changed.
+Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page,
+the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist
+independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then
+not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter
+in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it
+is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the
+brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds
+of our neighbor or friend--his character, his personality--exists after
+he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?
+
+We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or
+even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its
+ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the
+same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character,
+personality, mentality--do not these escape your analysis? and are they
+not also real?
+
+
+III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE
+
+Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter
+of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that
+same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His
+interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself
+also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his
+literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase
+of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic
+orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so
+that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well
+interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because
+the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew
+into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new
+enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and
+the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and
+our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting
+Nature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart and
+mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and
+his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives
+the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the
+perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical
+order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night
+prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there
+is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows
+and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they
+are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature
+interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her
+terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her
+presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
+emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him
+his susceptibility to beauty.
+
+It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in
+the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall
+into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the
+flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in
+the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
+and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot
+of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn,
+the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no
+resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it.
+We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the
+laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of
+brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.
+
+The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul
+through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's
+color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is
+in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and
+the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of
+physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the
+perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that
+apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret
+the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in
+the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the
+huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or
+Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
+mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's
+mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.
+
+All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an
+unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of
+chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as if
+they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own
+minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we
+habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be
+annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though
+theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's
+mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.
+
+The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine
+and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines
+of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit which
+the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt
+prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the
+attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official
+prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no
+avail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that the
+prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and
+clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for
+the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to
+reach one's hands for the moon.
+
+
+IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES
+
+The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are,
+in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the
+libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to
+the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the
+fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those
+forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence
+cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the
+air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at
+first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the
+vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in
+direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life
+possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its
+chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant,
+or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.
+
+The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for their
+religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to
+Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth
+inspires them.
+
+
+V. THE COSMIC HARMONY
+
+The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man
+produces or aims to produce in his work--the order and harmony that will
+give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic
+order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and
+circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are
+the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the
+spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles
+round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one
+law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends;
+and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently
+celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make
+their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, which
+undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as
+they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star
+suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a
+star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly
+grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic
+accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough,
+would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it
+even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the
+world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are
+the exception--else there would be no living world. Organic evolution
+reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious
+course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its
+course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels
+ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable
+life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a
+living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that
+disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we
+call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the
+orderly development of life.
+
+The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds
+tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she
+diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures,
+she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on the
+other hand, tends to multiply the mouths.
+
+Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work in
+deforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions of
+drought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations.
+
+
+VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS
+
+The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean are not merely the
+result of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is in
+them. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic
+than terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment which
+the sun and moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to side. Only
+the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The great
+inland bodies of water are unresponsive to them--they are too small for
+the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that only
+great souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What a
+puzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford of
+the cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in their
+net! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tied
+to the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters--how they follow the sun
+and moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round the world"! The
+land feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobile
+clouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of the
+sun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious of
+it. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.
+
+
+VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE
+
+It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and
+Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or
+unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the
+Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I
+saw in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado where they were laid down
+horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a
+mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series
+of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living
+bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms.
+Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure
+silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many
+exquisite forms, _Foraminiferæ_. The Pyramids are said to be built of
+rocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animal
+kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at present
+contributing, so largely as has the _Foraminiferæ_ to the formation of
+the earth's crust." In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem
+Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the
+continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh
+waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the
+"bordering primordial seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the mark.
+There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living
+organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them,
+but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring
+another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists
+usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter
+begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with
+myriads of animal forms.
+
+
+VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE
+
+Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to
+her ends." She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written
+large--written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of
+that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so
+of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal
+parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many
+trees yield fruit only every other year.
+
+I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most.
+Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses
+in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as
+of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts--butternuts,
+hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the
+agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the
+wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than
+they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she
+offers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find the
+service its own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and woods
+hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery
+arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries,
+and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels
+doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds
+have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with
+strychnine.
+
+We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few,
+extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western
+farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own account
+in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are
+stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD
+
+
+As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in
+Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again,
+which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the
+rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more
+familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I
+detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect
+to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in
+the whole performance.
+
+
+I. SUNRISE
+
+The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the
+rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his
+coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the
+forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes
+very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become
+conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly
+increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten
+minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge--the gold turns to silver.
+After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to
+appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a
+minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon
+line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me
+blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One
+realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its
+axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day.
+The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil"
+to describe this moment?--"Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks
+of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I
+watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It
+is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning.
+Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the
+heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually
+enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest
+veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down.
+His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the
+morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or
+storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
+are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as
+if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and
+yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this
+mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it
+could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God
+to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and
+particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.
+
+
+II. NATURE'S METHODS
+
+Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his
+inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The
+first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies
+hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed
+steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
+her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models.
+There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case
+of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with
+those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term.
+She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal
+and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is
+like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.
+
+The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the
+secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of
+the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the
+original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one
+another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one
+case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one
+overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and
+no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat
+rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the
+origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
+of the animal species.
+
+The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is
+analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated
+sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the
+other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of
+high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must
+have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and,
+while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
+approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it
+is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.
+
+We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in
+the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and
+tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned
+instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was
+developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as
+indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in
+the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
+that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or
+are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have
+slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from
+the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes
+and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things.
+The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought
+their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they
+graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for
+us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels;
+they teach us what to shun.
+
+How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for
+instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and
+elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They
+are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their
+horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our
+common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does
+not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.
+
+Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose
+and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.
+
+What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footed
+mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special
+tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use
+his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet
+have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it
+back with his nose.
+
+Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows
+its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition
+it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just
+beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven
+inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its
+conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.
+
+A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner,
+demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly
+distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in
+one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my
+answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural
+law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his
+letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.
+
+There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to
+scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command--to
+increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is
+limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs.
+Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum
+to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the
+fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
+robin--in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers--may
+and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.
+
+The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is
+mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on
+all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds
+do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be
+"fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail
+as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak
+many advantages.
+
+There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another--the
+fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and
+sharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with the
+blunt of scent--which we call natural competition; but the slow, the
+stupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and
+thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to
+be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and
+sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent
+secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the
+antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have
+speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful
+because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the gray
+squirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunk
+below him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows in
+the ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store of
+nuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates the
+rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels.
+
+The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, the
+cold, the heat--the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment,
+survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life than
+those who fall by the way.
+
+
+III. HEADS AND TAILS
+
+I have heard a story of a young artist who, after painting a picture of
+a horse facing a storm, was not satisfied with it, and, feeling that
+something was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly the great
+artist said to him, "Turn the horse around."
+
+The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse turns his tail. Why this
+difference? Because each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and
+its anatomy. How much better suited is the broad, square head of the
+cow, with its heavy coating of hair and its ridge of bone that supports
+its horns, to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous and
+sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast between their noses and
+their mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the
+grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off and
+loves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile and
+sensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and the
+equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow a
+feeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, the
+cow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. The
+tail of the cow is of less protection to her than is that of the horse
+to him. Her great need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the
+rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then her bony stern,
+with its ridges and depressions and thin flanks, is less fit in any
+encounter with storm or with beast than is her head. On the other hand,
+the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with their huge masses
+of muscles, his smooth flanks, and his tail--an apron of long, straight,
+strong hair--are well designed to resist storm and cold. What animal is
+it in Job whose neck is clothed with thunder? With the horse, it is the
+hips that are so clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.
+
+
+IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT
+
+If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I suppose the breath
+of the obscene fungus by any other name would smell as rank. The
+defensive weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would probably not be
+less offensive if we called him by that name alone, instead of the
+common one by which he is universally known.
+
+While in southern California last winter I heard of one that took up his
+abode in the basement of a house that stood on the side of a hill in the
+edge of the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where all sorts of
+odds and ends had accumulated. On some shelves was a box of
+miscellaneous articles, such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old
+toothbrushes, bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire, chips of wood,
+and the dried foot and leg of a hen. One morning, on opening the door of
+the basement, the mistress of the house was surprised to see the whole
+collection of trash laid out in a line across the floor. The articles
+were placed with some degree of regularity covering a space about
+fifteen inches wide and ten feet in length. There were sixty-one
+articles in the row.
+
+Having such an unsavory creature in the basement of one's house is
+rather ticklish business; not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet
+fraught with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away the exhibit and
+left the door open, hoping their uninvited guest would take his
+departure. But he did not. A few nights later he began another
+collection, finding a lot of new material--among other things a box with
+old atomizer bulbs, four of which bulbs he arranged here and there, in
+the row--a motley array.
+
+What is his object? I confess I do not know. No one has seen him do it,
+as he works at night, but there is little doubt that it is his work.[3]
+The Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger than a gray
+squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.
+
+  [3] Later investigations point to this having been the
+  work of a wood rat instead of a skunk.--C. B.
+
+I wish some one would tell me why this night prowler so often seems to
+spray the midnight air with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He
+never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our Eastern species is
+as free from odor as a squirrel or a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by
+day or night in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground that
+lasts for months. While at a friend's house in the Catskills last August
+a wood pussy came up behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap. We
+saw him from the window in the early evening, and we smelled him. For
+some reason he betrayed his presence. Late that night I was awakened by
+a wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose smart, yet in the
+morning no odor could be detected anywhere about the place. Of course
+the smell is much more pronounced in the damp night air than by day, yet
+this does not seem an adequate explanation. Does he signal at night to
+his fellows by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I have never
+heard him make a vocal sound. When caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs
+in a stone wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping his feet. He
+is the one American who does not hurry through life. I have no proof
+that he ever moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he ever
+experiences the feeling of fear, so common to nearly all our smaller
+animals. His track upon the snow is that of a creature at peace with all
+the world.
+
+
+V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE
+
+Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of some animals than of
+others. The frog and the toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn
+thousands, but most birds lay only five or six eggs.
+
+A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a miser with the other. She
+lets loose an army of worms upon the forests, and then sends an
+ichneumon-fly to check them. She wastes no perfume or color upon the
+flowers which depend upon the wind to scatter their pollen.
+Cross-fertilization is dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways
+to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will rob the bones of the
+fowl of their lime to perfect the shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or
+cunning on the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has already
+endowed each of them with a perfect means of defense.
+
+Two things Nature is not chary of--fear and pain. She heaps the measure
+here because fear puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them
+from many real dangers. What dangers have lurked for man and for most
+wild things in the dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a
+fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic. Pain, too,
+safeguards us; it shields us against real dangers. The pains of
+childbirth are probably no check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of
+procreation, especially on the part of the male, overcomes all other
+considerations.
+
+
+VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS
+
+Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and ticks for the South--this
+seems to be Nature's decree, at least in this country. The mosquitoes of
+the Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously, while our Jersey
+mosquitoes hesitate and parley and make exasperating feints and passes.
+On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a swarm of these
+insects rose out of the grass as if they had been waiting for me all the
+years (as they had) and were so hungry that they could not stand upon
+the order of their proceeding, but came headlong.
+
+In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to death by the fleas. They
+were the most sorry, forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life was
+evidently a burden to them. I remember that Lewis and Clark, in their
+journey across the continent, were greatly pestered by fleas. I have
+found that our woodchucks, when they "hole up" in the fall, are full of
+fleas.
+
+
+VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
+
+I have just been reading, for the third time, Dana's "Two Years Before
+the Mast," my sojourn near San Diego for a few months, where so many of
+the scenes and events he describes took place, having given me a renewed
+interest in the book.
+
+It is very evident that the climate of southern California has greatly
+changed since Dana was here in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in
+1832 and 1833. The change has been from wet to dry. At that time his
+ship collected, and others engaged in the same trade collected, hundreds
+of thousands of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from cattle
+grown by the missions between San Diego and Santa Barbara. This fact
+implies good pasturage. The cattle grazed on the hills and plains that
+are now, during a large part of the year, as dry as a bone. At present
+cattle left to their own devices on this coast would soon starve to
+death.
+
+Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain, mainly from the
+southeast, which the ship, anchored a few miles off the coast, or
+cruising up and down, experienced at all times of year--one or more
+storms each week, often lasting for days. One December he describes it
+as raining every hour for the whole month. The dread of the southeasters
+was ever present with the sailors. One of these, lasting three days,
+which came out of a cloudless sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays a
+southeast storm of half a day is, according to my experience, an
+uncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely a drop of rain falls here from
+April till November, yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August. At
+present, in some of the interior valleys, where they grow alfalfa by
+means of irrigation, I see herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the season
+of rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle do well, but during
+the long dry season there is no pasturage save dry pasturage.
+
+Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season here, I have been
+here during three seasons and have so far seen only light rains. To-day
+(December 16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as you care to
+dig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in grain, and a great cloud of dust
+streamed out behind him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavy
+rainfall in this locality that inundated large sections of the country
+and destroyed much property, the dry San Diego River getting out of
+bounds and carrying away bridges and floating houses on its banks. But
+it has been as dry as a highway ever since. It is clear that when the
+big rains do come they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly.
+
+
+VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE
+
+Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on my home acres in the
+Catskills, I noticed that the wild strawberry-vines sent out their
+runners over the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the turf,
+just as over the ground. Of course they could not take root, but they
+went through all the motions of taking root; the little clusters of
+leaves developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their points or stood
+at "attention," and the runners pushed out two or three feet over the
+barren surface and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the desert
+whose strength begins to fail. The first knot, or, one might say, the
+first encampment, was about one foot from the last one upon the turf,
+the next one about eight inches farther in; then the distance dropped to
+six inches, then to four. I think the runner finally gave it up and
+stopped reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently draws its main
+sustenance from the one next behind it, and when this one fails to reach
+the soil it loses heart and can give little succor to the next in front.
+The result is that the stools become smaller and smaller, and the
+distances between them less and less, down the whole line.
+
+Nature's methods are seen in the little as well as in the big, and these
+little purple runners of the vine pushing out in all directions show the
+all-round-the-circle efforts of Nature as clearly as do the revolving
+orbs in sidereal space. Her living impulses go out in all directions.
+She scatters her seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots.
+She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as upon the land. She
+knows not our parsimony nor our prudence. We say she is blind, but
+without eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live to
+particular ends, and are limited to particular spheres, have need of
+eyes. Nature has all time and all space and all ends. Delays and failure
+she knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do not reach their
+goal, the trouble corrects itself; they finally stop searching for it in
+that direction, and the impulse of the plant goes out stronger and
+fuller on other sides.
+
+If the rains were especially designed to replenish our springs and
+supply our growing crops, the clouds might reasonably be expected to
+limit their benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the rains are
+older than are we and our crops, and it is we who must adjust ourselves
+to them, not they to us.
+
+The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized vision. Does the
+blood need eyes to find its way to the heart and lungs? Does the wind
+need eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop its winged seeds?
+It drops them upon all spots, and each kind in due time finds its proper
+habitat, the highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants,
+hitting their marks as surely as do others.
+
+Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps are numbered and must
+go in a particular direction, but the goal of all-seeing Nature is
+everywhere, and she arrives before she starts. She has no plan and no
+method, and she is not governed.
+
+These conceptions express too little, not too much. Nature's movements
+are circular; her definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The
+rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no more an end than is
+the rising vapor. Each is a part of the great circuit of beneficent and
+malevolent forces upon which our life (and all life) depends, upon which
+the making of the soil of the earth and the shaping of the landscape
+depend; all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and perfume of the
+world, all the glory of cloud and sky, all the hazards of flood and
+storm, all the terror of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit
+of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back again through the rivers
+to the sea. In our geologic time there is, in this circuit of the
+waters, more that favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say,
+we should not be here. The enormous destruction of human life, of all
+life, which has taken place and will continue to take place, in this
+beneficent circuit, is only an incident in the history of the globe; the
+physical forces are neither for nor against it; they are neutral; life
+to be here at all has to run these risks; has to run the gantlet of
+these forces, and to get many a lash and gash in the running. Against
+the suffering and death incident thereto there is no insurance save in
+the wit of man himself. All this wit has been developed and sharpened by
+much waste and suffering. We learn to deal with difficulties through the
+discipline of the difficulties themselves. If man were finally to learn
+to control the rains and the floods, it would be through the experience
+which they themselves bring him. The demons that destroy him are on his
+side when he strikes with the strength which they give him. Gravity,
+which so often crushes and overthrows him, is yet the source of all his
+might. The fire that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same fire
+that warms him and drives his engines across the continent.
+
+There is no god that pities us or weeps over our sufferings, save the
+god in our own breasts. We have life on heroic terms. Nature does not
+baby us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take our chances with
+all other forms of life. Our special good fortune is that we are capable
+of a higher development, capable of profiting to a greater extent by
+experience, than are the lower forms of life. And here is the mystery
+that has no solution: we came out of the burning nebulæ just as our
+horse and dog, but why we are men and they are still horse and dog we
+owe to some Power, or, shall I say, to the chance working of a multitude
+of powers, that are beyond our ken. That some Being willed it, designed
+it, no; yet it was in some way provided for in the constitution of the
+world.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Agassiz, Louis, 168, 169.
+
+  Air, light and heavy, 72, 73.
+
+  Albatross, 38.
+
+  Animal life, abundance, 11, 12.
+
+  Antlers, 201.
+
+  Ants, 11.
+
+  Army trucks, 110, 111.
+
+  Arum, 196.
+
+  Automobile trip, 109-26.
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis, 186.
+
+  Barton, W. Va., 119.
+
+  Bee, honey, spirit of the hive, 152, 158-62;
+    intelligence, 156, 157;
+    communication, 159, 160;
+    their world, 161;
+    sting, 165.
+
+  Bee, leaf-cutter, 14, 15.
+
+  Beech, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Birds, living with, 31;
+    flight, 32-38;
+    and cats, 56;
+    nesting near houses, 54-59;
+    home sense, 59;
+    nests of most species built by the females, 64, 65;
+    and dead trees, 84, 85;
+    song, 86;
+    at Pine Knot, Va., 102-05;
+    of southern California, 129-32;
+    community of mind in flocks, 153, 154.
+
+  Birds' nests, finding, 79-81.
+
+  Bluebird, endearing qualities, 43;
+    nesting, 43, 44, 54;
+    experience with a pair, 44-48.
+
+  Bobolink, song flight, 38, 85.
+
+  Bolar Springs, 117.
+
+  Brain, as organ of the mind, 22, 23.
+
+  Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc, 157.
+
+  Bumble-bee, carpenter, 36.
+
+  Bunting, indigo, nesting, 90, 91.
+
+  Bunting, painted, 114.
+
+  Butterflies, flight, 34;
+    flocking, 155.
+
+  Butterfly, monarch, 34, 35, 155.
+
+  Buzzard, turkey, 32-34.
+
+
+  Cacti, 143-48.
+
+  California, southern, observations in, 127-51;
+    coast, 127;
+    mountains, 127, 128;
+    climate and soil, 128;
+    bird-song, 128, 129;
+    birds, 129-32;
+    change of climate in, 210-12.
+
+  Cambium layer, 5, 6.
+
+  Carpenter, W. B., quoted, 194.
+
+  Catbird, 30;
+    stealthiness, 60, 67, 68;
+    experience with a pair, 60-66;
+    fondness for butter, 66;
+    theatrical, 68;
+    notes, 87.
+
+  Caterpillars, 91-94.
+
+  Causes, 165-67.
+
+  Cedar-bird, 65.
+
+  Chance, in animal life, 208, 209.
+
+  Cheat River, W. Va., 116.
+
+  Chipmunks, two in a den, 11;
+    storing currants, 17;
+    carrying provender, 96, 97.
+
+  Chippie. _See_ Sparrow, chipping.
+
+  Chlorophyll, 190, 191.
+
+  Chrysalis, 12.
+
+  Condor, 33, 34.
+
+  Connellsville, Pa., 113.
+
+  Cormorant, 132.
+
+  Cosmos, the, order and harmony of, 191-93.
+
+  Cow, 205.
+
+  Crow, flight, 37;
+    needs no great wing-power, 180.
+
+  Crow, fish, 55, 56, 68.
+
+  Cuckoo, 71, 72, 87;
+    solemnity, 88;
+    nesting, 88, 89;
+    young, 89;
+    nest, 90;
+    food, 90.
+
+  Cuckoo, black-billed, notes, 87, 88;
+    nesting-habits, 88.
+
+  Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 87.
+
+
+  Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., at San Diego, 210, 211.
+
+  Darwin, Charles, quoted, 5,17, 18, 33;
+    his eager study of natural history, 17, 18;
+    observations during the voyage of the Beagle, 18, 19;
+    failure of his theory, 147, 167-69;
+    his mind, 173;
+    treated man as an animal, 174.
+
+  Darwin, George Howard, on the tides, 169, 170.
+
+  Darwinism, a cause of the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Death, an analogy of, 185, 186.
+
+  Desert, vegetation of the, 143-48.
+
+  Dove, mourning, _or_ turtle-dove, 86.
+
+
+  Earth, the, quiverings of the surface, 169-71;
+    the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Edison, Thomas A., 114, 119;
+    contrasted with Mr. Ford, 122-25.
+
+  Elm, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 69, 165, 186.
+
+  Erosion, as sculpture, 181-83.
+
+
+  Fabre, Jean Henri, 162;
+    quoted, 139.
+
+  Far-away, the, 39.
+
+  Fear in animals, 58, 59, 154, 155, 209.
+
+  Fireflies, 19.
+
+  Firestone, H. S., 119, 125.
+
+  Fish, schools of, 154.
+
+  Fleas, 210.
+
+  Flies, intelligence, 156, 157.
+
+  Foraminiferæ, 194.
+
+  Ford, Henry, 113, 114, 119, 120;
+    contrasted with Mr. Edison, 122-24.
+
+  Foxes, 180.
+
+  Frog, wood, 94, 95.
+
+
+  Germans, Darwinism, and the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Giraffe, 200.
+
+  Girls, two West Virginia, 115.
+
+  Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 103.
+
+  God, man appropriating, 199.
+
+  Goldfinch, flight, 37, 42;
+    chorus singing, 40-42;
+    notes, 42;
+    notes of young, 43;
+    nesting, 43.
+
+  Grand Cañon, 182, 194.
+
+  Grass, the wonder of, 74, 75.
+
+  Grasshoppers, 155.
+
+  Great Smoky Mts., 109.
+
+  Greensborough, Pa., 112.
+
+  Grosbeak, rose-breasted, nesting, 65.
+
+  Grouse, ruffed, 166.
+
+  Gull, herring, 131.
+
+  Gulls, flight, 38.
+
+
+  Hawk, red-tailed, 32.
+
+  Hawks, flight, 35.
+
+  Haymaking, 69-76.
+
+  Hen-hawk, flight, 35.
+
+  Hornets, 163.
+
+  Horns, 201, 202.
+
+  Horse, 205, 206.
+
+  Horseshoe Run, W. Va., 114.
+
+  Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 64;
+    bathing in dew, 13;
+    nest, 79;
+    a fairy bird, 94.
+
+  Hurley, Edward N., 113.
+
+  Huxley, Thomas Henry, 27;
+    quoted, 8, 25.
+
+
+  Ibis, white, 32, 153, 154.
+
+  Insects, their world, 23-25, 162;
+    senses, 24;
+    reaction to heat,
+    cold, and vibrations, 25;
+    antennæ, 25;
+    the ruling sex among, 140, 141.
+
+  Interpretation, 186-90.
+
+  Ironweed, 116.
+
+
+  James, William, 22.
+
+  Jay, blue, notes, 87.
+
+  Joe-Pye-weed, 116.
+
+  Junco, young, 19, 20;
+    nesting, 81;
+    abundance, 82.
+
+
+  Kepler, Johann, 169.
+
+  Killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Kingbird, flight, 37;
+    and bees, 156.
+
+
+  Leaves, autumn, 1-3.
+
+  Lemmings, 152, 153.
+
+  Life, origin of, 194, 195.
+
+  Life, human, analogies, 25-27.
+
+  Lightning-bugs. _See_ Fireflies.
+
+  Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 5.
+
+  Lubbock, Sir John, quoted, 156.
+
+
+  McCarthy, Denis Aloysius, quoted, 157.
+
+  Maeterlinck, Maurice, quoted, 23, 162;
+    on the bee, 156-63.
+
+  Man, and Darwinism, 174;
+    a part of nature, 184-86;
+    interpretation of nature and of himself, 186-90;
+    mystery of his evolution, 216.
+
+  Maple, sugar, susceptibility to atmospheric changes, 72, 73.
+
+  Maples, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Marcus Aurelius, quoted, 185.
+
+  Meadowlark, song flight, 37.
+
+  Measuring-worm, 91, 92.
+
+  Mice, wild, 16;
+    barking trees, 27, 28.
+
+  Microphone, 170, 171.
+
+  Microseisms, 170.
+
+  Mind, community of, 152-55.
+
+  Mockingbird, 68.
+
+  Moose, 200.
+
+  Mosquitoes, 210.
+
+  Moth, luna, 97.
+
+  Mouse, jumping, 166, 167.
+
+  Mouse, white-footed, 166.
+
+  Mullets, 154.
+
+
+  Natural history about home, 39, 40.
+
+  Nature, her methods unlike ours, 179-81, 199;
+    interpreting, 186-90;
+    lavishness and parsimony, 195, 196, 209;
+    puzzling and contradictory, 201, 202;
+    all-seeing, 212-14;
+    her movements circular, 214-16.
+
+  Nighthawk, 104.
+
+  Nonpareil, _or_ painted bunting, 114.
+
+  North Carolina, a countryman of, 121.
+
+  Northern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+
+  Oak, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Odd and even numbers, 163-65.
+
+  Oriole, Baltimore, 30, 56;
+    nest, 48-52, 64.
+
+  Oriole, Bullock's, nest, 52.
+
+  Oriole, orchard, nest, 52.
+
+  Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on the origin of life, 194, 195.
+
+  Ostrich, 200.
+
+  Owl, screech, 45-47.
+
+
+  Pacific Ocean, 127.
+
+  Pain, 209.
+
+  Pear-trees, autumn color, 1.
+
+  Pelican, California brown, 131, 132.
+
+  Pennsylvania, motor trip through, 109-13.
+
+  Pewee, wood, nest, 52, 64;
+    its plaint, 87.
+
+  Phoebe, flight, 37;
+    nest, 52-54, 56, 59, 60, 64, 79, 80.
+
+  Pigeon, wild, 103, 104.
+
+  Pine Knot, Va., visit to, 101-08.
+
+  Pipit, American, 129;
+    nest, 129, 130.
+
+  Pittsburgh, 111.
+
+  Plover, killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Porcupine, 166.
+
+
+  Rabbit, its protection, 166;
+    caught by a weasel, 177, 178.
+
+  Rainbow tints, in dew, etc., 13, 14.
+
+  Rat, wood, 207 _note_.
+
+  Reasons, 165-67.
+
+  Redstart, 29.
+
+  Road-mending, 11.
+
+  Robin, young, 19;
+    nest, 53-55, 64, 176;
+    fear of man, 57, 58;
+    fittest to survive, 175, 176;
+    versatility, 176;
+    a hustler, 176;
+    danger of a plague of robins, 177;
+    a runner, 177.
+
+  Rocks, origin of the secondary, 200.
+
+  Roosevelt, Theodore, visit to Pine Knot, Va., with, 101-08;
+    knowledge of India, 101;
+    opinion of Taft, 105;
+    killing a mosquito, 105, 106;
+    protection of the President, 106;
+    bird-gazing, 107;
+    letter from, 107, 108.
+
+
+  Salamander, orange-colored, 95, 96.
+
+  San Diego, Cal., 210-12.
+
+  Sandstone, in the Catskills, 20.
+
+  Sap, 6-8.
+
+  Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Scorpion, 23.
+
+  Seals, hair, in California, 148-51.
+
+  Sex, the ruling, 140, 141.
+
+  Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, 169;
+    on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Shrew, 16.
+
+  Skunk, 206-08.
+
+  Snakes, 11.
+
+  Sources, original, 190, 191.
+
+  South, characteristics of the, 120, 121.
+
+  Southern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+  Sparrow, story of a nest, 98, 99.
+
+  Sparrow, chipping _or_ social, nest, 53, 54.
+
+  Sparrow, song, song flight, 37;
+    nesting, 54;
+    singing, 85, 86.
+
+  Sparrow, vesper, nesting, 80-84;
+    its names, 82;
+    appearance and habits, 82, 83;
+    courted by a skylark, 83.
+
+  Species, origin of, an insoluble problem, 167-69, 199.
+
+  Spider, trap-door, 132-43.
+
+  Spiders, 12, 23;
+    genius of, 136.
+
+  Spider-webs, rainbows in, 13, 14.
+
+  Squirrel, gray, caught by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Squirrel, red, chased by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Strawberry-vines, wild, 212-14.
+
+  Struggle, 203, 204.
+
+  Sunrise, 197, 198.
+
+  Survival of the fit, 201, 203.
+
+  Swallow, bank, 78.
+
+  Swallow, barn, 71;
+    parental anxiety, 76, 77;
+    notes, 76, 77;
+    pleasing qualities, 77, 78.
+
+  Swallow, cliff, 77.
+
+  Swallow, tree, 78.
+
+  Swallows, feeding, 15, 16;
+    hibernation, 78.
+
+  Swift, chimney, 36.
+
+  Sycamore, autumn color, 3.
+
+
+  Taft, William Howard, 105.
+
+  Telepathy, 155.
+
+  Thistle, Canada, 202.
+
+  Thorns, the use of, 143-48.
+
+  Thrasher, brown, 67, 68.
+
+  Thrush, Alaska hermit, 129.
+
+  Thrush, hermit, song, 87.
+
+  Thrush, olive-backed, 30.
+
+  Thrush, Wilson's. _See_ Veery.
+
+  Thrush, wood, 30, 64;
+    manners, 67, 68.
+
+  Tides, the, 169, 170, 193, 194.
+
+  Titlark. _See_ Pipit.
+
+  Trees, leaves, 1-3;
+    mechanism of growth, 4-8;
+    roots and rootlets, 4-6;
+    what man has in common with, 9, 10.
+
+  Tree-toad, 71.
+
+  Turnip, Indian, 196.
+
+  Turtle-dove. _See_ Dove, mourning.
+
+
+  Uniontown, Pa., 113.
+
+  Universe. _See_ Cosmos.
+
+
+  Van Dyke, John C., on desert plants, 145, 146.
+
+  Veery, nesting, 97, 98.
+
+  Vireo, nest, young, and mother, 99, 100.
+
+  Vireo, red-eyed, 86, 100.
+
+  Vireo, yellow-throated, 30.
+
+  Vital principle, 8, 9.
+
+
+  Warbler, Audubon's, 129.
+
+  Warbler, Canada, 29.
+
+  Warbler, mourning, 29, 31.
+
+  Wasp, a solitary, 12, 13.
+
+  Water-thrush, _or_ water accentor, 79.
+
+  Waxwing, Bohemian, 21.
+
+  Weasel, catching rabbits and squirrels, 177, 178;
+    an inspirer of terror, 178, 179.
+
+  Weather, prophesying the, 20-22.
+
+  West Virginia, motor trip through, 114-19.
+
+  Whitman, Walt, quoted, 9, 193.
+
+  Wolf Creek, 117.
+
+  Woodcock, flight song, 32, 37.
+
+  Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Woodpeckers, flight, 37.
+
+  World War, Darwinism a cause of the, 172-75.
+
+  Wren, Bewick's, 103.
+
+  Wren, house, 86;
+    and nesting-box, 29.
+
+  Wren, winter, nest, 79.
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+  CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
+  U · S · A
+
+
+
+
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under the Maples
+
+Author: John  Burroughs
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2009 [EBook #30246]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE MAPLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Turgut Dincer, Joseph Cooper and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="tn">Transcriber's Note:<br />
+Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy
+has been retained as it appears in the original
+publication.</div>
+
+<h1>UNDER THE MAPLES</h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/photo.jpg" width="500" height="643" alt=
+"The last portrait of John Burroughs" title="" />
+
+<div class="caption">THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS<br />
+<small>(March 23, 1921; six days before his death)</small><br />
+Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time
+friend Charles F. Lummis</div></div>
+
+
+<h1>UNDER THE MAPLES</h1>
+
+<h3><small>BY</small><br />
+JOHN BURROUGHS<br /><br /></h3>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 100px;"><img src="images/printer.jpg" width="100" height="131" alt=
+"Printer's mark" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<h4>
+<small>BOSTON AND NEW YORK</small><br />
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY<br />
+<b>The Riverside Press Cambridge</b></h4>
+
+<h6>COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY</h6>
+
+<h6>ALL RIGHTS RESERVED</h6>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">v</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the
+Catskills and looking out upon the maple woods of
+the old home farm, and under the maples at Riverby,
+that the most of these essays were written,
+during the last two years of the author's life. And it
+was to the familiar haunts near his Hudson River
+home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering
+in Southern California in 1921. As he pictured
+in his mind the ice breaking up on the river in the
+crystalline March days, the return of the birds, the
+first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he
+was there in spirit, gazing upon the river from the
+summer-house, or from the veranda of the Nest, or
+seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or
+busy with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.</p>
+
+<p>Casting about for a title for this volume, the
+vision of maple-trees and dripping sap and crisp
+March days playing constantly before his mind,
+one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his
+new book, he suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call
+it <i>Under the Maples</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>His love for the maple, and consequently his
+pleasure in having hit upon this title, can be gathered
+from the following fragment found among his
+miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">vi</a></span>
+the sugar maple grows It was paramount in the
+woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It
+looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple
+stick to put on my fire, I feel like caressing it a
+little. Its fiber is as white as a lily, and nearly as
+sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory
+wood to handle&mdash;a clean, docile, wholesome tree;
+burning without snapping or sputtering, easily
+worked up into stovewood, fine of grain, hard of
+texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as
+a shade tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness
+in summer, sugar in its veins, gold in its foliage,
+warmth in its fibers, and health in it the year
+round."</p>
+
+<p><span class="quotsig"><span class="smcap">Clara Barrus</span></span></p>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;"><i>The Nest at Riverby</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0em;"><i>West Park on the Hudson</i></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><i>New York</i></span><br />
+</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">vii</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">I.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">The Falling Leaves</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">II.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">The Pleasures of a Naturalist</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">III.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">The Flight of Birds</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">Bird Intimacies</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_39">39</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">V.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">A Midsummer Idyl</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_69">69</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">Near Views of Wild Life</span></td><td class="right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">With Roosevelt at Pine Knot</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_101">101</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">A Strenuous Holiday</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">IX.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">Under Genial Skies</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">A Sun-Blessed Land</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Lawn Birds</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Silken Chambers</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_132">132</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Desert Note</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_143">143</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Sea-Dogs</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_148">148</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">X.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">A Sheaf of Nature Notes</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Nature's Wireless</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Maeterlinck on the Bee</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_156">156</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Odd or Even</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Why and How</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">An Insoluble Problem</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_167">167</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">A Live World</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Darwinism and the War</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_172">172</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Robin</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IX.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Weasel</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_177">177</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">X.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Misinterpreting Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_179">179</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">XI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Natural Sculpture</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">XI.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">viii</a></span><span class="smcap">Ruminations</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_184">184</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Man a Part of Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_184">184</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Marcus Aurelius on Death</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_185">185</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Interpreter of Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_186">186</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Original Source</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Cosmic Harmony</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_191">191</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Cosmic Rhythms</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_193">193</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">The Beginnings of Life</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_194">194</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Spendthrift Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_195">195</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left">XII.</td>
+<td class="middle"><span class="smcap">New Gleanings in Field and Wood</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left2">I.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Sunrise</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_197">197</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">II.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Nature's Methods</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_199">199</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">III.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Heads and Tails</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_205">205</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">IV.</td>
+<td class="middle2">An Unsavory Subject</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_206">206</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">V.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Chance in Animal Life</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_208">208</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VI.</td>
+<td class="middle2">Mosquitoes and Fleas</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VII.</td>
+<td class="middle2"><p class="indent">The Change of Climate in Southern California</p></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_210">210</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2">VIII.</td>
+<td class="middle2">All-Seeing Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_212">212</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table><table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="middle" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Index</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_217">217</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
+
+<h1>UNDER<br />
+THE MAPLES</h1>
+
+
+
+<div class="center">I</div>
+
+<div class="center">THE FALLING LEAVES</div>
+
+
+<p>The time of the falling of leaves has come again.
+Once more in our morning walk we tread upon
+carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and bronze,
+woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate
+textures while we slept.</p>
+
+<p>How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of
+light and color are their last days! There are
+exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of the
+fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously.
+They bequeath their heritage of color to their fruit.
+Upon it they lavish the hues which other trees
+lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often
+an exception. I have seen pear orchards in October
+painting a hillside in hues of mingled bronze
+and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, it
+is so chary of color upon its fruit.</p>
+
+<p>But in October what a feast to the eye our woods
+and groves present! The whole body of the air
+seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They
+are giving back the light they have been absorbing
+from the sun all summer.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so
+clean and delicate when it first covers the paths and
+the highways that one almost hesitates to walk
+upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw
+down his cloak for Queen Elizabeth to walk upon?
+See what a robe the maples have thrown down for
+you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to
+soil it! The summer robes of the groves and the
+forests&mdash;more than robes, a vital part of themselves,
+the myriad living nets with which they have captured,
+and through which they have absorbed, the
+energy of the solar rays. What a change when the
+leaves are gone, and what a change when they come
+again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The
+dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change
+but little from summer to winter. When the leaves
+come, what a transformation, what mobility, what
+sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand
+delicate veined hands reaching forth and waving
+a greeting to the air and light, making a union and
+compact with them, like a wedding ceremony.
+How young the old trees suddenly become! what
+suppleness and grace invest their branches! The
+leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the
+cambium layer beneath the bark is the girdle of
+perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial expression
+of the same quality. The leaves have their
+day and die, but the last leaf that comes to the
+branch is as young as the first. The leaves and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span>
+the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go,
+yet they age not; under the magic touch of spring
+the miracle is repeated over and over.</p>
+
+<p>The maples perhaps undergo the most complete
+transformation of all the forest trees. Their leaves
+fairly become luminous, as if they glowed with
+inward light. In October a maple-tree before
+your window lights up your room like a great lamp.
+Even on cloudy days its presence helps to dispel
+the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess
+in a much less degree that quality of luminosity,
+though certain species of oak at times are rich in
+shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees
+just named for the most part turn brown before
+they fall. The great leaves of the sycamore assume
+a rich tan-color like fine leather.</p>
+
+<p>The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals
+with which to capture her prey, but the net is not
+a part of herself as the leaf is a part of the tree.
+The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree
+never repairs its leaves. It may put forth new
+leaves, but it never essays to patch up the old ones.
+Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves
+that a few more or less or a few torn and bruised
+ones do not seem to matter. When the leaf
+surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some
+insect pest, or some form of leaf-blight, or by the
+ravages of a hail-storm, the growth of the tree and
+the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked. To<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
+denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession
+usually proves fatal. The vitality of the tree
+declines year by year till death ensues.</p>
+
+<p>To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable
+as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which
+it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets at the
+bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at
+the top. The rootlets absorb the water charged
+with mineral salts from the soil, and the leaves
+absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as
+if the tree were almost made of matter and spirit,
+like man; the ether with its vibrations, on the one
+hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds,
+on the other&mdash;earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy
+oak, the gigantic sequoia, are each equally finely
+organized in these parts that take hold upon nature.
+We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense
+they are; but all are delicate feeders in their
+mechanism of absorption from the earth and air.</p>
+
+<p>The tree touches the inorganic world at the two
+finest points of its structure&mdash;the rootlets and
+the leaves. These attack the great crude world
+of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only
+the microscope can fully reveal them to us. The
+animal world seizes its food in masses little and big,
+and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable,
+through the agency of the solvent power of water,
+absorbs its nourishment molecule by molecule.</p>
+
+<p>A tree does not live by its big roots&mdash;these are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>
+mainly for strength and to hold it to the ground.
+How they grip the rocks, fitting themselves to them,
+as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's life
+is in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the
+roots. Darwin says those rootlets behave as if
+they had minute brains in their extremities. They
+feel their way into the soil; they know the elements
+the plant wants; some select more lime, others
+more potash, others more magnesia. The wheat
+rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the
+pea rootlets select more lime: the pea does not
+need the silica. The individuality of plants and
+trees in this respect is most remarkable. The
+cells of each seem to know what particular elements
+they want from the soil, as of course they do.</p>
+
+<p>The vital activity of the tree goes on at three
+points&mdash;in the leaves, in the rootlets, and in the
+cambium layer. The activity of the leaf and rootlet
+furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this
+generative layer&mdash;the milky, mucilaginous girdle
+of matter between the outer bark and the wood
+through which the tree grows and increases in size.
+Generation and regeneration take place through
+this layer. I have called it the girdle of perpetual
+youth. It never grows old. It is annually renewed.
+The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and
+disappear, indeed the tree may be reduced to a
+mere shell and many of its branches may die and
+fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>
+the fact that its cambium layer, at least over a part
+of its surface, is still youthful and doing its work.
+It is this layer that the yellow-bellied woodpecker,
+known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours,
+thus drawing directly upon the vitality of the tree.
+But his ravages are rarely serious. Only in two
+instances have I seen dead branches on an apple-tree
+that appeared to be the result of his drilling.</p>
+
+<p>What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense
+the heart; it has no vital function, but only the
+mechanical one of strength and support. It adds
+to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms.
+The trunk of a tree is like a community where only
+one generation at a time is engaged in active business,
+the great mass of the population being retired
+and adding solidity and permanence to the social
+organism. The rootlets of a plant or a tree are
+like the laborers in the field that produce for us
+the raw material of our food, while the leaves are
+like our many devices for rendering it edible and
+nourishing. The rootlets continue their activity
+in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and
+thus gorge the tree with fluid against the needs of
+the spring. In the growing tree or vine the sap,
+charged with nourishment, flows down from the
+top to the roots. In the spring it evidently
+flows upward, seeking the air through the leaves.
+Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always
+flows upward, while the nutritive sap flows down<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>ward,
+thus giving the tree a kind of double
+circulation.</p>
+
+<p>A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful
+when we have come to a knowledge of all its hidden
+processes, but it certainly is no less so. We do
+not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the
+bark, nor of the roots and rootlets, when we gaze
+upon a noble oak or an elm; we admire it for its
+form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin to ourselves;
+it is the work of a vast community of cells
+like those that build up our own bodies; it is a
+fountain of living matter rising up out of the earth
+and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a
+spray of leaves and flowers; and if we could see its
+hidden processes we should realize how truly like a
+fountain it is. While in full leaf a current of water
+is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward
+against gravity. This stream of water is truly its
+life current; it enters at the rootlets under the
+ground and escapes at the top through the leaves
+by a process called transpiration. All the mineral
+salts with which the tree builds up its woody tissues,&mdash;its
+osseous system, so to speak,&mdash;the instruments
+with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon
+which it obtains from the air, are borne in solution
+in this stream of water. Its function is analogous to
+that of the rivers which bring the produce and other
+material to the great cities situated upon their
+banks. A cloud of invisible vapor rises from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span>
+top of every tree and a thousand invisible rills
+enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The
+trees are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters
+from the earth to the clouds. Our own bodies and
+the bodies of all living things perform a similar
+function. Life cannot go on without water, but
+water is not a food; it makes the processes of
+metabolism possible; assimilation and elimination
+go on through its agency. Water and air are the
+two ties between the organic and the inorganic.
+The function of the one is mainly mechanical,
+that of the other is mainly chemical.</p>
+
+<p>As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows
+out at the top, to which point it rises by capillary
+attraction and a process called osmosis. Neither
+of them is a strictly vital process, since both are
+found in the inorganic world; but they are in the
+service of what we call a vital principle. Some
+physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a
+vital principle. Huxley thought we might as well
+talk about the principle of aqueosity in water.
+We are the victims of words. The sun does not
+shoot out beams or rays, though the eye reports
+such; but it certainly sends forth energy; and it
+is as certain that there is a new activity in matter&mdash;some
+matter&mdash;that we call vital.</p>
+
+<p>Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up
+new compounds and begets myriads of new forms
+not found in the inorganic world, till it finally<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>
+builds up the body and mind of man. Death puts
+an end to this activity alike in man and tree, and
+a new kind of activity sets in&mdash;a disorganizing
+activity, still with the aid of water and air and
+living organisms. It is like the compositor distributing
+his type after the book is printed. The
+micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but they
+are of a different kind from those which build up
+the body in the first instance. But the living
+body as a whole, with its complex of co&ouml;rdinating
+organs and functions&mdash;what attended to that?
+The cells build the parts, but what builds the
+whole?</p>
+
+<p>How many things we have in common with the
+trees! The same mysterious gift of life, to begin
+with; the same primary elements&mdash;carbon, nitrogen,
+oxygen, and so on&mdash;in our bodies; and
+many of the same vital functions&mdash;respiration,
+circulation, absorption, assimilation, reproduction.
+Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell
+is the architect that builds up the bodies of both.
+Trees are rooted men and men are walking trees.
+The tree absorbs its earth materials through the
+minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrill&aelig;, and the
+animal body absorbs its nutriment through
+analogous organs in the intestines, called lacteals.</p>
+
+<p>Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid
+trees" often comes to my mind. They are the words
+of a poet who sees hidden relations and meanings<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
+everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all
+animate nature is. The trees are wrapped in a
+kind of slumber in winter, and they are reservoirs
+of living currents in summer. If all living bodies
+came originally out of the sea, they brought a big
+dower of the sea with them. The human body
+is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held in
+solution by several gallons of water. The ashes
+of the living tree bulk small in comparison with
+the amount of water it holds. Yes, "the slumbering
+and liquid trees." They awaken from
+their slumber in the spring, the scales fall from
+their buds, the fountains within them are unsealed,
+and they again become streams of living
+energy, breaking into leaf and bloom and fruit
+under the magic of the sun's rays.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">II</div>
+
+<div class="center">THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST</div>
+
+<div class="center2">I</div>
+
+<p>How closely every crack and corner of nature is
+packed with life, especially in our northern temperate
+zone! I was impressed with this fact when
+during several June days I was occupied with
+road-mending on the farm where I was born. To
+open up the loosely piled and decaying laminated
+rocks was to open up a little biological and zo&ouml;logical
+museum, so many of our smaller forms of life
+harbored there. From chipmunks to ants and
+spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the
+chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more
+beneath the loosely piled rocks. There were two
+of them in a soft, warm nest of dry, shredded
+maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned
+out of doors, but when they heard the racket overhead
+bolted precipitately. Two living together
+surprised me, as heretofore I had never known
+but one in a den. Near them a milk snake had
+stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the little
+earthquake which we set up got badly crushed.
+Two little red-bellied snakes about one foot long
+had also found harbor there.</p>
+
+<p>The ants rushed about in great consternation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>
+when their eggs were suddenly exposed. In fact,
+there was live natural history under every stone
+about us. Some children brought me pieces of
+stone, which they picked up close by, which
+sheltered a variety of cocoon-building spiders.
+One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about
+its ball of eggs, the size of a large pea, attached
+to the hind part of its body. This became detached,
+when she seized it eagerly and bore it
+about held between her legs. Another fragment
+of stone, the size of one's hand, sheltered the
+chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was
+attached to it at its tail. It was surprising to
+see this enshrouded creature, blind and deaf,
+wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with
+its wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would
+about as soon expect to see an egg protest.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere.
+Every solitude to him is peopled. Every
+morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to
+eye or ear.</p>
+
+<p>The born naturalist is one of the most lucky
+men in the world. Winter or summer, rain or
+shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his
+pleasures are always near at hand. The great
+book of nature is open before him and he has only
+to turn the leaves.</p>
+
+<p>A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory
+rocking-chair the other day was annoyed by one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>
+of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want
+to occupy the chair. It held a small worm in
+its legs. She would "shoo" it away, only to see
+it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it
+did not want to sting her, but that its nest was
+somewhere in the chair. And, sure enough, as
+soon as she quieted down, it entered a small
+opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and
+deposited its worm, and presently was back with
+another, and then a third and a fourth; and
+before the day was done it came with little pellets
+of mud and sealed up the opening.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II</div>
+
+<p>My morning walk up to the beech wood often
+brings me new knowledge and new glimpses of
+nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird
+taking its bath in the big dewdrops on a small
+ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe in the
+dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not
+before know that the hummer bathed at all.</p>
+
+<p>I also discovered that the webs of the little
+spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture,
+as they were from the early fog this morning,
+exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web
+was strung with minute spherules of moisture,
+and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow.
+In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny
+rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span>
+other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course
+I could not see the completed bow in so small an
+area. These fragments are as unapproachable as
+the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a
+suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays
+rainbow tints, you can see only one at a time&mdash;to
+the right or left of you. It also is a fragment of
+a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a
+great display of prismatic effects in the foliage
+of trees, or in the grass after a shower, are not
+to be credited. You may see the drops glistening
+in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit
+prismatic tints. In only one at a time will
+you see rainbow tints. Change your position, and
+you may see another, but never a great display of
+prismatic tints at one time.</p>
+
+<p>In my walk the other morning I turned over a
+stone, looking for spiders and ants. These I found,
+and in addition there were two cells of one of our
+solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called
+"sweat bees," because they came around us and
+would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if
+in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about
+the size of a honey bee, of lighter color, and its
+abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It carries
+its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs.
+These cells were of a greenish-brown color; each
+of them was like a miniature barrel in which the
+pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span>
+When the egg hatches, the grub finds a loaf of
+bread at hand for its nourishment. These little
+barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular
+bits of leaves cut as with a compass, exactly
+fitting the cylinder, one upon the other. The wall
+of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings
+from leaves, about half an inch wide, and three
+quarters of an inch long, a dozen of them lapped
+over one another, and fitted together in the most
+workmanlike manner.</p>
+
+<p>In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting
+out her nesting-material. Her mandibles
+worked like perfect shears. When she had cut out
+her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them
+up, and, holding them between her legs, flew away
+with them. I have seen her carry them into little
+openings in old rails, or old posts. About the period
+of hatching, I do not know.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III</div>
+
+<p>Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects,
+do not snap their game up as do the true flycatchers.
+Their mouths are little nets which they drive
+through the air with the speed of airplanes. A
+few mornings ago the air was cold, but it contained
+many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the size of mosquitoes
+down to gnats. They kept near the
+ground. I happened to be sitting on the sunny
+side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep past.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
+One came by within ten feet of me and drove
+straight on to a very conspicuous insect which
+disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How
+many hundreds or thousands of such insects they
+must devour each day! Then think of how many
+insects the flycatchers and warblers and other
+insect-eating birds must consume in the course of
+a season!</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV</div>
+
+<p>We little suspect how the woods and wayside
+places swarm with life. We see little of it unless
+we watch and wait. The wild creatures are
+cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies
+are on the lookout for them. Certain woods at
+night are alive with flying squirrels which, except
+for some accident, we never see by day. Then
+there are the night prowlers&mdash;skunks, foxes,
+coons, minks, and owls&mdash;yes, and mice.</p>
+
+<p>The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew
+mole, which I know is active at night, I have never
+seen but once. I once set a trap, called the delusion
+trap, in the woods by some rocks where I
+had no reason to suspect there were more mice
+than elsewhere, and two mornings later it was
+literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.</p>
+
+<p>Turn over a stone in the fields and behold
+the consternation among the small folk beneath
+it,&mdash;ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders,&mdash;all object<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>ing
+to the full light of day, not because their deeds
+are evil, but because the instinct of self-preservation
+prompts this course. As I write these sentences, a
+chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the roadside
+near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe
+currants which grew on a bush a few yards away.
+Of course the currants will ferment and rot, but
+that consideration does not disturb him; the
+seeds will keep, and they are what he is after. In
+the early summer, before any of the nuts and
+grains are ripened, the high cost of living among
+the lesser rodents is very great, and they resort to
+all sorts of makeshifts.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V</div>
+
+<p>In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden
+places of nature, Darwin says as much of the world
+as a whole:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean
+ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains&mdash;warm
+mineral springs&mdash;the wide expanse and depth of the
+ocean, the upper regions of the atmosphere, and even
+the surface of perpetual snow&mdash;all support organic
+beings.</p></div>
+
+<p>Never before was there such a lover of natural
+history as Darwin. In the earth, in the air, in the
+water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the mud&mdash;he
+scanned the great biological record of the globe as
+it was never scanned before. During the voyage of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span>
+the Beagle he shirked no hardships to add to his
+stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the
+comfortable ship while it was making its surveys,
+and make journeys of hundreds of miles on horseback
+through rough and dangerous regions to glean
+new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology
+or botany or zo&ouml;logy or anthropology for himself,
+and he was happy. At a great altitude in the
+Andes the people had shortness of breath which
+they called "puna," and they ate onions to correct
+it. Darwin says, with a twinkle in his eye, "For my
+part I found nothing so good as the fossil shells."</p>
+
+<p>His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of
+natural-history knowledge. Was any country
+ever before so searched and sifted for its biological
+facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods,
+everywhere his insatiable eye penetrated. One
+re-reads him always with a different purpose in
+view. If you happen to be interested in insects,
+you read him for that; if in birds, you read him
+for that; if in mammals, in fossils, in reptiles, in
+volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with
+each of these subjects in mind. I recently had in
+mind the problem of the soaring condor, and I
+re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had
+studied and mastered that subject, too. If you
+are interested in seeing how the biological characteristics
+of the two continents, North and South
+America, agree or contrast with each other, you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span>
+will find what you wish to know. You will learn
+that in South America the lightning-bugs and glowworms
+of many kinds are the same as in North
+America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed
+upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls
+upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene
+fungus, or <i>Phallus</i>, taints the tropical forests, as a
+similar species at times taints our dooryards and
+pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps
+stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their
+young, just as in North America. Of course
+there are new species of animal and plant life, but
+not many. The influence of environment in modifying
+species is constantly in his mind.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI</div>
+
+<p>The naturalist can content himself with a day of
+little things. If he can read only a word of one syllable
+in the book of nature, he will make the most of
+that. I read such a word the other morning when
+I perceived, when watching a young but fully
+fledged junco, or snowbird, that its markings
+Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young
+of birds always for a brief period repeat the
+markings of the birds of the parent stem from which
+they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our
+robins have speckled breasts, betraying their
+thrush kinship. And the young junco shows, in
+its striped appearance of breast and back, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span>
+lateral white quills in the tail, its kinship to the
+grass finch or vesper sparrow. The slate-color
+soon obliterates most of these signs, but the white
+quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits
+of its forbears. The vesper sparrow nests
+upon the ground in the open fields, but the junco
+chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside,
+or in the woods, and constructs a very artistic
+nest of dry grass and hair which is so well hidden
+that the passer-by seldom detects it.</p>
+
+<p>Another small word I read about certain of the
+rocks in my native Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray
+sandstone, that when you have split them
+open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown
+them up with dynamite, instead of the gray fresh
+surface of the rock greeting you, it is often a surface
+of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled
+or electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from
+the first muddy day of creation. I have such
+a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It
+is amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of
+doorstones fall upon it with soap and hot water,
+and utterly fail to make any impression upon it.
+Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with
+primal mud. The fresh-water origin of the Catskill
+rocks no doubt in some way accounts for it.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII</div>
+
+<p>We are all interested students of the weather, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>
+the naturalist studies it for some insight into the
+laws which govern it. One season I made my reputation
+as a weather prophet by predicting on the
+first day of December a very severe winter. It
+was an easy guess. I saw in Detroit a bird from
+the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the
+Bohemian waxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above
+the Arctic Circle and is common to both hemispheres.
+I said, When the Arctic birds come down,
+be sure there is a cold wave behind them. And
+so it proved.</p>
+
+<p>When the birds fail to give one a hint of the
+probable character of the coming winter, what
+reliable signs remain? These remain: When
+December is marked by sudden and violent extremes
+of heat and cold, the winter will be broken;
+the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that
+the hum of the bee in December is the requiem of
+winter. But when the season is very evenly
+spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing
+through November and December, no hurry, no
+violence, then be prepared for a snug winter.</p>
+
+<p>As to wet and dry summers, one can always be
+guided by the rainfall on the Pacific coast; a
+shortage on the western coast means an excess on
+the eastern. For four or five years past California
+has been short of its rainfall; so much so that quite
+general alarm is felt over the gradual shrinkage of
+their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span>
+and during the summer seasons the parts of New
+England and New York with which I am acquainted
+have had very wet seasons&mdash;floods in
+midsummer, and full springs and wells at all times.
+The droughts have been temporary and local.</p>
+
+<p>We say, "As fickle as the weather," but the
+meteorological laws are pretty well defined. All
+signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail in a wet
+season. At one time the south wind brings no
+rain, at another time the north and northwest
+winds do bring rain. The complex of conditions
+over a continental area of rivers and lakes and
+mountain-chains is too vast for us to decipher; it
+inheres in the nature of things. It is one of the
+potencies and possibilities which matter possesses.
+We can take no step beyond that.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII</div>
+
+<p>There seems to me to be false reasoning in the
+argument from analogy which William James uses
+in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The
+brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but
+may only sustain the relation to it, he says, which
+the wire sustains to the electric current which
+it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water
+which it conveys.</p>
+
+<p>Now the source and origin of the electric current
+is outside the wire that transmits it, and it could
+sustain no other than a transient relation to any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span>
+outside material through which it passed. But
+if we know anything, we know that the human mind
+or spirit is a vital part of the human body; its
+source is in the brain and nervous system; hence,
+it and the organ through which it is manifested
+are essentially one.</p>
+
+<p>The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo
+in which the current originates is the only
+logical or permissible one.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IX</div>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb
+life, and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
+earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something,
+on the other hand, about the insect that does not
+belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our
+globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect
+comes from another planet, more monstrous, more
+energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal
+than our own.</p></div>
+
+<p>Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own.
+Among the spiders, for instance, the female eats
+the male and often devours her own young. The
+scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing
+like it among our land animals outside the insect
+world.</p>
+
+<p>The insects certainly live in a wonderland of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span>
+which we have little conception. All our powers
+are tremendously exaggerated in these little people.
+Their power makes them acquainted with the inner
+molecular constitution of matter far more intimately
+than we can attain to by our coarse chemical
+analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations,
+coarse and fine, of which our senses can take in
+only the slower ones. If they exceed three
+thousand a second, they become too shrill for our
+ears. It is thought that the world of sound with
+the insects begins where ours leaves off. The
+drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute.
+What would to us be a continuous sound is to them
+a series of separate blows. We begin to hear
+blows as continuous sounds when they amount to
+about thirty a second. The house-fly has about
+four thousand eye-lenses; the cabbage butterfly,
+and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand;
+and some species of beetles have twenty-five
+thousand. We cannot begin to think in what an
+agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and vibrating
+to a degree that would drive us insane. If we
+possessed the same microscopic gifts, how would
+the aspect of the world be changed! We might
+see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies,
+or hear the hum of a mosquito as the
+blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so much
+that disturbs us must escape the insects, because
+their senses are too fine to take it in. Doubtless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span>
+they do not hear the thunder or feel the earthquake.</p>
+
+<p>The insects are much more sensitive to heat and
+cold than we are, and for reasons. The number
+of waves in the ether that gives us the sensation of
+heat is three or four million millions a second. The
+number of tremors required to produce red light is
+estimated at four hundred and seventy-four million
+millions a second, and for the production of violet
+light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions
+a second. No doubt the insects react to all these
+different degrees of vibration. Those marvelous
+instruments called antenn&aelig; seem to put them in
+touch with a world of which we are quite oblivious.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">X</div>
+
+<p>To how many things our lives have been compared!&mdash;to
+a voyage, with its storms and adverse currents
+and safe haven at last; to a day with its morning,
+noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring,
+summer, autumn, and winter; to a game, a school,
+a battle.</p>
+
+<p>In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley
+compared life to a game of chess. We must learn
+the names and the values and the moves of each
+piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope
+to play it successfully. The chessboard is the
+world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe,
+the rules of the game are what we call the laws of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span>
+nature. But it may be questioned if the comparison
+is a happy one. Life is not a game in this sense,
+a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over
+an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and
+then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery
+of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the
+forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are
+much more vague and varied and intangible than
+are those of the chessboard. Life is co&ouml;peration
+with other lives. We win when we help others to
+win. I suppose business is more often like a game
+than is life&mdash;your gain is often the other man's
+loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
+rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal
+life there is little that suggests a game of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>We must all have money, or its equivalent.
+There are the three things&mdash;money, goods, labor&mdash;and
+the greatest of these is labor. Labor is the
+sum of all values. The value of things is the labor
+it requires to produce or to obtain them. Were
+gold plentiful and silver scarce, the latter would be
+the more precious. The men at the plough and
+the hoe and in the mines of coal and iron stand
+first. These men win from nature what we all must
+have, and these things are none of them in the hands
+or under the guardianship of some one who is
+trying to keep us from obtaining them, or is aiming
+to take our aids and resources from us.</p>
+
+<p>The chess simile has only a rhetorical value.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>
+The London workingmen to whom Huxley spoke
+would look around them in vain to find in their
+problems of life anything akin to a game of chess,
+or for any fruitful suggestion in the idea. They
+were probably mechanics, tradesmen, artisans,
+teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew
+through experience the forces with which they had
+to deal. But how many persons who succeed in
+life have any such expert knowledge of the forces
+and conditions with which they have to deal, as
+two chess-players have of the pawns and knights
+and bishops and queens of the chessboard?</p>
+
+<p>Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing,
+and there was vastly more logical force in
+his figures than in those of most writers.</p>
+
+<p>Life may more truly be compared to a river that
+has its source in a mountain or hillside spring,
+with its pure and sparking or foaming and noisy
+youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger
+volume, and then its placid and gently moving current
+to the sea. Blessed is the life that is self-purifying,
+like the moving waters; that lends itself to
+many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and
+becoming a destructive force.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">XI</div>
+
+<p>I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted
+to know why the meadow, or field, mice gnawed or
+barked the apple-trees when there was a deep<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span>
+coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because
+they found it difficult to get up through the deep,
+frozen snow to the surface to get seeds to eat? He
+did not seem to know that meadow mice are not
+seed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots
+and keep well hidden beneath the ground during the
+day, when there is a deep fall of snow coming up out
+of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday
+life beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats,
+foxes, owls, and hawks. Life then becomes a sort
+of picnic. They build new nests on the surface
+of the ground and form new runways, and disport
+themselves apparently in a festive mood. The
+snow is their protection. They bark the trees and
+take their time. When the snow is gone, their
+winter picnic is at an end, and they retreat to their
+dens in the ground and beneath flat stones, and lead
+once more the life of fear.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">XII</div>
+
+<p>Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my
+blanket, recovering from a slight indisposition, I
+was in a mood to be interested in the everyday
+aspects of nature before me&mdash;in the white and
+purple lilacs, in the maple-leaves nearly full grown,
+in the pendent fringe of the yellowish-white bloom
+of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of the
+grapevines, and so forth. All these things formed
+only a setting or background for the wild life near by.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The birds are the little people that peep out at
+me, or pause and regard me curiously in this great
+temple of trees,&mdash;wrens, chippies, robins, bluebirds,
+catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants.
+A few days earlier, for a moment, a mourning
+ground warbler suddenly appeared around the
+corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and
+glanced hastily up at me. When I arose and looked
+over the railing, it had gone. Then the speckled
+Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringa
+branches and gave me several good views. The
+bay-breasted warbler was reported in the evergreens
+up by the stone house, but he failed to report
+to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart,
+however, came several times to the gravel walk below
+me, evidently looking for material to begin her
+nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren,
+was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying
+nesting-material into the box on the corner of
+the veranda. How intense and emphatic she is!
+And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with
+song! Yesterday an interloper appeared. He or she
+climbed the post by the back way, as it were, and
+hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as
+if to see that the coast was clear. He acted as if
+he felt himself an intruder. Quick as a flash there
+was a brown streak from the branch of a maple
+thirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after
+him. The culprit did not stop to argue the case, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span>
+was off, hotly pursued. I must not forget the pair of
+wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maple
+fifty or more feet away. How I love to see them
+on the ground at my feet, every motion and gesture
+like music to the eye! The head and neck of the
+male fairly glows, and there is something fine and
+manly about his speckled breast.</p>
+
+<p>A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry
+bushes at the south end of the house, and are in
+evidence at all hours. But when the nest is completed,
+and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out
+of the public eye as much as possible. From the
+front of the stage they retreat behind the curtain.</p>
+
+<p>One day as I sat here I heard the song of the
+olive-backed thrush down in the currant-bushes
+below me. Instantly I was transported to the
+deep woods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills.
+I heard the murmuring water and felt the
+woodsy coolness of those retreats&mdash;such magic hath
+associative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated
+vireo sang briefly in the maple, a harsh
+note; and the oriole with its insistent call added to
+the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the
+oriole. He has not one musical note, and in grape
+time his bill is red, or purple, with the blood of our
+grapes.</p>
+
+<p>But the most of these little people are my benefactors,
+and add another ray of sunshine to the
+May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacle of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span>
+that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of
+the porch, like a little fairy, and then vanishing.</p>
+
+<p>The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere
+knowledge of them, is not enough. You must live
+with the birds, so to speak; have daily and seasonal
+associations with them before they come to mean
+much to you. Then, as they linger about your
+house or your camp, or as you see them in your
+walks, they are a part of your life, and help give
+tone and color to your day.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">III</div>
+
+<div class="center">THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS</div>
+
+
+<p>To what widely different use birds put their power
+of flight! To the great mass of them it is simply a
+means of locomotion, of getting from one point to
+another. A small minority put their wing-power
+to more ideal uses, as the lark when he claps his
+wings at heaven's gate, and the ruffed grouse when
+he drums; even the woodcock has some other use
+for his wings than to get from one point to another.
+Listen to his flight song in the April twilight up
+against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Our small hawks use their power of flight mainly
+to catch their prey, as does the swallow skimming
+the air all day on tireless wing, but some of the other
+hawks, such as our red-tailed hawk, climb their
+great spirals apparently with other motives than
+those which relate to their daily fare. The crow
+has little other use for his wings than to gad about
+like a busy politician from one neighborhood to
+another. In Florida I have seen large flocks of
+the white ibis performing striking evolutions high
+up against the sky, evidently expressive of the
+gay and festive feeling begotten by the mating
+instinct.</p>
+
+<p>The most beautiful flyer we ever see against our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span>
+skies is the unsavory buzzard. He is the winged
+embodiment of grace, ease, and leisure. Judging
+from appearances alone, he is the most disinterested
+of all the winged creatures we see. He rides the
+airy billows as if only to enjoy his mastery over
+them. He is as calm and unhurried as the orbs in
+their courses. His great circles and spirals have
+a kind of astronomic completeness. That all
+this power of wing and grace of motion should be
+given to an unclean bird, to a repulsive scavenger,
+is one of the anomalies of nature. He does not need
+to hurry or conceal his approach; what he is after
+cannot flee or hide; he has no enemies; nothing
+wants him; and he is at peace with all the world.</p>
+
+<p>The great condor of South America, in rising from
+the ground, always faces the wind. It is often
+captured by tempting it to gorge itself in a comparatively
+narrow space. But if a strong enough wind
+were blowing at such times, it could quickly rise
+over the barrier. Darwin says he watched a
+condor high in the air describing its huge circles for
+six hours without once flapping its wings. He says
+that, if the bird wished to descend, the wings were
+for a moment collapsed; and when again expanded,
+with an altered inclination, the momentum gained
+by the rapid descent seemed to urge the bird upwards
+with the even and steady movement of a
+paper kite. In the case of any bird <i>soaring</i>, its
+motion must be sufficiently rapid for the action of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span>
+the inclined surface of its body on the atmosphere
+to counterbalance its gravity. The force to keep
+up the momentum of a body moving in a horizontal
+plane in the air (in which there is so little friction)
+cannot be great, and this force is all that is wanted.
+The movement of the neck and body of the condor,
+we must suppose, is sufficient for this. However
+this may be, it is truly wonderful and beautiful to
+see so great a bird, hour after hour, without any
+apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain
+and river.</p>
+
+<p>The airplane has a propelling power in its motor,
+and it shifts its wings to take advantage of the
+currents. The buzzard and condor do the same
+thing. They are living airplanes, and their power
+is so evenly and subtly distributed and applied,
+that the trick of it escapes the eye. But of course
+they avail themselves of the lifting power of the
+air-currents.</p>
+
+<p>All birds know how to use their wings to propel
+themselves through the air, but the mechanism of
+the act we may not be able to analyze. I do not
+know how a butterfly propels itself against a breeze
+with its quill-less wings, but we know that it does
+do it. As its wings are neither convex nor concave,
+like a bird's, one would think that the upward and
+downward strokes would neutralize each other;
+but they do not. Strong winds often carry them
+out over large bodies of water; but such a master<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>
+flyer as the monarch beats its way back to shore,
+and, indeed, the monarch habitually flies long distances
+over salt water when migrating along our
+seacoast in spring and fall.</p>
+
+<p>At the moment of writing these paragraphs, I
+saw a hen-hawk flap heavily by, pursued by a
+kingbird. The air was phenomenally still, not a
+leaf stirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat
+his wings vigorously. No soaring now, no mounting
+heavenward, as I have seen him mount till his
+petty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and
+returned to earth. But the next day, with a fairly
+good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks for
+many minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the
+skies, till they became very small objects against the
+clouds, and not once did they flap their wings!
+Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top
+and sailed straight into the face of the wind, till
+he was probably over his mate or young, when, with
+half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-tops
+like an arrow.</p>
+
+<p>In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the
+air may be divided into three grand classes: those
+which use their wings simply to transport themselves
+from one place to another,&mdash;the same use we
+put our legs to,&mdash;those which climb the heavens
+to attain a wide lookout, either for the pleasure of
+soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to
+scan a wide territory in search of food or prey,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span>
+and those which feed as they fly. Most of our
+common birds are examples of the first class.
+Our hawks and buzzards are examples of the
+second class. Swallows, nighthawks, and some sea-birds
+are examples of the third class. A few of our
+birds use their wings to gain an elevation from which
+to deliver their songs&mdash;as the larks, and some of the
+finches; but the robins and the sparrows and the
+warblers and the woodpeckers are always going
+somewhere. The hawks and the buzzards are,
+comparatively speaking, birds of leisure.</p>
+
+<p>Every bird and beast is a master in the use of
+its own tools and weapons. We who look on from
+the outside marvel at their skill. Here is the
+carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about
+the verge-board of my porch-roof as I write this.
+It darts swiftly this way and that, and now and
+then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of
+whirring wings, as often does the hummingbird.
+How it does it, I do not know. I cannot count or
+distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At
+the same time, the chimney swifts sweep by me
+like black arrows, on wings apparently as stiff as
+if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air,
+now sailing. In some way they suggest winged
+gimlets. How thin and scimitar-like their wings
+are! They are certainly masters of their own craft.</p>
+
+<p>In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far
+below the body as they do above it. Note the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span>
+crow flapping his way through the air. He is a
+heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His
+wings probably move through an arc of about
+ninety degrees. The ph[oe]be flies with a peculiar
+snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird,
+with a mincing and hovering flight; it tiptoes
+through the air. The woodpeckers gallop, alternately
+closing and spreading their wings. The
+ordinary flight of the goldfinch is a very marked
+undulatory flight; a section of it, the rise and the
+fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The
+bird goes half that distance or more with wings
+closed. This is the flight the male indulges in
+within hearing distance of his brooding mate.
+During the love season he occasionally gives way
+to an ecstatic flight. This is a level flight, performed
+on round, open wings, which beat the air
+vertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song
+season is common to many of our birds. I have
+seen even the song sparrow indulge in it, rising fifty
+feet or more and delivering its simple song with
+obvious excitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock,
+inspired by the grand passion, rises upon
+whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and
+floats and circles at an altitude of a hundred feet
+or more, and in rapid smackering and chippering
+notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasy
+with our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight
+and is sharp and hurried, both flight and song differ<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>ing
+radically from its everyday performance. One
+thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually
+on the wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk
+of all our singing birds. His season is brief
+but hilarious. In his level flight he seems to use
+only the tips of his wings, and we see them always
+below the level of his back. Our common birds
+that have no flight-song, so far as I have observed,
+are the bluebird, the robin, the ph[oe]be, the social
+sparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the
+wood warblers, and most of the ground warblers.</p>
+
+<p>Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines
+had this to say about the flight of sea-gulls:
+"Sweeping around in circles, occasionally elevating
+themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide
+down and up the aerial inclines without apparently
+any effort whatever. But a close observation
+will show that at every turn the angle of inclination
+of the wings is changed to meet the new conditions.
+There is continual movement with power&mdash;by
+the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine
+only through mechanism obeying a mind not nearly
+so well instructed."</p>
+
+<p>The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing
+round and round, in a brisk breeze, on unbending
+wing, only now and then righting itself with a
+single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides
+upon the storm.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">IV</div>
+
+<div class="center">BIRD INTIMACIES</div>
+
+
+<p>When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination
+to seek out new lands in my own country, or in
+other countries, to see what Nature is doing there,
+and what guise she wears, something prompts me
+to pause, and after a while to say to myself:
+"Look a little closer into the nature right at your
+own door; do a little intensive observation at home,
+and see what that yields you. The enticement
+of the far-away is mostly in your imagination;
+let your eyes and your imagination play once more
+on the old familiar birds and objects."</p>
+
+<p>One season in my walks to the woods I was on
+the lookout for a natural bracket among the tree-branches,
+to be used in supporting a book-shelf. I
+did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree,
+within a few feet from the corner of my own house,
+I found what I was searching for, perfect in every
+particular&mdash;the right angle and the supporting
+brace, or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have
+not forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>I find that one has only to overcome a little of
+his obtuseness and indifference and look a little
+more closely upon the play of wild life about him
+to realize how much interesting natural history is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span>
+being enacted every day before his very eyes&mdash;in
+his own garden and dooryard and apple-orchard
+and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and
+sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one
+rides or walks or sits under the trees, or loiters
+about the fields or woods, the play of wild life is
+going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed
+with the seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available
+for his instruction and entertainment. On every
+farm in the land a volume of live natural history
+goes to waste every year because there is no historian
+to note the happenings.</p>
+
+<p>The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind
+screens&mdash;a screen of leaves or of grass, or of
+vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert and
+sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us
+see only a mere fraction of it. If one saw one tenth
+of the significant happenings that take place on his
+few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the
+course of the season, or even of a single week, what
+a harvest he would have! The drama of wild life
+is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the stage
+before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other
+stages.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing
+along the road between my place and the railway
+station one early May day became aware that
+a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees
+over their heads. It was the annual <i>s&auml;ngerfest</i> of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span>
+the goldfinches&mdash;one of the prettiest episodes in
+the lives of any of our birds, a real musical reunion
+of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township,
+many hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops
+along the road and in the groves with a fine,
+sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to the
+surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails
+adequately to account for. It comes from everywhere,
+but from nowhere in particular. The birds
+sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it
+is difficult to identify the singers. It is a minor
+strain, but multitudinous, and fills all the air. The
+males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if
+to celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which,
+with the elm-trees, afford them their earliest food-supply.
+While they are singing they are busy cutting
+out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going
+down to the ground and tearing open the closed
+dandelion-heads that have shut up to ripen their
+seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal
+flowering when they become spheres of fragile silver
+down.</p>
+
+<p>Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches
+should be called a dandelion festival, or a new-coat
+festival, or whether it is to bring the sexes together
+preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss
+to decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and
+continues on wet days as well as on fair. It all
+has a decidedly festive air, like the f&ecirc;te-days of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>
+humans. I know of nothing like it among other
+birds. It is the manifestation of something different
+from the flocking instinct; it is the social and
+holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a
+brief season, as if in celebration of some special
+event or purpose. I have observed it in my vicinity
+every spring for many years, usually in April or early
+May, and it is the prettiest and most significant
+bird episode, involving a whole species, known
+to me.</p>
+
+<p>The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one
+of our most amiable birds. So far as my knowledge
+goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. His tones
+are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring
+reunions they are joyous. In the peculiar flight-song
+in which he indulges in the mating season,
+beating the air vertically with his round, open
+wings, his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to
+his mate when she is brooding, and when he circles
+about her in that long, billowy flight, the crests of
+his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling,
+"Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee," as if he were
+saying, "For love of thee, for love of thee," and she
+calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"&mdash;his tones
+at such times express contentment and reassurance.</p>
+
+<p>When any of his natural enemies appear&mdash;a
+hawk, a cat, a jay&mdash;his tones are plaintive and appealing.
+"Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and not
+in anger.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>When with his mate he leads their brood about
+the August thistles, the young call in a similar tone.
+When in July the nesting has begun, the female
+talks the prettiest "baby talk" to her mate as he
+feeds her. The nest-building rarely begins till
+thistledown can be had&mdash;so literally are all the
+ways of this darling bird ways of softness and
+gentleness. The nest is a thick, soft, warm structure,
+securely fastened in the fork of a maple or
+an apple-tree.</p>
+
+<p>None of our familiar birds endear themselves to
+us more than does the bluebird. The first bluebird
+in the spring is as welcome as the blue sky
+itself. The season seems softened and tempered
+as soon as we hear his note and see his warm breast
+and azure wing. His gentle manners, his soft, appealing
+voice, not less than his pleasing hues, seem
+born of the bright and genial skies. He is the spirit
+of the April days incarnated in a bird. He has
+the quality of winsomeness, like the violet and the
+speedwell among the flowers. Not strictly a songster,
+yet his every note and call is from out the
+soul of harmony. The bluebird is evidently an offshoot
+from the thrush family, and without the
+thrush's gift of song; still his voice affords us much
+of the same pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>How readily the bluebirds become our friends
+and neighbors when we offer them suitable nesting-retreats!
+Bring them something from nature,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span>
+something with the bark on&mdash;a section of a dry
+beech or maple limb in which the downy woodpecker
+has excavated his chamber and passed the
+winter or reared his brood; fasten it in early spring
+upon the corner of your porch, or on the trunk of
+a near-by tree, and see what interesting neighbors
+you will soon have. One summer I brought home
+from one of my walks to the woods a section, two
+or three feet long, of a large yellow birch limb
+which contained such a cavity as I speak of, and
+I wired it to one of the posts of the rustic porch at
+Woodchuck Lodge. The next season a pair of
+bluebirds reared two broods in it. The incubation
+of the eggs for the second brood was well under
+way when I appeared upon the scene in early July.
+My sudden presence so near their treasures, and my
+lingering there with books and newspapers, disturbed
+the birds a good deal. The first afternoon the
+mother bird did not enter the cavity for hours. I shall
+always remember the pretty and earnest manner in
+which the male tried to reassure her and persuade
+her that the danger was not so imminent as it
+appeared to be, probably encouraging a confidence
+in his mate which he did not himself share. The
+mother bird would alight at the entrance to the
+chamber, but, with her eye fixed upon the man
+with the newspaper, feared to enter. The male,
+perched upon the telegraph wire fifty feet away,
+would raise his wings and put all the love and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span>
+assurance in his voice he was capable of, apparently
+trying to dispel her fears. He would warble and
+warble, and make those pretty wing gestures over
+and over, saying so plainly: "It is all right, my
+dear, the man is harmless&mdash;absorbed there in his
+newspaper. Go in, go in, and keep warm our
+precious eggs!" How long she hesitated! But as
+night grew near she grew more and more anxious,
+and he more and more eloquent. Finally she
+alighted upon the edge of the overhanging roof and
+peered down hesitatingly. Her mate applauded
+and encouraged till finally she made the plunge and
+entered the hole, but instantly came out again;
+her heart failed her for a moment; but she soon
+returned and remained inside. Then her mate flew
+away toward the orchard, uttering a cheery note
+which doubtless she understood.</p>
+
+<p>The birds soon became used to my presence and
+their household matters progressed satisfactorily.
+Both birds took a hand in feeding the young, which
+grew rapidly. When they were nearly ready to
+leave the nest, a cruel fate befell them: I slept
+upon the porch, and one night I was awakened by
+the cry of young bluebirds, and the sound of feet
+like those of a squirrel on the roof over me. Then
+I heard the cry of a young bird proceed from the
+butternut-tree across the road opposite the house.
+I said to myself, "A squirrel or an owl is after my
+birds." The cry coming so quickly from the but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>ternut-tree
+made me suspect an owl, and that the
+bird whose cry I heard was in his talons. I was
+out of my cot and up to the nest in a
+moment, but the tragedy was over; the birds were
+all gone, and the night was silent. In the
+morning I found that a piece of the brittle
+birch limb had been torn away, enlarging
+the entrance to the cavity so that the murderous
+talons of the owl could reach in and seize the young
+birds. I had been aroused in time to hear the
+marauder on the roof with one, and then hear its
+cry as he carried it to the tree. In the grass in
+front I found one of the young, unable to fly, but
+apparently unhurt. I put it back in the nest, but
+it would not stay. The spell of the nest was
+broken, and the young bird took to the grass
+again. The parent birds were on hand, much
+excited, and, when I tried to return the surviving
+bird to the nest, the male came at me
+fiercely, apparently charging the whole catastrophe
+to me.</p>
+
+<p>We had strong proof the previous season that
+an owl, probably the screech owl, prowled about
+the house at night. A statuette of myself in clay
+which a sculptor was modeling was left out one
+night on the porch, and in the morning its head
+was unusually bowed. The prints of a bird's
+talons upon the top told what had happened. In
+the bronze reproduction of that statuette the head<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>
+has more of a droop than the artist at first planned
+to give it.</p>
+
+<p>The next season the bluebirds occupied the cavity
+in the birch limb again, but before my arrival in
+July the owls had again cleaned them out. In so
+doing they had ripped the cavity open nearly to the
+bottom. For all that, early the following May
+bluebirds were occupying the cavity again. It
+held three eggs when I arrived. I looked over the
+situation and resolved to try to head off the owl
+this time, even at the risk of driving the bluebirds
+away. I took a strip of tin several inches wide
+and covered the slit with it and wired it fast.
+Then I obtained a broad strip of dry birch-bark,
+wrapped it about the limb over the tin, and wired
+it fast, leaving the entrance to the nest in its
+original form. I knew the owl could not slit the
+tin; the birch-bark would hide it and preserve in
+a measure the natural appearance of the branch.
+When the bluebirds saw what had happened to
+their abode, they were a good deal distressed; they
+could no longer see their eggs through the slit
+which the owl had made, and they refused to enter
+the cavity. They hung about all day, uttering
+despondent notes, approaching the nest at times,
+but hesitating even to alight upon the roof above
+it. Occasionally the female would fly away toward
+the distant woods or hills uttering that plaintive,
+homesick note which seemed to mean farewell.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span>
+The male would follow her, calling in a more cheery
+and encouraging tone. Once the couple were
+gone three or four hours, and I concluded they had
+really deserted the place. But just before sundown
+they were back again, and the female alighted
+at the entrance to the nest and looked in. The
+male called to her cheerily; still she would not enter,
+but joined him on the telephone wire, where the two
+seemed to hold a little discussion. Presently the
+mother bird flew to the nest again, then to the
+roof above it, then back to the nest, and entered
+it till only her tail showed, then flew back to the
+wire beside her mate. She was evidently making
+up her mind that the case was not hopeless. After
+a little more maneuvering, and amid the happy,
+reassuring calls of her mate, she entered the nest
+cavity and remained, and I was as well pleased as
+was her mate.</p>
+
+<p>No owls disturbed them this time, and the brood
+of young birds was brought off in due season. In
+July a second brood of four was successfully reared
+and sent forth on their career.</p>
+
+<p>The oriole nests in many kinds of trees&mdash;oaks,
+maples, apple-trees, elms&mdash;but her favorite is the
+elm. She chooses the end of one of the long drooping
+branches where a group of small swaying twigs
+affords her suitable support. It is the most unlikely
+place imaginable for any but a pendent nest,
+woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>
+twigs, and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests
+are so secure, so hidden, and so completely sheltered
+from the rains by the drooping leaves above and
+around it. It is rarely discoverable except from
+directly beneath it. I think a well-built oriole's
+nest would sustain a weight of eight or ten pounds
+before it would be torn from its moorings. They
+are also very partial to the ends of branches that
+swing low over the highway. One May I saw two
+female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five
+feet above our State Road, where automobiles
+and other vehicles passed nearly every minute all
+the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far from
+highways and dwellings is a rare occurrence.</p>
+
+<p>Birds of different species differ as widely in skill
+in nest-building as they do in song. From the rude
+platform of dry twigs and other coarse material of
+the cuckoo, to the pendent, closely woven pouch of
+the oriole, the difference in the degree of skill displayed
+is analogous to the difference between the
+simple lisp of the cedar-bird, or the little tin whistle
+of the "chippie," and the golden notes of the wood
+thrush, or the hilarious song of the bobolink.</p>
+
+<p>Real castles in the air are the nests of the orioles;
+no other nests are better hidden or apparently more
+safe from the depredations of crows and squirrels.
+To start the oriole's nest successfully is quite an
+engineering feat. The birds inspect the branches
+many times before they make a decision. When<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>
+they have decided on the site, the mother bird
+brings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches
+it to a twig by winding it around and around many
+times, leaving one or both ends hanging free. I have
+nests where these foundation strings are wound
+around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings
+and tuckings and loopings the bird occasionally ties
+a substantial knot, but it is never the result of a
+deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but
+purely a matter of chance. When she uses only
+wild vegetable fibers, she fastens it to the twig by
+a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about the craziest
+kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has
+fastened many lines to opposite twigs, their ends
+hanging free, she proceeds to span the little gulf
+by weaving them together. She stands with her
+claws clasped one to each side, and uses her beak
+industriously, looping up and fastening the loose
+ends. I have stood in the road under the nest looking
+straight up till my head swam, trying to make out
+just how she did it, but all I could see was the bird
+standing astride the chasm she was trying to bridge,
+and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze
+of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom
+of the nest thickens, till some morning you see the
+movement of the bird inside it; her beak comes
+through the sides from within, like a needle or an
+awl, seizes a loose hair or thread, and jerks it back
+through the wall and tightens it. It is a regular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span>
+stitching or quilting process. The course of any
+particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard
+as if it were the work of the wind or the
+waves. There is plan, but no conscious method of
+procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It
+is not something builded as we build, in which
+judgment, design, forethought enter; it is the result
+of the blind groping of instinct which rarely errs,
+but which does not see the end from the beginning,
+as reason does. The oriole sometimes overhands
+the rim of her nest with strings and fibers to make
+it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perch
+upon, but it is like the pathetic work which an
+untaught blind child might do under similar conditions.
+The birds use fine, strong strings in their
+nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results
+from it. I have an oriole's nest sent me from
+Michigan on the outside of which is a bird's dried
+foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it.
+It would be difficult to tie so complicated a knot.
+The tragedy is easy to read. Another nest sent me
+from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of
+fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them.
+But there is no sign that the bird came to grief
+using this dangerous material. Where the lives of
+the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always
+a danger-line to them. They are partakers of our
+bounty in many ways, but they pay a tax to fate
+in others.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span>The orioles in my part of the country always use
+the same material in the body of their nests&mdash;a
+kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which they apparently
+get from some species of everlasting flower.
+Woven together and quilted through with strings
+and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm, feltlike
+walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the
+walls are made of something that suggests brown
+human hair, except that it is too hard and brittle
+for hair.</p>
+
+<p>Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest,
+but not so deep and pocketlike as that of the
+Baltimore oriole, and showing no such elaborate
+use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of
+some sort of dried grass, very elaborately woven
+together.</p>
+
+<p>Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely
+of the long, strong threads which it draws out
+of the palm-leaves. The only one I have seen was
+suspended from the under side of one of those
+leaves.</p>
+
+<p>I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except
+the nest of the hummingbird, is that of the wood
+pewee. It is as smooth and compact and symmetrical
+as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike
+substance. Of course, the ph[oe]be's artistic masonry
+under the shelving rocks, covered with moss
+and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry grass
+and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>yond
+the reach of four-footed prowlers, is almost
+ideal. It certainly is a happy thought.</p>
+
+<p>The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird,
+the goldfinch, the indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders,
+each with a style of its own.</p>
+
+<p>About the most insecure nest in our trees is that
+of the little social sparrow, or "chippie." When
+the sudden summer storms come, making the tree-tops
+writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest
+amid the tossing branches. Pass through the grove
+or orchard after the tempest is over, and you are
+pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon the
+ground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of
+nest-building in trees. She is a poor architect.
+She should have kept to the ground or to the low
+bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their
+nests fast to the branches, but "Chippie" does not;
+she simply arranges her material loosely between
+them, where the nest is supported, but not secured.
+She seems pathetically ignorant of the fact that
+there are such things as wind and storm. Hence
+her frail structure is more frequently dislodged from
+the trees than that of any other bird.</p>
+
+<p>Recently, after a day of violent northwest wind,
+I found a wrecked robin's nest and eggs upon the
+lawn under a maple&mdash;not a frequent spectacle.
+The robin's firm masonry is usually proof against
+wind and rain, but in this case the nest was composed
+almost entirely of dry grass; there was hardly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>
+a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible and yielding,
+and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently
+the second nest of the pair this season, and
+the second nest in summer of any species of bird
+is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first
+nest in spring. Comparatively few of our birds
+attempt to bring off a second brood unless the first
+attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sure to
+bring off two, and may bring off three. But the
+robin is a hustler, probably the most enterprising
+of all our birds. I recall a mother robin that, in
+late June, repaired a nest in a climbing rosebush
+which her first brood had vacated only a week
+before. A brood of wood thrushes which left their
+nest about the same time was still being fed by
+their parents about the place.</p>
+
+<p>The song sparrow, the social sparrow, the ph[oe]be,
+the bluebird, all build a second nest. The first
+brood of the bluebird will be looked after by the
+father in some near-by grove or orchard, while the
+mother starts a new family in the old nest. If all
+goes well with them, those two bluebird families
+will unite and keep together in a loose flock till
+they migrate in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>So many of our birds nest about our houses and
+lawns and gardens and along our highways, that
+at first sight it seems as if they must be drawn
+there by a sense of greater security for their eggs
+and young. The robin has become almost a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span>
+domestic institution. It is rarely that one finds a
+robin's nest very far from a human habitation.
+One spring there were four robins' nests on my
+house and outbuildings&mdash;in the vines, on window-sills,
+or other coigns of vantage. There were at
+the same time at least fifteen robins' nests on my
+lot of sixteen acres, and I am quite certain
+that I have not seen all there were. They were in
+sheds and apple-trees and spruces and cedars, in
+the ends of piles of grape-posts, in rosebushes, in
+the summer-house, and on the porch. We did not
+expect to get one of the early cherries, and might
+count ourselves lucky if we got any of the later ones.</p>
+
+<p>A robin has built her nest in my summer-house.
+She abuses me so when I try to tarry there, after
+incubation has begun, that I take no comfort and
+presently withdraw. Until her brood has flown, I
+am practically a stranger in my open-air rest-house
+and study.</p>
+
+<p>When the fish crows come egging in the spruces
+and maples about the house, and I hear the screaming
+of the robins, I seize my gun and rush out to
+protect them, but am not always successful, as the
+mischief is often done before I get within reach;
+I am not sure but that the robins think&mdash;if they
+think at all&mdash;that I am in league with the crows
+to despoil them. I was not in time to save the eggs
+of the wood thrush the other morning, when I
+heard the alarm calls of the birds, but I had the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>
+satisfaction of seeing the black marauder go limping
+over the hill, dropping quills from his wings at
+nearly every stroke. I am sure he will not come
+back. The fish crow is one of the most active enemies
+of our small birds. Of course, he only obeys
+his instincts in hunting out and devouring their
+eggs and young, but I fancy I obey something
+higher than instinct when I protest with powder
+and shot.</p>
+
+<p>The birds do not mind the approach of the
+domestic animals, such as the cow, the horse, the
+sheep, the pig, and they are only a little suspicious
+of the dog, but the appearance of the cat fills them
+with sudden alarm. I think that birds that have
+never before seen a cat join in the hue and cry.
+What alarms one alarms all within hearing. The
+orioles are probably the most immune from the
+depredations of crows and jays and owls of all our
+birds, and yet they will join in the cry of "Thief,
+thief!" when a crow appears. (The alarm cry of
+birds will even arrest the attention of four-footed
+beasts, and often bring the sportsman's stalking to
+naught.)</p>
+
+<p>I fancy that Ph[oe]be selects our sheds and bridges
+and porticoes for her nesting-sites because they are
+so much more numerous than the overhanging
+rocks where her forbears built. For the same reason
+certain of the swallows and the swifts select
+our barns and chimneys.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span>If the birds themselves are not afraid to draw
+near us, why should their instinct lead them to feel
+that their enemies will be afraid of us? How do
+they know that a jay or a crow or a red squirrel
+will be less timid than they are? And why also,
+if they have such confidence in us, do they raise
+such a hue and cry when we pass near their nests?
+The robin in my summer-house knew, if she knew
+anything, that I had never raised a finger against
+her. On the contrary, my hoe in the garden had
+unearthed many a worm and slug for her. Still
+she sees in me only a possible enemy, and tolerate
+me with my book or my newspaper near her nest
+she will not. Another robin has built her nest
+in a rosebush that has been trained to form
+an arch over the walk that leads to the kitchen
+door and only a few yards from it; but whenever
+we pass and repass she scurries away with
+loud, angry protests and keeps it up as long as
+we are in sight, so that we do not feel at all
+complimented by her settling down so near us. If
+one's appearance is so alarming, even when he
+is going to hoe the garden, why did the intolerant
+bird set up her household gods so near? If I
+keep away her enemies, why will she not be
+gracious enough to regard me as her friend?
+The robin that trusted her brood to the sheltering
+vines of the woodshed, and lined her nest with
+the hair of our old gray horse&mdash;why should she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>
+scream, "Murder!" whenever any of us go to the
+well a few feet away?</p>
+
+<p>What is the real explanation of the fact that so
+many of our birds nest so near our dwellings and
+yet show such unfriendliness when we come near
+them? Their apparent confidence, on the one
+hand, contradicts their suspicion on the other. Is
+it because we have here the workings of a new
+instinct which has not yet adjusted itself to the
+workings of the older instinct of solicitude for the
+safety of the nest and young? My own interpretation
+is that birds are not drawn near us by any
+sense of greater security in our vicinity. It is evident
+from the start that there is an initial fear of
+us to be overcome. How, then, could the sense of
+greater safety in our presence arise? Fear and
+trust do not spring from the same root. How
+should the robins and thrushes know that their
+enemies&mdash;the jays, the crows, and the like&mdash;are
+more afraid of human beings than they are themselves?
+Hunted animals pursued by wolves or
+hounds will at times take refuge in the haunts of
+men, not because they expect human protection,
+but because they are desperate, and oblivious to
+everything save some means of escape. If the
+hunted deer or fox rushes into an open shed or a
+barn door, it is because it is desperately hard-pressed,
+and sees and knows nothing but some object
+or situation that it may place between itself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span>
+and its deadly enemy. The great fear obliterates
+all minor fears.</p>
+
+<p>The key to the behavior of the birds in this
+respect may be found in the Darwinian theory of
+natural selection. From the first settlement of the
+country a few of the common birds, attracted by a
+more suitable or more abundant food-supply, or
+other conditions, must inevitably have nested near
+human dwellings. These birds would thrive better
+and succeed in bringing off more young than
+those that nested in more exposed places. Hence,
+their progeny would soon be in the ascendancy. All
+animals seem to have associated memory. These
+birds would naturally return to the scenes and conditions
+of their youth, and start their nests there.
+It would not be confidence in men that would draw
+them; rather would the truth be that the fear of
+man is inadequate to overcome or annul this home
+attraction.</p>
+
+<p>The catbird does not come to our vines on the
+veranda to nest from considerations of safety, but
+because her line of descent runs through such places.
+The catbirds and robins and ph[oe]be-birds that were
+reared far from human habitations doubtless return
+to such localities to rear their young. The home
+sense in birds is strong. I have positive proof in a
+few instances of robins and song sparrows returning
+successive years to the same neighborhood. It
+is very certain, I think, that the ph[oe]be-birds that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span>
+daub our porches with their mud, and in July leave
+a trail of minute creeping and crawling pests,
+were not themselves hatched and reared in the
+pretty, moss-covered structure under the shelving
+rocks in the woods, or on the hillsides.</p>
+
+<p>How different from the manners of the robins
+are the manners of a pair of catbirds that have a
+nest in the honeysuckle against the side of the first-floor
+sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from
+the nature of the catbird than the hue and cry
+which the robin at times sets up. The catbird is
+sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline
+<i>mew</i> is her characteristic note. She never raises
+her voice like the town-crier, as the robin does,
+perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold
+him. The catbird peers and utters her soft protest
+from her hiding-place in the bushes. This particular
+pair of catbirds appeared in early May and
+began slyly to look over the situation in the vines
+and bushes about the house. All their proceedings
+were very stealthy; they were like two dark shadows
+gliding about, avoiding observation&mdash;no tree-tops
+or house-tops for them, but coverts close to
+the ground. We hoped they would divine safety
+in the shadow of the cottage, but tried to act as
+if oblivious of their goings and comings. We saw
+them now and then stealthily inspecting the tangle
+of honeysuckle on the east side of the veranda,
+where a robin last season reared a brood, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>
+low hedge of barberry-bushes on the south side of
+the cottage, where a song sparrow had her nest.
+If they come, which will they take, we wondered.
+Several times in the early morning I heard the
+male singing vivaciously and confidently in the
+thick of the honeysuckle. I guessed that the
+honeysuckle was the choice of the male, and that
+his song was a p&aelig;an in praise of it, addressed to
+his mate. But it was nearly a week before his
+musical argument prevailed and the site was apparently
+agreed upon.</p>
+
+<p>When the nest-building actually began, the birds
+were so shy about it that, watch as I might, I failed
+to catch them in the act. One morning I saw the
+mother bird in the garden with nesting-material
+in her beak, but she failed to come to the honeysuckle
+with it while I watched from a near-by
+covert. At the same time robins were flying here
+and there with loaded beaks, and wood thrushes
+were going through the air trailing long strips of
+white paper behind them, but the catbird was an
+emblem of secrecy itself. She, too, brought fragments
+of white paper to her nest, but no one saw
+her do it. Like other nest-builders, she apparently
+put in her big strokes of work in the early morning
+before the sleepers on the veranda were stirring.
+A few times my inquisitive eye, cautiously peering
+over the railing, started her from the vine, but I
+never saw her enter it with leaf, stick, or straw;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span>
+yet slowly the nest grew and came into shape, and
+finally received its finishing touches. So cautiously
+had the birds proceeded that, were they capable
+of concepts like us, I should fancy they flattered
+themselves that we had not the least suspicion of
+their little secret. The male ceased to sing near
+the house after the nest was begun. So much time
+elapsed after the finishing of the nest before the
+first egg appeared in it that some members of the
+household feared the birds had deserted it, especially
+as they were not seen about the premises for
+several days. But the weather was wet and cool,
+and the eggs ripened slowly. Then one morning
+the birds were seen again, and one blue-green egg
+was discovered in the nest. The next morning
+another egg was added, and a third egg on the
+third morning, and a fourth on the fourth morning.
+In due time incubation began, and thenceforth all
+went well with our dusky neighbors.</p>
+
+<p>It is an anxious moment for all birds when their
+young leave the nest. One noontime by the unusual
+mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure that
+the critical time had come. Sure enough, there
+sat one of the young on a twig a few inches above
+the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty response
+to the agitated cry of the mother, as is
+usually the case with the robin. "No publicity" is
+the watchword of the young catbirds as well as
+of the old. An hour or two later another young<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>
+one was perched on a branch, and before night,
+when no one was looking, they both disappeared,
+leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The
+next morning early, without any signs of alarm
+or agitation on the part of the old birds, they took
+the important step. It could hardly have been
+much of a flight with any of them, as their wing-quills
+were only partially developed, and their tails
+were mere stubs. For several days afterward no
+sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard.
+They were probably keeping well concealed in the
+near-by trees or in the vines and currant-bushes in
+the vineyard. In about a week the whole family
+appeared briefly in upper branches of the maples
+near the house. The young were distinguishable
+from the old only by their shorter tails. A few
+days later the parent birds were seen moving
+stealthily through the vines and bushes about the
+house, or perching on the near-by stakes that supported
+the wire netting. Are they coming back
+for a second brood? was the question in our minds.</p>
+
+<p>Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the
+male, then one morning a regular old-time burst of
+joy from him in the vine that held the old nest.
+Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window
+on the south side of the cottage, and both birds
+were soon seen paying frequent visits to the bush.
+We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether
+or not the first brood were now shifting for them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span>selves,
+we did not know; they never again appeared
+upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of the
+Fourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was
+started in the syringa-bush three feet from the
+ground, and barely four feet from the window!</p>
+
+<p>We had a view of the proceedings that the first
+site did not afford us. The old nest appeared to be
+in perfect condition, but there was evidently no
+thought with the birds of using it again, as the
+robins sometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff
+swallows always do. A new nest, built of material
+almost identical with that of the old, and in a more
+exposed position, was decided upon. It progressed
+rapidly, and I was delighted to find that the male
+assisted in the building. Indeed, he was fully as
+active as the female. Very often they were both
+in the nest with material at the same moment.
+They seemed to agree perfectly. At first I got the
+impression that the male was not quite as decided
+as the female, and hesitated more, once or twice
+bringing material that he finally rejected. But he
+soon warmed up to the work and certainly did his
+share.</p>
+
+<p>With most species of our birds the nest is entirely
+built by the female. With the robin, the
+wood thrush, the ph[oe]be, the oriole, the hummingbird,
+the pewee, and many others, the male is only
+an interested spectator of the proceeding. He
+usually attends his mate in her quest for material,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>
+but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the
+cock wren assists in nest-building. I know the
+male cedar-bird does, and probably the male woodpeckers
+do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeak
+assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing
+upon the nest. It seems fair to infer that he assists
+in the nest-building also, but I am not certain that
+he does, and I have heard another observer state
+that in a nest which he watched the female apparently
+did it all.</p>
+
+<p>My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon
+at least, being on their job as late as seven o'clock.
+In three days the nest was done, all but touching
+up the interior. During the construction I laid
+out pieces of twine and bits of white paper on the
+bushes and wire netting, also some loose material
+from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly
+used. How much labor the birds would have saved
+themselves had they pulled the old nest to pieces
+and used the material a second time! I have
+known the oriole to start a nest, then change her
+mind, and then detach some of her strings and
+fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once
+saw a "chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull
+the old nest to pieces and rebuild it in a tree a
+hundred feet away.</p>
+
+<p>The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking
+than his mate, but we could easily tell her
+by her often simulating the actions of a young bird<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>
+when she came with material in her beak; she would
+alight on a near-by post and slightly spread and
+quiver her wings in a tender, beseeching kind of
+way. She would do this also when bringing food
+to her first brood. When one of the parent birds
+of any species simulates by voice or manner the
+young birds, it is always the female; her heart
+would naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation
+than that of the male.</p>
+
+<p>On the fifth day the nest was completed and
+received its first egg. There was considerable delay
+with the second egg, but it appeared on the
+second or third day, and the third egg the following
+day. Then incubation began. In twenty days
+from the day the nest was begun, the birds were
+hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly
+left the nest.</p>
+
+<p>A friend of mine who has a summer home on
+one of the trout-streams of the Catskills discovered
+that the catbird was fond of butter, and she soon
+had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room
+window for its lump of fresh butter, and
+finally entering the dining-room, perching on the
+back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter
+from a fork held in the mistress's hand. I think
+the butter was unsalted. My friend was convinced
+after three years that the same pair of
+birds returned to her each year, because each
+season the male came promptly for his butter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird
+contrast strongly with the frank, open manners of
+the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrasher goes
+skulking about in much the same way, flirting from
+bush to bush like a culprit escaping from justice.
+But he does love to sing from the April tree-tops
+where all the world may see and hear, if said world
+does not come too near. In the South and West
+the thrasher also nests in the vicinity of houses,
+but in New York and New England we must look
+for him in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of
+any bad traits that go with the thrasher's air of
+suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that
+goes with the catbird's&mdash;I have seen her perch on
+the rim of another bird's nest and deliberately
+devour the eggs. But only once. Whether or not
+she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If
+she does, she is doubtless so sly about it that she
+escapes observation.</p>
+
+<p>I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so
+attractive a neighbor as the wood thrush. She has
+none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace. She
+skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the
+wood thrush stands up before you or perches upon
+a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoat toward you
+in the most open and trusting manner. In fact,
+few birds have such good manners as the wood
+thrush, and few have so much the manner of a
+Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>
+flight of the wood thrush across the lawn is such a
+picture of grace and harmony, it is music to the eye.
+The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I
+told you so, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!"
+But the courteous thrush (just here I heard the
+excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry caw
+of a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow
+fly away from the maple in front of the Study,
+pursued by a mob of screeching robins. He took
+refuge in the spruces above the house where the
+collected robins abused him from surrounding
+branches. On my appearance he flew away, and
+the robins dispersed)&mdash;but the courteous thrush, I
+say, invites the good-breeding in you which he
+himself shows. The thrush never has the air of a
+culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other
+air. But I welcome them both. One shall stand
+for the harmony and repose of bird life, and the
+other for its restlessness and curiosity. The
+songs and the manners of birds correspond. The
+catbird, the brown thrasher, and the mockingbird
+are all theatrical in their manners&mdash;full of
+gestures of tail and wings, and their songs all
+imply an audience, while the serene melody of the
+thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of
+their behavior.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">V</div>
+
+<div class="center">A MIDSUMMER IDYL</div>
+
+
+<p>As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the
+wide-open doors of a big hay-barn, busy with my
+pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my
+farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I
+idly contrast his harvest with mine. I have to
+admit that he succeeds with his better than I do
+with mine, though he can make hay only while the
+sun shines, while I can reap and cure my light fancies
+nearly as well in the shade as in the sun. Yet his
+crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind.
+But I have this advantage over him&mdash;I
+might make literature out of his haymaking, or
+might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest
+he never dreamed of. What does Emerson say?</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One harvest from the field</span>
+<span class="i1">Homeward bring the oxen strong;</span>
+<span class="i0">A second crop thine acres yield,</span>
+<span class="i1">Which I gather in a song.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only
+where he has sown, and if Emerson had not scattered
+his own heart in the fields his Muse would not
+reap much there. Song is not one of the instruments
+with which I gather my harvest, but long
+ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span>
+the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself
+there, and whatever comes back to me now from
+that source is honestly my own. The second crop
+which I gather is not much more tangible than that
+which the poet gathers, but the farmer as little
+suspects its existence as he does that of the poet. I
+can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies,
+his buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow,
+his meadow-rue, serve my purpose better than they
+do his. They look better on the printed page than
+they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy
+and clover have their literary uses, and his new-mown
+hay may perfume a line in poetry. When
+one of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod
+round his quiet bed," he makes better use of this
+weed than the farmers can.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with
+all its sights and sounds, its singing birds, its
+skimming swallows, its grazing or ruminating cattle,
+its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes from
+the meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with
+his men and teams busy with the harvest, has
+material for the literary artist. A good hay day is
+a good day for the writer and the poet, because it
+has a certain crispness and pureness; it is positive;
+it is rich in sunshine; there is a potency in the blue
+sky which you feel; the high barometer raises your
+spirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You
+can sit in a circle of shade beneath a tree in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span>
+fields, or in front of the open hay-barn doors, as I
+do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature
+all about you. The brimming meadows seem fairly
+to purr as the breezes stroke them; the trees rustle
+their myriad leaves as if in gladness; the many-colored
+butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the
+swallows' backs glistens in the sun as they skim the
+fields; and the mellow boom of the passing bumble-bee
+but enhances the sense of repose and contentment
+that pervades the air. The hay cures; the
+oats and corn deepen their hue; the delicious
+fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the
+breeze; your mental skies are lucid, and life has
+the midsummer fullness and charm.</p>
+
+<p>As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of
+the scarlet tanager in the maple woods that crown
+a hill above me, and in the loft overhead two broods
+of swallows are chattering and lining up their
+light-colored breasts on the rims of their nests, or
+trying their newly fledged wings while clinging to
+its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound
+is the call of the cuckoo, which I hear and have
+heard at nearly all hours for many days, and which
+surely bodes rain. The countryman who first
+named this bird the "rain crow" hit the mark.
+The cuckoo is a devourer of worms and caterpillars,
+and why he should be interested in rain is hard to
+see. The tree-toad calls before and during a
+shower, mainly, I think, because he likes to have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span>
+his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like the
+cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a
+mystery, unless the rain and the shadows are congenial
+to the gloomy mood in which he usually
+seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery
+of our birds, and the part of doleful prophet in our
+bird drama suits him well.</p>
+
+<p>A high barometer is best for the haymakers and
+it is best for the human spirits. When the smoke
+goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likely to
+soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons
+who do not like to get up in the morning till the
+day has been well sunned and aired evidently
+thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do
+seem better ventilated, and our lungs take in fuller
+draughts of air. How curious it is that the air
+should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light
+when it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days
+when it is an effort to move, and the grasshopper
+is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the
+trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we
+are on its crest, and are buoyed up both in mind and
+in body, on the crisp, bright days when the air
+seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the
+heavier salt sea-water buoys us up more than the
+fresh river or pond water, but we do not feel in the
+same way the lift of the high barometric wave.
+Even the rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring
+are quickly susceptible to these atmospheric<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span>
+changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine
+and crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as
+to make hay. Let the high blue-domed day with
+its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer,
+overcast, humid day from the south, and the
+flow of sap lessens at once. It would seem
+as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their
+dry bark, they respond to the change so quickly.
+There is no sap without warmth, and yet warmth,
+without any memory of the frost, stops the flow.</p>
+
+<p>The more the air presses upon us the lighter we
+feel, and the less it presses upon us the more "logy"
+we feel. Climb to the top of a mountain ten thousand
+feet high, and you breathe and move with an
+effort. The air is light, water boils at a low
+temperature, and our lungs and muscles seem inadequate
+to perform their usual functions. There is
+a kind of pressure that exhilarates us, and an
+absence of pressure that depresses us.</p>
+
+<p>The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy
+work, sets one up, while the idle, the unemployed,
+has a deficiency of h&aelig;moglobin in his blood.
+The Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the
+man so over-employed that the pressure upon him
+is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled
+with compressed air.</p>
+
+<p>Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in
+the drama of the harvest, and one likes to see it
+well staged, as it is to-day&mdash;the high blue dome,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>
+the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still
+white in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures
+and hill-slopes, the clover shedding its
+perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds
+of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the
+song-birds still vocal, and the tide of summer
+standing poised at its full. Very soon it will begin
+to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become
+dry and harsh, the clover will fade, the
+girlish daisies will become coarse and matronly,
+the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the
+pastures will turn brown, and the haymakers will
+find the hay half cured as it stands waiting for
+them in the meadows.</p>
+
+<p>What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common,
+so abundant, so various, a green summer snow that
+softens the outlines of the landscape, that makes a
+carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields,
+and that furnishes food to so many and such various
+creatures! More than the grazing animals live
+upon the grass. All our cereals&mdash;wheat, barley,
+rye, rice, oats, corn&mdash;belong to the great family of
+the grasses.</p>
+
+<p>Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment
+of the hills. It gives us the meadow, a
+feature in the northern landscape so common that
+we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once
+when we enter a tropical or semi-tropical country.
+In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw no mead<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span>ows
+and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the
+genial, mellow look which our landscape presents.
+Harshness, rawness, aridity, are the prevailing
+notes.</p>
+
+<p>From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows
+with their boundary line of stone fences that are
+like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover.
+They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in
+the breeze, the green inundation seems about to
+overwhelm its boundaries, all the surface inequalities
+of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and
+stones are hidden, the woodchucks make their
+roads through it, immersed like dolphins in the
+sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowing
+beneficence of our temperate zone it all presents!
+Nature in her kinder, gentler moods, dreaming of
+the tranquil herds and the bursting barns. Surely
+the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for
+the most part noiseless, peace-yielding victories
+that gladden the eye and tranquillize the heart.</p>
+
+<p>The meadow presents a pleasing picture before
+it is invaded by the haymakers, and a varied and
+animated one after it is thus invaded; the mowing-machine
+sending a shudder ahead of it through the
+grass, the hay-tedder kicking up the green locks
+like a giant, many-legged grasshopper, the horserake
+gathering the cured hay into windrows,
+the white-sleeved men with their forks pitching it
+into cocks, and, lastly, the huge, soft-cheeked loads<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span>
+of hay, towering above the teams that draw them,
+brushing against the bar-ways and the lower
+branches of the trees along their course, slowly
+winding their way toward the barn. Then the
+great mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the
+fields, and the battle is won. Milk and cream
+are stored up in well-cured hay, and when the
+snow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills
+them in summer, the tranquil cow can still rest
+and ruminate in contentment.</p>
+
+<p>As the swallows sweep out and in near my head
+they give out an angry "Sleet, sleet," as if my presence
+had suddenly become offensive to them. I
+know what makes the change in their temper. The
+young are leaving their nests, and at such eventful
+times the parent birds are always nervous and
+anxious. When any of our birds launch a family
+into the world they would rather not have spectators,
+and you are pretty sure to be abused if you
+intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a
+good deal of sharp emphasis into that "Sleet,
+sleet," though she is not armed to make any of
+her threats good. Who knows that all will go well
+with them when they first make the plunge into
+space with their untried wings? A careful parent
+should keep the coast clear.</p>
+
+<p>They have been testing their wings for several
+days, clinging to the sides of the nest and beating
+the wings rapidly. And now comes the crucial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>
+moment of letting go and attempting actual flight.
+Several of them have already done it, and I see
+them resting on the dead limbs of a plum-tree
+across the road. But more are to follow, and parental
+anxiety is still rife. I shall be sorry when the
+spacious hayloft becomes silent. That affectionate
+"Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing
+squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged
+companionship. The old barn is the abode of
+friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of them
+and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of
+poetry and romance to these familiar scenes.</p>
+
+<p>Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest
+of birds? Known to the poets and sages and
+prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless
+and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and
+masterful on the wing, the child and darling of the
+summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in the
+fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching
+no earthly food, drinking and bathing and
+mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly coursing the
+long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in
+the shape of a bird! Only in the free fields of the
+summer air could it have got that steel-blue of the
+wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of
+course I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff
+swallow seems less a child of the sky and sun,
+probably because its sheen and glow are less, and
+its shape and motions less arrowy. More varied in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span>
+color, its hues yet lack the intensity, and its flight
+the swiftness, of those of its brother of the haylofts.
+The tree swallows and the bank swallows
+are pleasing, but they are much more local and
+restricted in their ranges than the barn-frequenters.
+As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the
+barn swallows the summer always brought.</p>
+
+<p>After all, there is but one swallow; the others
+are particular kinds that we specify. How curious
+that men should ever have got the notion that this
+airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams,
+spends the winter hibernating in the mud of
+ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of newts and
+frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born
+of the blindness and superstition of earlier times.
+One knows that the rain of the rainbow may be
+gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the
+fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life.
+Yet one would as soon think of digging up a rainbow
+in the mud as a swallow. The swallow follows
+the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial
+regions, where it hibernates on the wing, buried
+in tropical sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the
+swallows, a good day for the haymakers, and a good
+day for him who sits before his open barn door and
+weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this
+slight literary fabric.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">VI</div>
+
+<div class="center">NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE</div>
+
+
+<p>The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive
+and goes its own way so quietly and furtively that
+we miss much of it unless we cultivate an interest
+in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase
+a line of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will
+seem worthy of his interest. One thing is linked
+to another or gives a clue to another. There is
+no surer way to find birds' nests than to go berrying
+or fishing. In the blackberry or raspberry bushes
+you may find the bush sparrow's nest or the indigobird's
+nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I
+missed my fish, and my hook caught on a branch
+over my head. When I pulled the branch down,
+there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's
+nest. I unwittingly caught more than I
+missed. On another occasion I stumbled upon the
+nest of the water accentor which I had never before
+found; on still another, upon the nest of the
+winter wren, a marvel of mossy softness and delicacy
+hidden under a mossy log.</p>
+
+<p>Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving
+ledges the fisherman often sees the nest of the
+ph[oe]be-bird, which does not cease to please for the
+hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>
+artistry. On the newly sawn timbers of your
+porch or woodshed it is far less pleasing, because
+the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
+the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.</p>
+
+<p>Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper
+sparrow fly up and alight on the telephone wire with
+nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye upon
+her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy
+and weedy bank of the roadside in front of me and
+disappears. A few moments later I have her
+secret&mdash;a nest in a little recess in the bank. That
+straw gave the finishing touch. She kept her
+place on the nest until she had deposited her first
+egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this
+season. Some young vespers flitting about farther
+up the road are presumably her first brood. Each
+day thereafter for four consecutive days she added
+an egg. Incubation soon began and on the
+10th of July the young were out, the little sprawling,
+skinny things looking, as a city girl said
+when she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a
+nest, as if they were mildewed.</p>
+
+<p>These ground-builders among the birds, taking
+their chances in the great common of the open
+fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every hour&mdash;the
+hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes,
+weasels, coons by night, and crows and hawks by
+day&mdash;what bird-lover does not experience a little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span>
+thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
+nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt
+and the disorderly; he has found a thing of
+life and love amid the cold and the insensate. Yet
+all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw
+of it serves a purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies
+the little niche in which it is placed. What a center
+of solicitude and forethought.</p>
+
+<p>Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the
+other side of the road, is a junco's nest. You may
+know the junco's nest from that of any other
+ground-builder by its being more elaborate and
+more perfectly hidden. The nest is tucked far under
+the mossy and weedy bank, and only a nest-hunter
+passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a
+blind man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would
+have seen it. A little screen of leaves of the hawkweed
+permits only the rim of one edge of the nest
+to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached
+forth my hand did the mother bird come fluttering
+out and go down the road with drooping wings and
+spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly
+lighting up the whole performance.</p>
+
+<p>A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had
+had brief glimpses of the male many times about the
+place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
+one male spitefully pursuing another male along
+the top of the stone wall opposite, which fact,
+paralleled in a human case, would afford a hint for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span>
+detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a
+very successful bird. The swarms of them that
+one sees in the late fall and in the early winter going
+south is good evidence of this. They usually precede
+the white-throats north in the spring, but a few
+linger and breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.</p>
+
+<p>When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of
+my door makes herself into a sunshade to protect
+her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
+her young pant too; they would probably perish
+were not the direct rays of the sun kept from them.
+Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the hill
+pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk,
+might be considered in danger from a large herd of
+dairy cows, but it is wisely placed in view of such a
+contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of Canada
+thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a
+few square yards, the grazing is very poor. I do
+not think that the chances are one in fifty that the
+hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that
+the problem presented itself to the bird as it does to
+me, but her instinct was as sure a guide as my
+reason is to me&mdash;or a surer one.</p>
+
+<p>The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by
+a New England bird-lover, Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned
+writer on our birds, fifty or more years
+ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by
+our earlier writers. It haunts the hilly pastures
+and roadsides in the Catskill region. It is often<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>
+called the road-runner, from its habit of running
+along the road ahead when one is driving or walking&mdash;a
+very different bird, however, from the road-runner
+of the Western States. The vesper is
+larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and
+russet, and does not frequent our gardens and
+orchards as does the latter. In color it suggests
+the European skylark; the two lateral white
+quills in its tail enhance this impression. One
+season a stray skylark, probably from Long Island
+or some other place where larks had been liberated,
+appeared in a broad, low meadow near me, and not
+finding his own kind paid court to a female vesper
+sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt
+pestered her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately
+and seemed much embarrassed by the
+attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.</p>
+
+<p>When the young of any species appear, the solicitude
+and watchfulness of the mother bird are
+greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the
+vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of
+my harmless character now for several weeks and,
+one would think, must know that her precious secret
+is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in
+her beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards
+away, she maneuvers around for a minute or two,
+flying up to the telephone wire or a few yards up
+or down the road, and finally approaches the nest
+with much hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>
+in the act. When she comes again and again
+and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the
+half-fledged young were lying on the ground in
+front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous
+marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I
+could not divine.</p>
+
+<p>What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently
+so wise on some occasions and so absurd
+on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food
+to her young, going through the same tactics over
+and over, learns no more than a machine would.
+But, of course, the bird does not think; hence the
+folly of her behavior to a being that does. The
+wisdom of nature, which is so unerring under
+certain conditions, becomes to us sheer folly under
+changed conditions.</p>
+
+<p>When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better
+of her, she often devours the food she has in her
+beak, so fearful is she of betraying her precious
+secret. But the next time she comes she may only
+maneuver briefly before approaching the nest, and
+then again hesitate and parley with her fears and
+make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I
+had only just appeared upon the scene.</p>
+
+<p>One of the best things a bird-lover can have in
+front of his house or cabin is a small dead tree with
+numerous leafless branches. Many kinds of birds
+love to perch briefly where they can look around<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
+them. I would not exchange the old dead plum-tree
+that stands across the road in front of my lodge
+for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It
+bears a perpetual crop of birds. Of course the
+strictly sylvan birds, such as the warblers, the
+vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit
+thrushes, do not come, but many kinds of other
+birds pause there during the day and seem to enjoy
+the unobstructed view.</p>
+
+<p>All the field and orchard and grove birds come.
+In early summer the bobolink perches there, then
+tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows below,
+pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted
+grosbeak comes and shows his brilliant front. The
+purple finch, the goldfinch, the indigo bunting, the
+bluebird, the kingbird, the ph[oe]be-bird, the great
+crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee,
+the high-hole, the downy woodpecker, the
+vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy, pause
+there in the course of the day, and some of them
+several times during the day. Occasionally the
+scarlet tanager lights it up with his vivid color.</p>
+
+<p>But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song
+sparrow whose mate has a nest not far off. Here
+he perches and goes through his repertoire of three
+or four different songs from dawn till nightfall,
+pausing only long enough now and then to visit his
+mate or to refresh himself with a little food. He
+repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span>
+his plumage in the intervals. He sings several
+hundred times a day and has been doing so for many
+weeks. The house wren during the breeding-season
+repeats his song thousands of times a day, while
+the red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning
+till night for several months. How a conscious
+effort like that would weary our human singers and
+their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious,
+in our sense, of what they are doing.</p>
+
+<p>When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle
+this singing sparrow presents! A little wild bird
+sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its voice
+in song hour after hour, day after day, week after
+week.</p>
+
+<p>In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual
+characteristic, but viewed in the light of the spirit
+of the whole, what is it except a song of praise
+and thanksgiving&mdash;joy in life, joy in the day, joy
+in the mate and brood, joy in the paternal and
+maternal instincts and solicitudes, a voice from the
+heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving
+for the universal beneficence without which you
+and I and the little bird would not be here? In
+foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain and
+the cold do not silence him.</p>
+
+<p>There are few or no pessimists among the birds.
+One might think the call of the turtle-dove, which
+sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of
+despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>
+love." The plaint of the wood pewee, pensive and
+like a human sigh, is far from pessimistic, although
+in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to
+being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the
+catbird and the jay, with their peevish and complaining
+notes, might well be placed in that category,
+were it not for their songs when the love passion
+makes optimists even of them. The strain of
+the hermit thrush which floats down to me from the
+wooded heights above day after day at all hours,
+but more as the shades of night are falling&mdash;what
+does this pure, serene, exalted strain mean but
+that, in Browning's familiar words,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">God's in his heaven&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">All's right with the world!</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone,
+but what puts it into his heart to do that?
+Certainly it is good to have a mate and a
+brood!</p>
+
+<p>A new season brings new experiences with the
+same old familiar birds, or new thoughts about
+them. This season I have had new impressions of
+our cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen.
+Of the two species, the black-billed and the yellow-billed,
+the former prevails in the latitude of New
+England, and the latter farther south. We
+cannot hail our black-billed as "blithe newcomer,"
+as Wordsworth does his cuckoo. "Doleful<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span>
+newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing
+cheery or animated in his note, and he is about
+as much a "wandering voice" as is the European
+bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of
+flowers. He is a prophet of the rain, and the
+country people call him the rain crow. All his
+notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His
+nesting-instincts seem to lead him, or rather her, to
+the thorn-bushes as inevitably as the grass finch's
+lead her to the grass.</p>
+
+<p>The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and
+inefficient bird that it is interesting to see it doing
+things. One of our young poets has a verse in which
+he sings of</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The solemn priestly bumble-bee</span>
+<span class="i0">That marries rose to rose.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>He might apply the same or similar adjectives to
+the cuckoo. Solemn and priestly, or at least
+monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and
+suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights,
+or is gay and cheerful like our other birds, I have
+yet to witness it.</p>
+
+<p>During the last summer, day after day I saw one
+of the birds going by my door toward the clump of
+thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill. One
+afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting
+on a branch very still and straight, with the worm
+still in its beak. I sat down on the tentlike thicket
+and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span>
+guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after
+a minute or two he began to shake and bruise the
+worm. I waited to see him disclose the nest, but
+he would not, and finally devoured the worm.
+Then he hopped or flitted about amid the branches
+above me, uttering his harsh note every minute or
+two.</p>
+
+<p>After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted
+the curtain of thorny branches which separated the
+thicket from the meadow and stepped outside. I
+had moved along only a few paces when I discovered
+the nest on an outer branch almost in the sunshine.
+The mother bird was covering her half-grown
+young. As I put up my hand toward her,
+she slipped off, withdrew a few feet into the
+branches, and uttered her guttural calls.</p>
+
+<p>In the nest were four young, one of them nearly
+ready to leave it, while another barely had its
+eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened, while
+the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth
+for food. The most mature one pointed its bill
+straight up and sat as still as if petrified. The whole
+impression one got from the nest and its contents
+was of something inept and fortuitous. But the
+cares of a family woke the parents up and they got
+down to real work in caring for their charge.</p>
+
+<p>The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with
+threadlike yellow stripes, and looked as if they were
+wet or just out of the shell.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>That strain of parasitism in the blood of the
+cuckoo&mdash;how long in the history of its race since
+it mastered it and became its own nest-builder?
+But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly
+is. Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the
+twigs of the thorn-tree, with all their sharp needle-like
+spines upon them, some of the twigs a foot long,
+bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking
+nest and nursery I ever beheld&mdash;a mere
+platform of twigs about four inches across, carpeted
+with a little shredded brown fibrous material, looking
+as if made from the inner bark of some tree,
+perhaps this very thorn.</p>
+
+<p>In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or
+apple-tree worm, which is their favorite food,
+cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green
+worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods
+they can find a forest worm that is riddling the
+leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in
+force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the
+destruction of the worms. It is interesting to see
+the cuckoo fly by several times a day with a big
+green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems,
+here it is doing things. It is like seeing a monk at
+the plough-handle. It is a solemn creature; its
+note is almost funereal.</p>
+
+<p>Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive
+about its nesting-habits as any of the sparrows.
+The male bird seems to know that his brilliant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>
+color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far
+away from the nest, singing at all hours of the day
+in a circle around it, the radius of which must be
+more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest
+was near the house, almost under the clothes-line,
+in a low blackberry-bush, partly masked by tall-growing
+daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass
+near it, when off went the little brown bird with her
+sharp, chiding manners. She is a very emphatic
+creature. It is yea and nay with her every time.</p>
+
+<p>The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is
+not a very pleasing singer, but an all-day one and
+an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer birds.
+In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows
+and goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds.
+Their range of food is probably very limited.
+I have never chanced to see them taking
+food of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>How crowded with life every square rod of the
+fields and woods is, if we look closely enough!
+Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
+woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot
+wave, reclining on a cushion of dry leaves or sitting
+with my back against a cool, smooth exposure of the
+outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give
+myself up to a day of little things. And the little
+things soon come trooping or looping along.</p>
+
+<p>I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions
+of the rim of my straw hat which lies on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span>
+the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
+an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and
+rearing up on its hind legs and feeling the vacant
+space around it as a blind man might hunt for a
+lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its
+travels looking for a place in which to go through
+that wonderful transformation of creeping worm
+into a winged creature. In its higher stage of
+being it is a little silvery moth, barely an inch
+across, and, like other moths, has a brief season of
+life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some
+suitable place and then dying or falling a victim
+to the wood pewee or some other bird. After some
+minutes of groping and humping about on my hat
+and on dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.</p>
+
+<p>A little later a large black worm comes along.
+It is an inch and a quarter long, and is engaged in
+the same quest as its lesser brother of the green,
+transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say,
+many thousand times, and what a terrible-looking
+monster we should have&mdash;a traveling arch of
+contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher
+than your head, and measuring off the ground a rod
+or more at a time, or standing twenty feet or more
+high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is
+a puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead
+would quickly dispose.</p>
+
+<p>With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by
+and watch it go looping up the trunk. Evidently it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span>
+doesn't know just where it wants to go, but it
+finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up
+that. By chance it strikes one of the branches six
+feet from the ground and goes looping up that.
+Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
+of three small branches and climbs that a foot or
+more, and a dry twig, six or eight inches long, is
+seized and explored. At the end of it the creature
+tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty
+space, then turns back and hits a smaller twig on
+this twig about an inch long. This it explores over
+and over and sounds the depths that surround it,
+then loops back again to the end of the main twig
+it has just explored, profiting nothing by experience;
+then retraces its steps and measures off another
+small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the
+leaves.</p>
+
+<p>Has the course of life up through geologic time
+been in any way like this? There has been the
+push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but has
+there been no more guiding principle than in the
+case of this worm? The singular thing about the
+worm is its incessant reachings forth into surrounding
+space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding,
+as if to be sure that no chance to make a new connection
+is missed.</p>
+
+<p>Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging
+by its hind feet, lets itself down and simulates
+a small dry twig, in which disguise it would deceive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>
+the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed
+the night posing as a twig.</p>
+
+<p>Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon
+the stage were a hummingbird, a little red newt,
+and a wood frog. The hummer makes short
+work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is
+gone. This one seemed to be exploring the dry
+twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs or
+bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a
+twig a few yards from me. My ardent wish could
+not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy bird, appearing
+and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the
+heart of all the flowers and taking no food grosser
+than their nectar, the winged jewel of the poets, the
+surprise and delight of all beholders&mdash;it came like
+a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and
+was gone as quickly.</p>
+
+<p>All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of
+their own, all except the woodchuck; wherever he
+is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is
+known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a
+real sylvan frog, as pretty as a bird, the color of the
+dry leaves, slender and elegant in form and quick
+and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one
+in the bed of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand
+toward him and stroked his back with a twig. If
+you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put
+a spell upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized.
+He was instantly responsive to my passes. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span>
+began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my
+finger instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly,
+rose up more upon his feet, and bowed his head.
+As I continued the titillation he began to give
+forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if
+he were going to break out in song. He did not,
+but he seemed loath to go his way. How different
+he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in
+large numbers make a multitudinous croaking and
+clucking in the little wild pools in spring! He
+wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in
+the pools celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice
+is off them, and then in two or three days he takes
+to the open woods and assumes the assimilative
+coloring of the dry leaves.</p>
+
+<p>The little orange-colored salamander, a most
+delicate and highly colored little creature, is as
+harmless as a baby, and about as slow and undecided
+in its movements. Its cold body seems
+to like the warmth of your hand. Yet in color
+it is as rich an orange as the petal of the cardinal
+flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an
+outside color; it is a glow, and renders the creature
+almost transparent, an effect as uniform as
+the radiance of a precious stone. Its little, innocent-looking,
+three-toed foot, or three and a half
+toed&mdash;how unreptilian it looks through my pocket
+glass! A baby's hand is not more so. Its throbbing
+throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>
+with a glint of gold above them&mdash;only a close view
+of these satisfies one.</p>
+
+<p>Here is another remarkable transformation
+among the small wild folk. In the spring he is a
+dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;
+now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the
+woods. This is said to be an immature form, which
+returns to the ponds and matures the next season;
+but whether it is the male or the female that assumes
+this bright hue, or both, I do not know.
+The coat seems to be its midsummer holiday uniform
+which is laid aside when it goes back to the
+marshes to hibernate in the fall.</p>
+
+<p>Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means
+of protection that do not at once appear. In the
+case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or other
+disagreeable secretion, which would cause any
+animal to repent that took it in its mouth. It is
+even less concerned at being caught than is the
+skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.</p>
+
+<p>In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon
+the domain of another sylvan denizen, the chipmunk.
+One afternoon one suddenly came up from
+the open field below me with his pockets full of
+provender of some sort; just what sort I wondered,
+as there was no grain or seeds or any dry food that
+it would be safe to store underground for the winter.</p>
+
+<p>Beholding me sitting there within two yards of
+his den was a great surprise to him. He eyed me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>
+a long time&mdash;squirrel time&mdash;making little, spasmodic
+movements on the flat stone above his den.
+At a motion of my arm he darted into his hole with
+an exultant chip. He was soon out with empty
+pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little
+tocsin of distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan
+folk might hear. As I made no sign, he soon
+ceased and went about his affairs.</p>
+
+<p>All this time, behind and above me, concealed by
+a vase fern, reposed that lovely creature of the
+twilight, the luna moth, just out of her chrysalis,
+drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift
+the fern screen, and there was this marvel! Her
+body was as white and spotless as the snow, and
+her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and
+delicate as&mdash;well, as only those of a luna moth
+can be. It is as immaculate as an angel. With
+a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple
+sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her
+for the night.</p>
+
+<p>While I was loitering there on the threshold of
+the woods, observing the small sylvan folk, about
+a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was
+a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than
+a score of years, the nest of the veery, or Wilson's
+thrush. Some friends were camping there with
+their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech
+woods, and passed and repassed hourly within a
+few yards of the nest, and, although they each had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span>
+sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen
+nor heard the birds during the two days they had
+been there.</p>
+
+<p>While calling upon them I chanced to see the
+hurried movements of a thrush in the low trees six
+or seven yards away. The bird had food in its
+beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it.
+It quickly flew down to a small clump of ferns that
+crowned a small knoll in the open, about ten feet
+from the border of the woods. As it did so, another
+thrush flew out of the ferns and disappeared in the
+woods. Their stealthy movements sent a little
+thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure.
+I parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of
+the small knoll was the nest with two half-fledged
+young.</p>
+
+<p>A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my
+door gave an unkind cut to a sparrow that had a
+nest in the clover near the wall. The mower
+chanced to see the nest before the sickle-bar had
+swept over it. It contained four young ones just
+out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
+carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The
+parent birds were not seen, but we naturally
+reasoned that they would come back and would
+alight upon the wall to make observations.</p>
+
+<p>But that afternoon and the next morning passed,
+and we saw no anxious bird parents. The young
+lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span>
+the nest and seemed to be more contented than
+abandoned birds usually are. The next night was
+unseasonably cold, and I expected to find the nestlings
+dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
+strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather
+on a stone wall, they seemed to be doing well.
+Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them, I
+said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the
+road opposite to them and watched.</p>
+
+<p>I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow
+came slyly up and dropped some food into an open
+mouth and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in
+sauntering through the woods, his hat just brushes
+a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
+morning. The nest was like a natural growth,
+hanging there like a fairy basket in the fork of a
+beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery, brown
+and gray wood products, just high enough to escape
+prowling ground enemies and low enough to escape
+sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was in its
+artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the
+green-and-brown solitude. The weaver had bent
+down one of the green leaves and made it a part of
+the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist.
+Then the dabs of white here and there, given by
+the fragments of spiders' cocoons&mdash;all helped to
+blend it with the flickering light and shade.</p>
+
+<p>I gently bent down the branch and four con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>fident
+heads with open mouths instantly appeared
+above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
+flitting about in the branches overhead, peering
+down upon me and uttering her anxious "quay
+quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
+away!" This I soon did.</p>
+
+<p>Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is
+soon quickly over. But the red-eyed vireo sings
+on into September&mdash;not an ecstatic strain, but a
+quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at
+his work.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">VII</div>
+
+<div class="center">WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT</div>
+
+
+<p>It was in May during the last term of his Presidency
+that Roosevelt asked me to go with him down to
+Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him name his birds.
+I stayed with him at the White House the night
+before we started. I remember that at dinner<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">1</a>
+there was an officer from the British army stationed
+in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indian
+affairs. I did not take part in it because I knew
+nothing about India, but Roosevelt was so conversant
+with Indian affairs and Indian history that
+you would think he had just been cramming on it,
+which I knew very well he had not. But that
+British officer was put on his mettle to hold his
+own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India
+and England's relation to it than the officer seemed
+to know. It was amazing to see the thoroughness
+of his knowledge about India.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">1</span></a> Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The incident
+he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House, just
+before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;C. B.</p></div>
+
+<p>The next morning we started off for Virginia,
+taking an early train.</p>
+
+<p>Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from
+Washington. I think we left the train at Char<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>lottesville,
+Virginia, and drove about ten miles to
+Pine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on
+the edge of the woods, a mile from the nearest
+farmhouse.</p>
+
+<p>Before we reached there we got out of the wagon
+and walked, as there were a good many warblers in
+the trees&mdash;the spring migration was on. It was
+pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the
+President insisted on carrying it. We identified
+several warblers there, among them the black-poll,
+the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap.
+He knew them in the trees overhead as quickly as
+I did.</p>
+
+<p>We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but
+as he was eager for a walk we started off, he leading,
+as if walking for a wager. We went through fields
+and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile or
+more, when we stopped and mopped our brows and
+turned homeward without having seen many birds.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when
+she saw the heated condition in which we returned,
+for not long afterwards he came to me and said:
+"Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we
+were in too much of a hurry." I replied, "No, Mr.
+President, that isn't the way I usually go a-birding."
+His thirst for the wild and the woods, and
+his joy at returning to these after his winter in the
+White House, had evidently urged him on. He
+added, "We will try a different plan to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span>So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along
+the highways. Very soon we heard a wren which
+was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren," he said.
+We got out and watched it as it darted in and out
+of the fence and sang.</p>
+
+<p>I asked him if he knew whether the little gray
+gnatcatcher was to be seen there. I had not seen
+or heard it for thirty years. "Yes," he replied, "I
+saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run."</p>
+
+<p>We walked over to some plum-trees where there
+had been a house at one time. No sooner had we
+reached the spot than he cried, "There it is now!"
+And sure enough, there it was in full song&mdash;a little
+bird the shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine
+musical strain.</p>
+
+<p>As we were walking in a field we saw some birds
+that were new to me. Roosevelt also was puzzled
+to know what they were till we went among them
+and stirred them up, discovering that they were
+females of the blue grosbeak, with some sparrows
+which we did not identify.</p>
+
+<p>In the course of that walk he showed me a place
+where he had seen what he had thought at the time
+to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described how
+they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the
+tree where they alighted. I was skeptical, for it
+had long been thought that wild pigeons were extinct,
+but that fact had not impressed itself upon
+his mind. He said if he had known there could be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span>
+any doubt about it, he would have observed them
+more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as it
+was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable
+evidence. We talked with the colored coachman
+about the birds, as he also had seen them.
+His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had
+seen wild pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts.
+Subsequently Roosevelt wrote me that he had come
+to the conclusion that they had been mistaken
+about their being pigeons.</p>
+
+<p>One day while there, as we were walking through
+an old weedy field, I chanced to spy, out of the
+corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the
+ground only three or four yards away. I called
+Roosevelt's attention to it and said, "Now, Mr.
+President, I think with care you can drop your hat
+over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and
+crept up on the bird, and was almost in a position
+to let his hat drop over it when the bird flew to a
+near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this
+bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again
+cautiously and almost succeeded in putting his hand
+upon it; the bird flew just in time to save itself
+from his hand.</p>
+
+<p>One Sunday after church he took me to a field
+where he had recently seen and heard Lincoln's
+sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the
+dry grass for an hour or more, waiting for the
+sparrow, but it did not appear.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span>During my visit there we named over seventy-five
+species of birds and fowl, he knowing all of
+them but two, and I knowing all but two. He
+taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler,
+and I taught him the swamp sparrow and one of
+the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine warbler.
+If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he
+would have been one ahead of me.</p>
+
+<p>I remember talking politics a little with him
+while we were waiting for the birds, and, knowing
+that he was expecting Taft to be his successor, I
+expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill
+his shoes.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you
+don't know him as well as I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is
+that, though Taft is an able and amiable man, he
+is not a born leader."</p>
+
+<p>(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course
+in support of the proposed League of Nations has
+quite brought me around to Roosevelt's estimate
+of him.)</p>
+
+<p>Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One
+evening as we sat in the lamplight, he reading Lord
+Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the man-eating
+lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting
+near with her needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's
+hand came down on the table with such a bang
+that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span>
+exclaimed in a slightly nettled tone, "Why, my
+dear, what <i>is</i> the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would
+almost have demolished an African lion.</p>
+
+<p>It occurred to me later that evening how risky
+it was for the President of the United States to be
+so unprotected&mdash;without a guard of any kind&mdash;in
+that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something
+of this to him, suggesting that some one might
+"kidnap" him.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his
+hip pocket, "I go armed, and they would have to
+be mighty quick to get the drop on me."</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and
+listen to the night sounds in the Virginia woods, I
+went out around the cabin and almost immediately
+heard some animal run heavily through the woods
+not far from the house. I thought perhaps it was
+a neighboring dog, but, on speaking of it to Mrs.
+Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men
+came every night at nine o'clock and stood on
+guard till morning, spending the day at a farmhouse
+in that vicinity. She did not let the President
+know of this because it would irritate him.</p>
+
+<p>The only flower we saw there which was new to
+me was the Indian pink. Roosevelt seemed to
+know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink
+moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were
+common in that locality.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span>On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being
+on the train, Roosevelt threw himself into the
+dictation of many letters, the wrens and the warblers
+already sidetracked for the business of the
+Administration.</p>
+
+<p>I passed another night at the White House, and
+in the morning early we went out on the White
+House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming
+to attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by.</p>
+
+<p>"They often stare at me as though they thought
+me crazy," he said, "when they see me gazing up
+into the trees."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now they will think I am your keeper,"
+I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.</p>
+
+<p>When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds
+that we had seen while at Pine Knot and hoped
+that I would sometime write up the trip; in fact,
+for years after, whenever we would meet, almost
+the first thing he would say was, "Have you written
+up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?" And his
+disappointment at my failure to do so was always
+unmistakable.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">2</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">2</span></a>
+The following letter may be of interest in this connection.<br />
+<span class="quotsig">C. B.</span><br />
+
+<span class="smcap">Dear Oom John:</span><br />
+
+
+Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration?
+If not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will include
+in your coming volume of sketches a little account of the time
+you visited us at Pine Knot, our little Virginia camp, while I
+was President. I am very proud of you, Oom John, and I want<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span>
+the fact that you were my guest when I was President, and that
+you and I looked at birds together, recorded there&mdash;and don't
+forget that I showed you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's
+wren, and almost all the other birds I said I would!<br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p><span style="margin-left: 10em;">Ever yours,</span><br />
+<span class="quotsig"><span class="smcap">Theodore Roosevelt</span></span>
+</p></div>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<div class="center">VIII</div>
+
+<div class="center">A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY</div>
+
+
+<p>One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with
+some friends for a two weeks' automobile trip into
+the land of Dixie&mdash;joy-riders with a luxurious outfit
+calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.</p>
+
+<p>We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains
+in North Carolina. I confess that mountains and
+men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I can
+stand both, and I started out with the hope that the
+great Appalachian range held something new and
+interesting for me. Yet I knew it was a risky thing
+for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with
+younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red
+corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the
+things that moved one so deeply when one was
+younger. More than that, what did I need of an
+outing? All the latter half of my life has been an
+outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order.
+Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change,
+for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The
+old and familiar draw more strongly. Yet I was
+fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.</p>
+
+<p>Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so
+diversified, so forest-clad&mdash;the huge unbroken<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span>
+Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys cutting
+across it from north to south; the world of fine
+farms and rural homesteads in the eastern half, and
+the great mining and manufacturing interests in
+the western, the source of noble rivers; and the
+storehouse of many of Nature's most useful gifts
+to man.</p>
+
+<p>The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows
+the line of least resistance, but it has some formidable
+obstacles to surmount, and it goes at them very
+deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a
+sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember
+persons with lighter cars standing beside them at
+the foot of those long, winding ascents, nursing
+and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing
+them for the heavy task before them. An almost
+perfect road, worthy of its great namesake, but an
+Alleghany range which you cannot get around or
+through gives the automobilist pause.</p>
+
+<p>As we were hurled along over the great highway
+the things I remember with the most satisfaction
+were the groups or processions of army trucks we
+met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was
+written large on that Lincoln Highway in that army
+of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb, khaki-colored
+fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking,
+a host of them, rolling eastward toward the
+seat of war, some loaded with soldiers, some with
+camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>
+resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon
+himself in this far-off land. On other highways
+the weapons and materials of war were converging
+toward the great seaports in the same way. The
+silent, grim, processions&mdash;how impressive they
+were!</p>
+
+<p>Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in
+or very near the lake of brimstone and fire, and
+its head in the sweet country air of the hill-tops.
+I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than
+I ever did in any other city in this country. One
+is fairly suffocated at times driving along the public
+highway on a bright, breezy August day. It
+might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such
+blackening and blasting fumes comes our civilization.
+That weapons of war and of destructiveness
+should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire
+seemed fit and natural, but much more comes
+out of them&mdash;much that suggests the pond-lily
+rising out of the black slime and muck of the lake
+bottoms.</p>
+
+<p>We live in an age of iron and have all we can
+do to keep the iron from entering our souls. Our
+vast industries have their root in the geologic history
+of the globe as in no other past age. We delve
+for our power, and it is all barbarous and unhandsome.
+When the coal and oil are all gone and we
+come to the surface and above the surface for the
+white coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>
+the sunshine, how much more attractive life will be!
+Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may
+never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can
+hitch them to the mountain streams, and make
+the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the
+silver age will displace the iron age.</p>
+
+<p>The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast
+coal-mine. The farmer has only to dig into the
+side of the hill back of his house and take out his
+winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth
+and gentle and grassy the hills looked. It is a
+cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it
+seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and
+watched over with kindly care. Good crops of hay
+and grain were growing above their black remains,
+and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way.
+The shuffling and the deformation of the earth's
+surface which attended the laying down of the
+coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of
+that wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has
+smoothed it all out.</p>
+
+<p>Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or
+more miles southeast of Pittsburgh, an ideal place&mdash;a
+large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence well
+carpeted with grass, with wood and water in
+abundance. But the night was chilly. Folding
+camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily
+warmth, and until you get the hang of them and
+equip yourself with plenty of blankets, Sleep enters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span>
+your tent very reluctantly. She tarried with me
+but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I
+got up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair
+beside it indulged in the "long, long thoughts"
+which belong to age much more than to youth.
+Youth was soundly and audibly sleeping in the
+tents with no thoughts at all.</p>
+
+<p>The talk that first night around the camp-fire
+gave us an inside view of many things about which
+we were much concerned. The ship question was
+the acute question of the hour and we had with us
+for a few days Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping
+Board, who could give us first-hand information,
+which he did to our great comfort.</p>
+
+<p>Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania,
+where for that night we slept indoors.</p>
+
+<p>On the following day one of the big cars had an
+accident&mdash;the fan broke, and the iron punctured
+the radiator. It looked as if we should be delayed
+until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh.
+We made our way slowly to Connellsville,
+where there was a good garage, but the best workmen
+there shook their heads; they said a new radiator
+was the only remedy. All four arms of the fan
+were broken off and there was no way to mend
+them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle.
+"Give me a chance," he said, and, pulling off his
+coat and rolling up his sleeves, he fell to work. In
+two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
+of drills and copper wire the master mechanic had
+stitched the severed arms to their stubs, soldered
+up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled car
+was again in running order.</p>
+
+<p>On August the 31st we made our camp on the
+banks of a large, clear creek in West Virginia called
+Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road
+from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the
+reluctant consent of the widow who owned it to
+pitch our camp there, though her patch of roasting-ears
+near by made her hesitate; she had probably
+had experiences with gypsy parties, and was not
+impressed in our favor even when I gave her the
+names of two well-known men in our party. But
+Edison was not attracted by the widow's open
+field; the rough, grassy margin of the creek suited
+him better, and its proximity to the murmuring,
+eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it
+necessitated our mess-tent being pitched astride a
+shallow gully, and our individual tents elbowing one
+another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
+But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what
+the camper-out wants. Pure elements&mdash;air, water,
+earth&mdash;these settle the question; Camp Horseshoe
+Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I
+got my first view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting&mdash;a
+bird rarely seen north of the Potomac.</p>
+
+<p>An interesting object near our camp was an old,
+unused grist-mill, with a huge, decaying overshot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span>
+oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the wheel
+and had our pictures taken.</p>
+
+<p>At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a
+twelve-year-old girl appeared in the road above us
+with a pail of apples for sale. We invited her into
+our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We
+took all of her apples. I can see her yet with her
+shining eyes as she crumpled the new one-dollar
+bill which one of the party placed in her hand.
+She did not look at it; the feel of it told the story
+to her. We quizzed her about many things and
+got straight, clear-cut answers&mdash;a very firm, level-headed
+little maid. Her home was on the hill
+above us. We told her the names of some of the
+members of the party, and after she had returned
+home we saw an aged man come out to the gate
+and look down upon us. An added interest was
+felt whenever we came in contact with any of the
+local population. Birds and flowers and trees and
+springs and mills were something, but human
+flowers and rills of human life were better. I do
+not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen
+years old, to whom we gave a lift of a few miles on
+her way. She had been on a train five times, and
+once had been forty miles from home. Her mother
+was dead and her father lived in Pennsylvania, and
+she was living with her grandfather. When asked
+how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and ever
+so many miles."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds
+of miles, in fact, all the way from Pennsylvania to
+North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or
+Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed&mdash;stately, hardy
+growths, and very pleasing to look upon, the ironweed
+with its crimson purple, and the eupatorium
+with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.</p>
+
+<p>August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West
+Virginia, a large, clear mountain trout-brook.
+It crossed our path many times that day. Every
+mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on
+the other side of it. It was flowing by a very
+devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We
+were working south and east.</p>
+
+<p>We made our camp that night on the grounds
+of the Cheat Mountain Club, on the banks of the
+river&mdash;an ideal spot. The people at the big clubhouse
+gave us a hospitable welcome and added
+much to our comfort. I found the forests and
+streams of this part of West Virginia much like
+those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and
+the climate even colder. That night the mercury
+dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they had
+a frost that killed all their garden truck. The
+paper outlines of big trout which covered the
+walls in the main room of the clubhouse told the
+story of the rare sport the club-members have there.
+Evidently Cheat River deserves a better name.</p>
+
+<p>The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span>
+present a marked contrast to those of New York
+and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed down
+and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played
+such a part in shaping our northern landscapes.
+The valleys are markedly V-shaped, while ours are
+markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep
+that they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for
+the most part lies on the tops of the broad, rounded
+hills, though we passed through some broad, open
+river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful
+farms in which hay and oats were still being harvested.
+Everywhere were large fields of buckwheat,
+white with bloom, and, I presume, humming
+with bees.</p>
+
+<p>Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders
+strewn over the landscape, I saw evidences of large
+local glaciers that had hatched in these mountains
+during the great Ice Age.</p>
+
+<p>We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the
+23d&mdash;a famous spring, and a beautiful spot. We
+pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and
+some of the party availed themselves of the
+public bathhouse that spanned the overflow of
+the great spring. The next night our camp was
+at Wolf Creek, not far from the Narrows&mdash;a beautiful
+spot, marred only by its proximity to the dusty
+highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of
+a broad, limpid creek in which the fish were jumping.
+Some grazing horses disturbed my sleep early<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>
+in the morning, but on the whole I have only pleasant
+memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.</p>
+
+<p>We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia,
+crossing many times the border between the
+two States, now in one, then in the other, all the
+time among the mountains, with a succession of
+glorious views from mountain-tops and along broad,
+fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm Springs,
+then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at
+Sweet Water Springs. Soft water and hard water,
+cold water and warm water, mineral water and
+trout-streams, companion one another in these
+mountains. This part of the continent got much
+folded and ruptured and mixed up in the building,
+and the elements are unevenly distributed.</p>
+
+<p>I think to most of us West Virginia had always
+been a rather hazy proposition, and we were glad
+to get a clear impression of it. We certainly
+became pretty intimate with the backbone of the
+continent&mdash;or with its many backbones, as its
+skeleton seems to be a very multiplex affair. The
+backbones of continents usually get broken in many
+places, but they serve their purpose just as well.
+In fact, our old Earth is more like an articulate
+than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many sections.</p>
+
+<p>One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name
+of the owner of the farm. One of the boys there,
+Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in bringing
+wood and doing other errands.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span>A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I
+felt more than did the others, was the scanty or
+delayed war news; the local papers, picked up here
+and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in
+the larger towns we could get some of the great
+dailies, the news was a day or two old. When one
+has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four
+exciting years, one is lost when cut off from them.</p>
+
+<p>Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a
+kind of a lark, especially to the younger members
+of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain, near
+Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats
+on a side-hill below the road. Our procession
+stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and Firestone
+were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with
+doubtful success. A photograph shows the farmer
+and Mr. Ford looking on with broad smiles, watching
+Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle
+tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face
+also, but decidedly an equivocal smile&mdash;the trick
+was not so easy as it looked. Evidently Mr. Ford
+had not forgotten his cradling days on the home
+farm in Michigan.</p>
+
+<p>Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how
+many conveniences you have, and things of the
+mind keep pretty well in the background. Occasionally
+around the camp-fire we drew Edison out
+on chemical problems, and heard formula after
+formula come from his lips as if he were reading<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>
+them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps
+has few, if any, equals in this country. It
+was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on mechanical
+problems. There is always pleasure and profit in
+hearing a master discuss his own art.</p>
+
+<p>A plunge into the South for a Northern man is
+in many ways a plunge into the Past. As soon as
+you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and
+people in the South are more local and provincial
+than in the North. For the most part, in certain
+sections, at least, the county builds the roads
+(macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass
+from a fine stone road in one county on to a rough
+dirt road in the next. Toll-gates appear. In one
+case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for
+the cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills
+are seen along the way, driven by overshot wheels,
+and they are usually at work. A man or a boy on
+horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind
+him, going to or returning from the mill, is a frequent
+sight; or a woman on horseback, on a sidesaddle,
+with a baby in her arms, attracts your
+attention. Thus my grandmother went to mill in
+pioneer days in the Catskills.</p>
+
+<p>The absence of bridges over the small streams
+was to us a novel feature. One of the party called
+these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are
+made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble.
+Another Southern feature, indicating how far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>
+behind our Northern and more scientific farming
+the South still is, are the groups of small haystacks
+in the meadows with poles sticking out of their
+tops, letting the rain and the destructive bacteria
+into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features
+of the South much to be commended are
+the large families. In a farmhouse near which we
+made camp one night there were thirteen children,
+the eldest of whom was at the front in France.
+The schools were in session in late August, and the
+schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt there are many peculiar local customs
+of which the hurrying tourist gets no inkling. At
+a station in the mountains of North Carolina a
+youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe,
+stood within a few feet of my friend and me and
+gazed at us with the simple, blank curiosity of a
+child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent
+interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it
+was the frank stare of a five-year-old boy. He
+belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain
+districts of the South&mdash;good human stuff, valiant
+as soldiers, and industrious as farmers, but so
+unacquainted with the great outside world, their
+unsophistication is shocking to see.</p>
+
+<p>It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously
+equipped expedition going forth to seek discomfort,
+for discomfort in several forms&mdash;dust, rough roads,
+heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents&mdash;is pretty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span>
+sure to come to those who go a-gypsying in the
+South. But discomfort, after all, is what the
+camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow
+weary of our luxuries and conveniences. We react
+against our complex civilization, and long to get
+back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully
+endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies,
+and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality
+once more.</p>
+
+<p>Our two chief characters presented many contrasts:
+Mr. Ford is more adaptive, more indifferent
+to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest in
+the stream is in its potential water-power. He
+races up and down its banks to see its fall, and
+where power could be developed. He never ceases
+to lament so much power going to waste, and points
+out that if the streams were all harnessed, as they
+could easily be, farm labor everywhere, indoors and
+out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon
+the benefit that would accrue to every country
+neighborhood if the water-power that is going to
+waste in its valley streams were set to work in
+some useful industry, furnishing employment to
+the farmers and others in the winter seasons when
+the farms need comparatively little attention. He
+is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to
+the greatest number. He aims to place his inventions
+within reach of the great mass of the people.
+As with his touring-car, so with his tractor engine,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>
+he has had the same end in view. Nor does he
+forget the housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing
+power into every household that will greatly
+lighten the burden of the women-folk.</p>
+
+<p>Partly owing to his more advanced age, but
+mainly, no doubt, to his meditative and introspective
+cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active than
+is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday
+lunch, or to make camp at the end of the day,
+Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or curl
+up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while
+Mr. Ford would inspect the stream or busy himself
+in getting wood for the fire. Mr. Ford is a runner
+and a high kicker, and frequently challenged
+some of the party to race with him. He is also a persistent
+walker, and from every camp, both morning
+and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk half-hour
+walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all
+occasions, and his optimism in regard to all the
+great questions, are remarkable. His good-will and
+tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his
+practical turn of mind, and his mastery of the
+mechanical arts and of business methods, he is
+through and through an idealist. As tender as a
+woman, he is much more tolerant. He looks like
+a poet, and conducts his life like a philosopher. No
+poet ever expressed himself through his work more
+completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself
+through his car and his tractor engine. They typify<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>
+him; not imposing, nor complex, less expressive of
+power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability,
+and universal service, they typify the combination
+of powers and qualities which make him a beneficent,
+a likable, and a unique personality. Those
+who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is
+a national figure, and the crowds that flock around
+the car in which he is riding, as we pause in the
+towns through which we pass, are not paying their
+homage merely to a successful car-builder or business
+man, but to a beneficent human force, a great
+practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of universal
+helpfulness they have all felt. He has not
+only brought pleasure and profit into their lives,
+but has illustrated and written large upon the pages
+of current history a new ideal of the business man&mdash;that
+of a man whose devotion to the public good
+has been a ruling passion, and whose wealth has
+inevitably flowed from the depth of his humanitarianism.
+He has taken the people into partnership
+with him, and has eagerly shared with them
+the benefits that are the fruit of his great enterprise&mdash;a
+liberator, an emancipator, through channels
+that are so often used to enslave or
+destroy.</p>
+
+<p>In one respect, essentially the same thing may
+be said of Mr. Edison: his first and leading thought
+has been, "What can I do to make life easier and
+more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>
+chemist, a trenchant and original thinker on all the
+great questions of life, though he has delved but
+little into the world of art and literature&mdash;a practical
+scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound
+insight. And his humor is delicious. We
+delighted in his wise and witty sayings. A good
+camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go
+with hair disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long
+as the best of us, and can rough it week in and week
+out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so little
+that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts
+or turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the
+cornfields and apple-orchards, as some of us were,
+but he is second to none in his love for the open
+and for wild nature.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different
+type&mdash;the clean, clear-headed, conscientious business
+type; always on his job, always ready for whatever
+comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always
+at the service of those around him; a man generous,
+kindly, appreciative, devoted to his family
+and his friends; sound in his ideas&mdash;a manufacturer
+who has faithfully and honestly served
+his countrymen.</p>
+
+<p>It is after he gets home that a meditative man
+really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features
+are strained out or transformed. In retrospect
+it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am
+aware that I was often irritable and ungracious, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>
+my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed
+to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at
+this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at
+Slabsides, I look upon the whole trip with unmixed
+pleasure.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<div class="center">IX</div>
+
+<div class="center">UNDER GENIAL SKIES</div>
+
+<div class="center2">I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND</div>
+
+
+<p>The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the
+East and West, differ from each other almost as
+much as day differs from night. On the coast of
+southern California the dominant impression made
+upon one is of a world made up of three elements&mdash;sun,
+sea, and sky. The Pacific stretches away to
+the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating
+floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly
+than they do upon the Atlantic coast. It
+justifies its name. The passion and fury of the
+Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its
+rocks, all that I saw of them, are soft and friable.
+The languid waves rapidly wear them down. They
+are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous
+sea. The mountains that tower four or
+five thousand feet along the coast are of the same
+character. They are young, and while they carry
+their heads very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated
+compared with the granite of our coast.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule, young mountains always wear the look
+of age, from their deep lines and jagged and angular
+character, while the really old mountains wear the
+look of youth from their comparative smoothness,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>
+their unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing
+lines. Time has taken the conceit all out of them.</p>
+
+<p>The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about
+one third of what it is on the eastern side of the
+continent. And the soil is curiously adapted to the
+climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there
+under arid conditions that would kill every green
+thing on the Atlantic seaboard. The soil is clay
+tempered with a little sand, probably less than ten
+per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay
+out of a large lump of it and found the sand a
+curious heterogeneous mixture of small and large,
+light and dark grains of all possible forms. The
+soil does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps
+moist when ours would almost defy the plough.
+Under cultivation it works up into a good tillable
+condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable,
+as if it were made for a scant rainfall.
+As a crop-producing soil, it has virtues which I am
+at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown
+here have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness,
+of which we know nothing in the East. Much sunshine
+in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous
+and tough.</p>
+
+<p>I more than half believe that the wonderful
+sweetness of the bird songs here, such as that of
+the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of climate;
+the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected
+their vocal cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
+note of our meadowlark contrasts with that of the
+Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies contrast
+with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed
+land.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II. LAWN BIRDS</div>
+
+<p>To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house
+on the Pacific coast is to have spread out before
+you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty spectacle
+of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes,
+titlarks, and plovers flutter across it as thick as
+autumn leaves&mdash;not so highly colored, yet showing
+a pleasing variety of tints, while the black ph[oe]be
+flits about your porch and arbor vines.</p>
+
+<p>Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably
+ten to one of any other variety of birds. Then
+the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the
+tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of
+which I am not sure are next in number.</p>
+
+<p>Two species of birds from the Far North are
+usually represented by a solitary specimen of each,
+namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the American
+pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its
+usual trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker
+in the group. It walks about like our oven-bird
+with the same pretty movement of the head and a
+teetering motion of the hind part of the body.</p>
+
+<p>While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman
+Expedition, I found the nest of the pipit far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span>
+up on the side of a steep mountain. It was tucked
+in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of
+sea and mountain such as Alaska alone can afford.</p>
+
+<p>But the most conspicuous and interesting of all
+these lawn birds are the ring-necked plovers, or
+killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more of
+those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the
+shore and of the spirit of the tender, glancing April
+days, running over your lawn but a few yards from
+you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs,
+that curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down
+movement of their bodies, their shrill, disconsolate
+cries as they take flight, their beautiful and powerful
+wings and tail, and their mastery of the air&mdash;all
+arrest your attention or challenge your admiration.
+They bring the distant and the furtive to
+your very door. All climes and lands wait upon
+their wings. They fly around the world.</p>
+
+<p>The plovers are the favored among birds.
+Beauty, speed, and immunity from danger from
+birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial creatures!
+Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice?
+Is that the motion of the waves in its body? Is
+that the restlessness of the surf in its behavior?</p>
+
+<p>However high and far it may fly, it has to come
+back to earth as we all do. It comes to our lawn to
+feed upon earthworms. The other birds are all busy
+picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors
+in the grass, but the plover is here for game that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>
+harbors in the turf. His methods are like those of
+the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He
+scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about
+over it, making frequent drives into it with his bill,
+but only now and then seizing the prey of which he
+is in search. When he does so, he shows the same
+judgment which the robin does under like conditions.
+He pulls slowly and evenly, so as to make
+sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go its
+hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are
+wise about their food-supplies.</p>
+
+<p>On the beach the wild life that I see is all on
+wings. There are the tranquil, effortless gliding
+herring gulls, snow-white beneath and pearl-gray
+above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful
+to look upon&mdash;airplanes that put forth their powers
+so subtly and so silently as to elude both eye and
+ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white
+and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered
+rocks. Fresh water is at a premium on
+this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail themselves
+of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town,
+which discharge on the beach.</p>
+
+<p>There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged
+birds, the brown pelicans, usually in a line
+of five or six, skimming low over the waves, shaping
+their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set
+wings for a long distance, rising and falling to clear
+the water&mdash;coasting, at it were, on a horizontal sur<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span>face,
+and only at intervals beating the air for more
+power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds
+with wings and forms that suggest none of the
+grace and beauty of the usual shore birds. They
+do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to
+part the water, but they do both very successfully.
+When the pelican dives for his prey, he is for the
+moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
+down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts
+the water in superb style. When he recovers
+himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
+creature as before.</p>
+
+<p>A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian
+ancestors&mdash;a bird that is at home under the
+water and hunts its prey there on the wing&mdash;is the
+black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred
+of them on the face of a sea-cliff a short
+distance above me.</p>
+
+<p>I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black
+lines they make above the foaming breakers as
+they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
+In diving, they disappear under the water like
+the loon, and penetrate to as great depths. One
+does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
+them, but they are interesting as a part of the
+multitudinous life of the shore.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III. SILKEN CHAMBERS</div>
+
+<p>The trap-door spider has furnished me with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>
+one of the most interesting bits of natural history
+I have found on the coast. An obliging
+sojourner near me from one of the Eastern States
+had discovered a large plot of uncultivated ground
+above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows
+of these curious animals. One afternoon he
+volunteered to conduct me to the place.</p>
+
+<p>The ground was scantily covered with low bushy
+and weedy growths. My guide warned me that
+the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed,
+found it so. It not only required an "eye
+as practiced as a blind man's touch," it required
+an eye practiced in this particular kind of detective
+work. My new friend conducted me down
+into the plot of ground and, stopping on the edge
+of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet of me."
+I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I
+knew how, fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went
+over the soil inch by inch with my eyes, but to
+no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and
+brown earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door,
+or any other device. I stooped low, but without
+avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long
+needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular
+bit of the gray soil nearly the size of a silver quarter
+of a dollar, which hinged on the straight
+side of it, and behold&mdash;the entrance to the spider's
+castle! I was not prepared for anything so novel
+and artistic&mdash;a long silken chamber, about three<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>
+quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a
+silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter.
+The under side of the door, a dull white, the color
+of old ivory, is slightly convex, and its top
+is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings,
+and slightly concave. Its edges are beveled
+so that it fits into the flaring or beveled end
+of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner
+could have done it better. A faint semicircular
+raised line of clay as fine as a hair gave the only
+clue. The whole effect, when the door was held
+open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.</p>
+
+<p>Then we walked about the place, and, knowing
+exactly what to look for, I gave my eyes another
+chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My
+guide detected one after another, and when I
+failed, he would point them put to me. But presently
+I caught on, as they say, and began to find
+them unaided.</p>
+
+<p>We often found the lord of the manor on duty as
+doorkeeper, and in no mood to see strangers. He
+held his door down by inserting his fangs in two fine
+holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather,
+herself (as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree
+of resistance surprising in an insect. If one
+persists with a needle, there is often danger of
+breaking the door. But when one has made a crack
+wide enough to allow one to see the spider, she lets
+go her hold and rushes farther down in her burrow.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span>Occasionally we found one about half the usual
+size, indicating a young spider, but no other sizes.
+My guide said they only emerge from their tunnel
+at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical
+device made of straws attached to the door. When
+the door was opened, the straws lifted up, but did
+not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he
+found the straw still up in the morning he knew
+the door had been opened in the night.</p>
+
+<p>As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless
+prey upon other insects, such as sow-bugs and
+crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright
+specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes,
+but they are so small they probably only serve to
+enable them to tell night from day. I think these
+spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute
+tactile sense. They probably feel the slightest
+vibration in the earth or air, unless they have a
+sixth sense of which we know nothing.</p>
+
+<p>All their work, the building and repairing of
+their nests, as well as all their hunting, is done by
+night. This habit, in connection with their extreme
+shyness, makes the task of getting at their
+life-histories a difficult one. The inside of the
+burrow seems coated with a finer and harder substance
+than the soil in which they are dug. It is
+made on the spot, the spider mixing some secretion
+of her own with the clay, and working it up into
+a finer product.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the
+hinge, and is then discarded and a new door manufactured.
+We saw many nests with the old door
+lying near the entrance. The door is made of
+several layers of silk and clay, and is a substantial
+affair.</p>
+
+<p>The spider families all have the gift of genius.
+Of what ingenious devices and arts are they masters!
+How wide their range! They spin, they
+delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original
+spinners. They have probably been on their job
+since carboniferous times, many millions of years
+before man took up the art. And they can spin a
+thread so fine that science makes the astonishing
+statement that it would take four millions of them
+to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of
+our head&mdash;a degree of delicacy to which man can
+never hope to attain.</p>
+
+<p>Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems,
+secrets and betrayals, and this species of the
+arachnids is proficient in all these things.</p>
+
+<p>The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted
+to the purposes of this spider as if it had been made
+for her special use. But, as in all such cases, the
+soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it.
+It is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast&mdash;the
+soil for ca&ntilde;ons and the rectangular watercourses,
+and for the trap-door spider. It is a tough,
+fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>
+not crumble or disintegrate; the cohesion of particles
+is such that sun-dried brick are easily made
+from it.</p>
+
+<p>This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona,
+California, and Jamaica. It belongs to the family
+of <i>Mygalidae</i>. It resembles in appearance the tarantula
+of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many
+of the same habits; but its habitation is a much
+more ingenious and artistic piece of workmanship
+than that of its European relative. The tarantula
+has no door to her burrow, but instead she builds
+about the entrance a kind of breastwork an inch
+high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from
+this fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks
+a deeper shaft than does our spider, but excavates
+it in the same way with similar tools, her fangs,
+and lines it with silk from her own body.</p>
+
+<p>Our spider is an artist, evidently the master
+builder and architect of her kind. Considering her
+soft and pussy-like appearance&mdash;no visible drills for
+such rough work&mdash;one wonders how she excavates
+a burrow six inches or more deep in this hard
+adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and how she removes
+the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has
+been surprised at her work; her tools are her two
+fangs, the same weapons with which she seizes and
+dispatches her prey, and the rake or the <i>chelicer&aelig;</i>.
+To use these delicate instruments in such coarse
+work, says Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span>
+to dig a pit with a surgeon's scalpel." And she
+carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet
+at a time, and drops it here and there at some
+distance from her nest. Her dooryard is never
+littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a
+hole the size of half an English walnut, and to
+remove the earth.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests
+and left them turned over, a few inches away.
+The next morning I found that the occupants of
+the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each
+started the construction of a new door, and had
+it about half finished. It seemed as if the soil
+on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put
+out a semicircular bit of its surface toward the
+opposite side of the orifice, each new door copying
+exactly the color of the ground that surrounded it,
+one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a
+light brick-red. I read somewhere of an experimenter
+who found a nest on a mossy bit of ground
+protectively colored in this way. He removed the
+lid and made the soil bare about. The spider made
+a new lid and covered it with moss like the old
+one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it
+had in the first case. This is typical of the working
+of the insect mind. It seems to know everything,
+and yet to know nothing, as we use the term
+"know."</p>
+
+<p>On the second morning, one of the doors had at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span>tained
+its normal size, but not yet its normal thickness
+and strength. It was much more artfully concealed
+than the old one had been. The builder
+had so completely covered it with small dry twigs
+about the size of an ordinary pin, and had so woven
+these into it, standing a few of them on end, that
+my eye was baffled. I knew to an inch where to
+look for the door, and yet it seemed to have vanished.
+By feeling the ground over with a small
+stick I found a yielding place which proved to be
+the new unfinished door. Day after day the door
+grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked
+at it on the under side, adding new layers of silk.
+There is always a layer of the soil worked into the
+door to give it weight and strength.</p>
+
+<p>Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without
+food. The young, according to Fabre, go seven
+months without eating. They do not grow, but
+they are very active; they expend energy without
+any apparent means of keeping up the supply.
+How do they do it? They absorb it directly from
+the sun, Fabre thinks, which means that here is
+an animal between which and the organic world
+the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which
+can take at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of
+life. If this is true, and it seems to be so, it is
+most extraordinary.</p>
+
+<p>In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I
+have been considering, it is interesting to remember<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span>
+that one difference between the insect world and
+the world of animal life to which we belong, which
+Maeterlinck has forgotten to point out, is this:</p>
+
+<p>In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female
+plays a secondary part. In the insect world
+the reverse is true. Here the female is supreme and
+often eats up the male after she has been fertilized
+by him. Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood
+the secondary. It is the female mosquito
+that torments the world. It is the female spider
+that spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft,
+and power go with the female. The female spider
+eats up the male after he has served her purpose;
+her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours
+the male in the same way. Among our wild
+bees it is the queen alone that survives the winter
+and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on
+the window-pane are females. With the honey
+bees the males are big and loud, but are without
+any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed
+by the female as is the male spider. The queen bee
+does not eat her mate, but she disembowels him.
+The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In the
+vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey
+that the female is the larger and bolder; the care of
+the young devolves largely upon her. Yes, there is
+another exception: Among the fishes, the females
+are, as a rule, larger than the males; the immense
+number of eggs which they carry brings this about.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>There are always exceptions to this dominance
+of the female in the insect world. We cannot corner
+Nature and keep her cornered. She would not
+be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the
+male that dominates; the female is a little soft,
+wingless worm on the ground, always in the larval
+state.</p>
+
+<p>In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant.
+Behold the showy catkins of the chestnuts,
+the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the willows, and
+other trees. The stamens of most flowers are
+numerous and conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries
+its panicle of pollen high above the silken tresses
+which mother the future ear.</p>
+
+<p>One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by
+a spider with her brood of young ones. I took up
+a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or more,
+and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I
+kept it in the house under observation for a week,
+hoping that at some hour of day or night the spider
+would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious
+friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance
+over the door which he had used successfully
+before. But the latch was never lifted.
+Madam Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at
+the bottom of her den. At the end of a week I
+broke open the nest and found her alone. She had
+evidently devoured all her little ones.</p>
+
+<p>I kept two nests with a spider in each in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>
+house for a week, and in neither case did the occupant
+ever leave its nest.</p>
+
+<p>Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests
+of their own when they are about half-grown. As
+to where they stay, or how they live up to that
+time, I have no clue. The young we found in
+several nests were very small, not more than an
+eighth of an inch long. Of the size and appearance
+of the male spider, and where he keeps himself,
+I could get no clue.</p>
+
+<p>One morning I went with my guide down to
+the spider territory, and saw him try to entice or
+force a spider out of her den. The morning previous
+he had beguiled several of them to come up
+to the opening by thrusting a straw down the burrow
+and teasing them with it till in self-defense
+they seized it with their fangs and hung on to it
+till he drew them to the surface. But this morning
+the trick would not work. Not one spider would
+keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at
+the end in the shape of a hook, he finally lifted one
+out upon the ground. How bright and clean and
+untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of
+the thorax were as black as jet and shone as if they
+had just been polished. No lady in her parlor
+could have been freer from any touch of soil or
+earth-stain than was she. On the ground, in
+the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost. We
+turned her around and tried to induce her to enter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>
+the nest again; but over and over she ran across
+the open door without heeding it. In the novel
+situation in which she suddenly found herself, all
+her wits deserted her, and not till I took her between
+my thumb and finger and thrust her abdomen into
+the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of
+that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and
+she backed quickly into it and disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider
+has I do not know. I never saw a nest that had
+been broken into or in any way disturbed, except
+those which we had disturbed in our observations.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. THE DESERT NOTE</div>
+
+<p>I often wonder what mood of Nature this world
+of cacti which we run against in the great Southwest
+expresses. Certainly something savage and
+merciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor.
+How well she tempers her daggers and bayonets!
+How hard and smooth and sharp they are! How
+they contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and
+leaves which bear them! It is a desert mood; heat
+and drought appear to be the exciting causes. The
+scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to
+store up water in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates
+men to build great dams and reservoirs.
+These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But why
+spines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly
+cannot be for protection or defense; the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span>
+grass and other vegetation upon which the grazing
+animals feed are not armed with spines.</p>
+
+<p>If the cacti were created that grazing animals in
+the desert might have something to feed upon, as
+our fathers' way of looking at things might lead us
+to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated
+by the armor of needles and spines?</p>
+
+<p>Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures
+this broad, mittened hand like a cruel joke.
+It smites like a serpent and stings like a scorpion.
+The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert!
+Beware! Agonies are one of her garments.</p>
+
+<p>All we can say about it is that Nature has her
+prickly side which drought and heat aggravate. In
+the North our thistles and thorns and spines are
+a milder expression of this mood. The spines on
+the blackberry-bush tend against its propagation
+for the same reason. Among our wild gooseberries,
+there are smooth and prickly varieties, and one succeeds
+about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees
+in rough or barren places that have a severe
+struggle for life, often develop sharp, thorny
+branches. It is a struggle of some kind which
+begets something like ill-temper in vegetation&mdash;heat
+and drought in the desert, and browsing animals
+and poor soil in the temperate zones. The
+devil's club in Alaska is one mass of spines; why,
+I know not. It must just be original sin. Our
+raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span>
+large, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert
+expresses the belief that thorns and spines are
+given to the desert plants for protection; and
+that if no animal were there that would eat them,
+they would not have these defenses. But I believe
+if there had never been a browsing animal in the
+desert the cacti would have had their thorns just
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>Nature certainly arms her animal forms against
+one another. We know the quills of the porcupine
+are for defense, and that the skunk carries a weapon
+that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that
+any plant form is armed against any creature whose
+proper food it might become. Cacti carry formidable
+weapons in the shape of spines and thorns,
+but the desert conditions where they are found,
+heat and aridity, are no doubt their primary cause.
+The conditions are fierce and the living forms
+are fierce.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From
+our point of view she often seems partial and inconsistent.
+But I would just as soon think that
+Nature made the adobe soil in the arid regions
+that the human dwellers there might have material
+at hand with which to construct a shelter, as that
+she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable
+forms to secure their safety. One may confute
+Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth. He says:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of
+a family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive
+armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a
+thorn like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert
+to the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is
+plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas
+to thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the
+thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro
+and the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their
+cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a
+soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.</p></div>
+
+<p>But are they not just as much exposed to browsing
+animals in the high table-lands as in the desert,
+if not more so?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous
+about the species than about the individual.
+She is no more solicitous about the one than the
+other. The same conditions apply to all. But
+the species are numerous; a dozen units may be
+devoured while a thousand remain. A general will
+sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will
+sacrifice one man to save ten, but Nature's ways
+are entirely different. Both contending armies are
+hers, and she is equally solicitous about both. She
+wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the
+desert animals to survive, and she favors both
+equally. All she asks of them is that they breed
+and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according
+to Van Dyke, Nature has taken such pains to
+protect her desert plants, he yet confesses that,
+although it seems almost incredible, it is neverthe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span>less
+true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the
+cholla&mdash;fruit, stem, and trunk&mdash;though it bristle
+with spines that will draw blood from the human
+hand at the slightest touch."</p>
+
+<p>This question of spines and thorns in vegetation
+is a baffling one because Nature's ways are so
+unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in his
+theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded
+upon the idea that Nature selects as man
+selects. You cannot put Nature into a formula.</p>
+
+<p>Behold how every branch and twig of our red
+thorn bristles with cruel daggers! But if they are
+designed to keep away bird or beast from eating
+its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own
+ends! If no creature ate its little red apples and
+thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would rot on the
+ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red
+thorns would not increase. And increase alone is
+Nature's end.</p>
+
+<p>It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the
+animal kingdom is full of design. Every part and
+organ of our bodies has its purpose which serves
+the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any
+character of bird or beast, fish or insect, that does
+not show purpose, but in the plant world Nature
+seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not
+work on so economical a plan. What purpose do
+the spines on the prickly ash serve? or on the
+thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, goose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>berry
+bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering
+raspberry has no prickles, and thrives as well as
+any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry
+do not save them from browsing cattle, nor their
+fruit from the birds. In fact, as I have said, the
+service of the birds is needed to sow their seeds.
+The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so
+encased in a spiny armor; but what purpose the
+armor serves is a mystery. We know that hard
+conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns
+on seedling pear-trees and plum-trees, but we
+cannot know why.</p>
+
+<p>The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant,
+or American aloe (<i>Agave americana</i>), are
+thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and
+fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them.
+They are no more edible than cordwood or hemp
+ropes. This fact alone settles the defense question
+about spines.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. SEA-DOGS</div>
+
+<p>There is a bit of live natural history out here in
+the sea in front of me that is new and interesting.
+A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have their
+rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the
+breakers, and keep together there week after week.
+To the naked eye they seem like a group of children
+sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed
+by the waves that sweep over them. Their<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>
+heads and shoulders seem to show above the
+water, and they appear to be having a happy
+time.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then one may be seen swimming about
+or lifted up in a wall of green-blue transparent
+water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in
+the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them
+children of the sea, until I hear their loud barking,
+and then I think of them as dogs or hounds of the
+sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night
+when it has a half-muffled, smothered sound.</p>
+
+<p>They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals,
+and there seems something incongruous in their
+being at home there in the cold briny deep&mdash;badgers
+or marmots that burrow in the waves,
+wolves or coyotes that hunt their prey in the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Their progenitors were once land animals, but
+Darwinism does not tell us what they were. The
+whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony
+of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents.
+The origin of any new species is shrouded
+in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and
+the short span of human life, or of the whole
+human history, gives us no adequate vantage-ground
+from which to solve the problem.</p>
+
+<p>I can easily believe that these hair seals are close
+akin to the dog. They have five digits; they bolt
+their food like dogs; their sense of smell is said to
+be very acute, though how it could serve them in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>
+the sea does not appear. The young are born
+upon the land and enter the water very reluctantly.</p>
+
+<p>This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence
+of the dog and attaches itself to its master as does
+the dog. Its sense of direction and locality is very
+acute. This group of seals in front of me, day
+after day, and week after week, returns to the
+same spot in the ever-changing waters, without
+the variation of a single yard, so far as I can see.
+The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst,
+and it seems as if some sixth sense must guide
+them to it. Locality is as unreal in the sea as in
+the sky, but these few square yards of shifting
+waters seem as real to these seals as if they were
+a granite ledge. They keep massed there on the
+water at that particular point, with their flippers
+protruding above the surface, as if they were as
+free from danger as so many picnickers. Yet
+something attracts them to this particular place.
+I know of no other spot along the coast for a
+hundred miles or more where the seals congregate
+as they do here. What is the secret of it? Evidently
+it is a question of security from their
+enemies. At this point the waves break much
+farther out than usual, which indicates a hidden
+reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow
+water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks
+and killer whales, from stealing up beneath them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>
+and pulling them down. I do not hear their
+barking in the early part of the night, but long
+before morning their half-muffled baying begins.
+Old fishermen tell me that they retire for the night
+to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards
+or more out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp
+also afford them some protection from their enemies.
+The fishermen feel very bitter toward them
+on account of the fish they devour, and kill them
+whenever opportunity offers. Often when I lie
+half asleep in the small hours of the morning, I
+seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their
+quarry on the unstable hills and mountains of the
+sea, and giving tongue at short intervals, as did
+the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my
+youth.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span><br /></p>
+
+<div class="center">X</div>
+
+<div class="center">A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES</div>
+
+<div class="center2">I. NATURE'S WIRELESS</div>
+
+
+<p>The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes
+so much of, seems to give us the key to the psychic
+life of all the lower orders. What one knows, all
+of that kind seem to know at the same instant.
+It seems as if they drew it in with the air they
+breathed. It is something like community of mind,
+or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
+process, but an emotional process; not a thought,
+as with us, but an impulse.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we know there is nothing like a council
+or advisory board in the hive. There are no decrees
+or orders. The swarm is a unit. The members
+act in concert without direction or rule. If
+anything happens to the queen, if she is lost or
+killed, every bee in the hive seems to know it at the
+same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly
+agitated. The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous:
+the bees function and co&ouml;perate as do the
+organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
+without scheme or direction.</p>
+
+<p>This community of mind is seen in such an instance
+as that of the migrating lemmings from the
+Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these little
+creatures are at times seized with an impulse<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span>
+to migrate or to commit suicide, for it amounts to
+that. They leave their habitat in Norway and,
+without being deflected by any obstacle, march
+straight toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers
+that lie in their way. When the coast is reached,
+they enter the water and continue on their course.
+Ship captains report sailing for hours through
+waters literally alive with them. This suicidal
+act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of insanity.
+It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know
+of in animal life. But the migration of all animals
+on a large scale shows the same unity of purpose.
+The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The
+annual migration of the caribou in the North is an
+illustration. In the flocking birds this unity of
+mind is especially noticeable. The vast armies of
+passenger pigeons which we of an older generation
+saw in our youth moved like human armies under
+orders. They formed a unit. They came in countless
+hordes like an army of invasion, and they
+departed in the same way. Their orders were
+written upon the air; their leaders were as intangible
+as the shadows of their wings. The same is
+true of all our flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings,
+or of starlings, or of blackbirds, will act as
+one body, performing their evolutions in the air
+with astonishing precision.</p>
+
+<p>In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct
+is strong, I have seen a flock of white ibises waltz<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span>ing
+about the sky, going through various intricate
+movements, with the precision of dancers in a
+ballroom quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance
+whatever. Let a body of men try it under
+the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and
+the tumbling over one another! At one moment
+the birds would wheel so as to bring their backs
+in shadow, and then would flash out the white of
+their breasts and under parts. It was like the opening
+and shutting of a giant hand, or the alternate
+rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a
+tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock.
+When a hawk pursues a bird, the birds tack and
+turn as if linked together. When one robin dashes
+off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their
+movements exactly coincide! The hawk-hunted
+bird often escapes by reaching the cover of
+a tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer,
+as a rabbit or a squirrel will dodge a dog.
+Schools of fish act with the same machine-like
+unity.</p>
+
+<p>In the South, I have seen a large area of water,
+acres in extent, uniformly agitated by a school of
+mullets apparently feeding upon some infusoria on
+the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given
+signal, the fish would dive and the rippling cease.
+It showed a unity of action as of ten thousand
+spindles controlled by electricity.</p>
+
+<p>How quickly the emotion of fear is communi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span>cated
+among the wild animals! How wild and
+alarmed the deer become after the opening of the
+first day of the shooting season. Those who have
+not seen or heard a hunter seem to feel the impending
+danger.</p>
+
+<p>The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the
+monarch) illustrate the same law. In the fall they
+are all seized with this impulse to go South and
+thousands of them march in one body. At night
+they roost in the trees. I have seen photographs
+of them in which they appeared like a new kind of
+colored foliage covering the trees. In the return
+flight in the spring, the same massing again occurs.
+Recently the Imperial Valley in California was invaded
+by a vast army of worms moving from east
+to west. In countries that have been cursed with
+a plague of grasshoppers witnesses of the spectacle
+describe them as moving in the same way. They
+stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles,
+their crushed bodies making the rails
+and highways as slippery as grease would have
+made them. Ten million or ten billion behaving
+as one.</p>
+
+<p>This community of mind stands the lower orders
+in great stead. It makes up to them in a measure
+for the want of reason and judgment. In what
+we call telepathy we get hints of the same thing
+among ourselves. Telepathy is probably a survival
+from our earlier animal state.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center2">II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE</div>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the
+conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more
+intelligent than honey bees:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir
+John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle
+down horizontally with its base to the window, you will
+find that the bees will persist till they die of exhaustion
+or hunger in their endeavors to discover an issue through
+the glass; while the flies, in less than two minutes, will
+all have sallied forth through the neck on the opposite
+side.</p></div>
+
+<p>The flies are more intelligent than the bees
+because their problems of life are much more complicated;
+they are fraught with many more dangers;
+their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have
+very few natural enemies. There are no bee-catchers
+in the sense that there are scores of flycatchers.
+I know of no bird that preys upon the
+worker bees. The kingbird is sometimes called the
+"bee martin" because he occasionally snaps up
+the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon
+the flies; the swallows sweep them up in the air, the
+swifts scoop them in, while, besides the so-called
+flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the
+vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more
+or less upon them. Try to catch a big blow-fly
+upon the window-pane and see how difficult the
+trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>Or try to "swat" the ordinary house-fly with your
+hand. See how he squares himself and plants himself
+as your threatening hand approaches! He is
+ready for a trial of speed. He seems to know that
+your hand is slower than he is, and he is right in
+most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is
+reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows
+no fear; and to crush it is as easy as to crush a
+beetle.</p>
+
+<p>The wit and cunning of all animals are developed
+by their struggle for existence. The harder the
+struggle, the more their intelligence. Our skunk
+and porcupine are very stupid because they do not
+have to take thought about their own safety;
+Nature has done that for them.</p>
+
+<p>To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that
+"the capacity for folly so great in itself argues
+intelligence," which amounts to saying that the
+more fool you are, the more you know.</p>
+
+<p>Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion
+of the intelligence of the bee; he thought the dog,
+the monkey, and the majority of other animals
+possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed,
+of free intelligence the bee possesses very little.
+The slave of an overmastering instinct, as our
+new nature poet, McCarthy, says,</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She makes of labor an eternal lust.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>
+They work as well (or better) in the darkness as
+in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows and
+directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the
+individual bee.</p>
+
+<p>The bee does not know fear; she does not know
+love. She will defend the swarm with her life,
+but her fellows she heeds not.</p>
+
+<p>It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the
+same hive recognize one another at all outside the
+hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees from
+the same tree will clip and strike at one another
+around his box, when they are first attracted to it.
+After they are seriously engaged in carrying away
+his honey, they pay no attention to one another or
+to bees from other swarms. That bees tell one
+another of the store of honey they have found is
+absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he
+once experimented upon during an afternoon, the
+results showing that this bee had told the news of
+her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood
+it in good stead!</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive
+was an inspiration, and furnishes us with the key
+to all that happens in the hive. The secret of all
+its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon
+this solution, he should have had the courage to
+stand by it. But he did not. He is continually
+forgetting it and applying to his problem the explanations
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>
+we apply in our dealings with one
+another. He talks of the power of the bees to give
+"expression to their thoughts and feelings"; of
+their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says
+that the "extraordinary also has a name and place
+in their language"; that they are able to "communicate
+to each other news of an event occurring outside
+the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of
+the Hive superfluous. He quotes from a French
+apiarist who says that the explorer of the dawn,&mdash;the
+early bee,&mdash;like the early bird that catches the
+worm, returns to the hive with the news that "the
+lime-trees are blooming to-day on the banks of the
+canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay with white
+clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open";
+"the mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with
+pollen." Whereupon the bees must organize quickly
+and arrange to divide the work. They probably
+call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion
+and formalities proceed to send out their
+working expeditions. "Five thousand of the sturdiest
+will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three
+thousand juniors go and refresh the white clover."
+"They make daily calculations as to the means of
+obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine
+liquid."</p>
+
+<p>When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius
+of the hive issuing its commands," or recognizes
+the existence among the bees of spiritual communications
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span>
+that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he
+is true to his own conception.</p>
+
+<p>The division of labor among hive bees is of course
+spontaneous, like all their other economies&mdash;not a
+matter of thought, but of instinct.</p>
+
+<p>Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee
+make the mistake of humanizing the bee, thus
+making them communicate with one another as we
+communicate. Bees have a language, they say;
+they tell one another this and that; if one finds
+honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters, and
+so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is
+nothing analogous to verbal communication among
+the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the Spirit
+of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and
+co&ouml;perate with one another as the cells of the body
+communicate and co&ouml;perate in building up the
+various organs. The spirit of the body co&ouml;rdinates
+all the different organs and tissues, making a unit
+of the body.</p>
+
+<p>If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a
+snail, penetrates into the hive, and dies there, the
+bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it lies, so
+that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign
+object in the body, such as a bullet in the lungs,
+or in the muscles, becomes encysted in an analogous
+manner, and is thus rendered harmless.</p>
+
+<p>Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of
+its crushed body will infuriate the other bees. But
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>
+crush a bee in the fields or by the bee-hunter's box
+which is swarming with bees, and the units from
+the same hive heed it not.</p>
+
+<p>Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment
+for one another as animals have. If one of
+their number is wounded or disabled, they ruthlessly
+expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong
+to another world of beings that is absolutely
+oblivious of the world of which we form a part.
+They murder or expel the drones, after they have
+done their work of fertilizing the queen, in the most
+cruel and summary manner. Their apparent attachment
+to the queen, and their loyalty to her,
+are not personal. They do not love her. It is
+the Spirit of the Hive, or the cult of the swarm
+solicitous about itself. There are no brothers, sisters,
+fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are
+only co-workers, working not for the present, but
+for the future. When we enter the kingdom of the
+bee, we must leave all our human standards behind.
+These little people have no red blood, no organs
+of sense, as we have; they breathe and hear through
+their legs, their antenn&aelig;.</p>
+
+<p>The drones do not know the queen as such in
+the hive. Their instincts lead them to search for
+her in the air during her nuptial flight, and they
+know her only there. The drones have thirteen
+thousand eyes, while the workers have only six
+thousand. This double measure of the power of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span>
+vision is evidently to make sure that the males
+discover the queen in her course through the air.</p>
+
+<p>The guards that take their stand at the gate,
+the bees that become fans at the entrance to ventilate
+the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring the
+bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the
+bees that go forth to find a home for the new swarm,
+the sweepers and cleaners of the hive, the workers
+that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and crevices&mdash;all
+act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of
+the Hive.</p>
+
+<p>After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as
+the facts will bear us out in doing, it remains to
+be said that he is the philosopher of the insect
+world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has
+said, Maeterlinck is the Plato of that realm. How
+wisely he speaks of the insect world in his latest
+volume, "Mountain Paths":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb
+life and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain
+earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise
+and amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it.
+There is something, on the other hand, about the insect
+that does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology
+of our globe. One would be inclined to say that
+the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous,
+more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more
+infernal than our own. One would think that it was
+born of some comet that had lost its course and died
+demented in space.</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me
+of a well-known woodsman and camp-fire man who
+recently extolled in print the intelligence of hornets,
+saying that they have the ability to differentiate
+friends from foes. "They know us and we talk to
+them and they are made to feel as welcome as any
+of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp,
+they attract the attention of one they know <i>who
+recognizes their signal by thought or gesture and leaves
+immediately, returning only when the stranger has
+departed</i>." (The italics are mine.) He says the
+same hornets apparently come to them year after
+year, greeting them on their arrival, and, should
+they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
+with the same deference as "when they visit us
+after we have been in camp some time."</p>
+
+<p>Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and
+well-mannered bees? What would Maeterlinck
+say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent
+when we remember that hornets live but a single
+season, that none of them lives over the winter,
+save the queen, and that she never leaves the nest
+in summer after she has got her family of workers
+around her.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III. ODD OR EVEN</div>
+
+<p>One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have
+you observed that in the inorganic world things go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span>
+by even numbers, and in the organic world by
+odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of
+a bushy and swampy meadow below our camp and
+brought him a four-petaled flower of galium, and
+a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In
+another locality I might have brought him dwarf
+cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel, or the
+evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly
+more suggestive of mechanics than of life, while
+odd numbers seem to go more with the freedom
+and irregularity of growing things.</p>
+
+<p>One may make pretty positive assertions about
+non-living things. Crystals, so far as I know, are
+all even-sided, some are six and some eight-sided;
+snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but
+the number six rules them. In the world of living
+things we cannot be so sure of ourselves. Life
+introduces something indeterminate and incommensurable.
+It makes use of both odd and even,
+though undoubtedly odd numbers generally prevail.
+Leaves that are in lobes usually have three or five
+lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square,
+and the cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We
+have five fingers and five toes, though only four
+limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers
+serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged
+insects. In the inorganic world things attain a
+stable equilibrium, but in the living world the
+equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereo<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>typed,
+hence the danger of dogmatizing about living
+things. Growing Nature will not be driven into
+a corner.</p>
+
+<p>Well may Emerson ask&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Why Nature loves the number five,</span>
+<span class="i0">And why the star form she repeats?</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>The number five rules in all the largest floral
+families, as in the crowfoot family, the rose family
+(which embraces all our fruit trees), the geranium
+family, the flax family, the campanula family, the
+convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then
+there is a large number of flowers the parts of
+which go in threes, one of the best known of which
+is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the
+only form I recall based on the number five.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. WHY AND HOW</div>
+
+<p>One may always expect in living nature variations
+and modifications. It is useless to ask why.
+Nature is silent when interrogated in this way.
+Ask her how, and you get some results. If we
+ask, for instance, why the sting of the honey bee
+is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and
+bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth
+like a needle, so that they can sting and sting again,
+and live to sting another day, while the honey bee
+stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one
+species of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
+a powerful electric battery; or why the porcupine
+has an armor of quills while his brother rodent the
+woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on&mdash;we
+make no addition to our knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and
+defenseless an animal as the rabbit manages to survive
+and multiply, we extend our knowledge of
+natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of
+its wakefulness&mdash;by never closing its eyes&mdash;and by
+its speed; also by making its home where it can
+command all approaches, and so flee in any direction.
+Or if we ask how our ruffed grouse survives
+and prospers in a climate where its cousin the
+quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of
+certain trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder
+and is often cut off by a deep fall of snow.</p>
+
+<p>If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get
+no answer; but if we ask how he does it, we find
+out that he stores up food in his den, hence must
+take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck
+hibernates, also, but he stores up fuel in the shape
+of fat in his own body. The porcupine is above
+ground and active all winter. He survives by
+gnawing the bark of certain trees, probably the
+hemlock. We have two species of native mice that
+look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the
+jumping, or kangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is
+active the season through, over and under the snow;
+the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparently<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>
+accomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely
+keeping the spark of life burning. His fires are
+banked, so to speak; his temperature is very low,
+and he breathes only at long intervals.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, we ask with Emerson, "<i>why</i> Nature loves
+the number five," and "<i>why</i> the star form she repeats,"
+we shall be put to it for an answer. We can
+only say that with living things odd numbers are
+more likely to prevail, and with non-living, even
+numbers.</p>
+
+<p>Some seeds have wings and some have not. To
+ask why, is a blind question, but if we ask <i>how</i> the
+wingless seeds get sown, we may add to our knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>In our own practical lives, in which experimentation
+plays such a part, we are often compelled
+to ask why this result and not that, why this
+thing behaves this way and that thing that way.
+We are looking for reasons or causes. The farmer
+asks why his planting in this field was a failure,
+while it was a success in the next field, and so on.
+An analysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture
+will give him the answer.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM</div>
+
+<p>That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and
+a good and wise man admits of no question, but
+to us, at this distance, it seems strange enough that
+he should have thought that he had hit upon the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>
+key to the origin of species in the slow and insensible
+changes which he fancied species underwent during
+the course of the geologic ages, and should thus
+have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had
+he called his work the "Variability of Species," or
+the "Modification of Species," it would not have
+been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us
+new varieties, but not new species. In fact, of the
+origin of species we know absolutely nothing, no
+more than we do about the origin of life itself.</p>
+
+<p>Of the development of species we know some of
+the factors that play a part, as the influence of
+environment, the struggle for existence, and the
+competitions of life. But do we not have to assume
+an inherent tendency to development, an original
+impulse as the key to evolution? Accidental conditions
+and circumstances modify, but do not originate
+species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding
+or hastening a species, and in its extinction, but
+not in its origin. The record of the rocks reveals
+to us the relation of species, and their succession
+in geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.</p>
+
+<p>Agassiz believed that every species of animal and
+plant was the result of a direct and separate act of
+the Creator. But the naturalist sees the creative
+energy immanent in matter. Does not one have
+to believe in something like this to account for the
+world as we see it? And to account for us also?&mdash;a
+universal mind or intelligence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,</span>
+<span class="i0">And the round ocean and the living air,</span>
+<span class="i0">And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to
+the Infinite Mystery in terms of our own wills and
+acts. When we think of a Creator and the thing
+created as two, we are in trouble at once. They
+are one, as fire and light are one, as soul and body
+are one. Darwin said he could not look upon the
+world as the result of chance, and yet his theory
+of the origin of species ushers us into a chance
+world. But when he said, speaking of the infinite
+variety of living forms about us, that they "have
+all been produced by laws acting around us," he
+spoke as a great philosopher. These laws are
+not fortuitous, or the result of the blind grouping
+of irrational forces.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI. A LIVE WORLD</div>
+
+<p>It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler
+calls him, who looked upon the earth as animated
+in the fashion of an animal. "To him this world
+is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted
+alive." But his critics looked upon this
+fancy of Kepler's as proof of a disordered mind.</p>
+
+<p>Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son
+of the great naturalist) on the tides that the earth
+in many ways behaves more like a living organism<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span>
+than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface
+throbs and palpitates and quivers and yields to
+pressure as only living organisms do. The tides can
+hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
+Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of
+how closely it is held in the clasp of the heavenly
+forces. It is like an apple on the vast sidereal tree,
+that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon
+is no doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to
+fancy its surface yielding to our tread as does that
+of the earth. Then we know that the absence of
+air and water on it is proof that it cannot be
+endowed with what we call life. George Darwin
+tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp
+and bend the surface very much as we might bend
+or dent the epidermis of a colossal pachyderm.
+He and his brother devised an instrument by which
+the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move
+over it, could be measured. The instrument was
+so delicate that it revealed the difference of effect
+produced by the same pressure at seven feet and
+at six feet from the instrument! More than that,
+the instrument revealed the throbbing and agitations
+which the ground is undergoing at all times.
+They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms,
+as the Italians call them, are occurring constantly.</p>
+
+<p>Another instrument has been invented called the
+microphone, which translates this earth's move<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span>ments
+into sound&mdash;its tremors and agitations become
+audible. This microphone, when placed in a
+cave twenty feet below the surface, and carefully
+protected by means of a carpet from any accidental
+disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed
+what is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as
+roarings, explosions, occurring isolated or in volleys,
+and metallic or bell-like sounds." "The noises
+sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on
+one occasion in the middle of the night, half an
+hour before a sensible earthquake.</p>
+
+<p>Our apparently impassive and slumbering old
+planet evidently has dreams we know little of.</p>
+
+<p>From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in
+America" I get an impression which again deepens
+my feeling of something half human about
+our lucky planet, at least something progressive
+and unequal, like life itself. Shaler finds that
+organic development in the Northern Hemisphere
+is more advanced, by a whole geologic period, than
+in the Southern, with Europe at the head and
+Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life
+of Australia is much like that of Europe in
+the Jurassic period, while both Asia and Africa
+possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and
+lions, which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times.
+Hence the Northern Hemisphere is more like the
+head of the beast, and the Southern more like the
+viscera. The Northern races easily dominate<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span>
+the Southern. The flowering of civilization is in
+the North. It is very certain that man originated
+north of the equator. I think that one need not
+expect that the achievements of man in Australia,
+or in South America, will rival the achievements
+of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR</div>
+
+<p>That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes
+of the World War seems to me quite obvious.
+Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has
+more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His
+biological doctrine of the struggle for existence,
+natural selection, and the survival of the fittest,
+fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first.
+These theories fell in well with their militarism
+and their natural cruelty and greediness. Their
+philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann
+fairly made a god of natural selection, as did other
+German thinkers. And when they were ready for
+war, the Germans at once applied the law of the
+jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution,
+the triumph of the strong, the supremacy of
+the fit, became the foundation of their political
+and national ideals. They looked for no higher
+proof of the divinity of this law, as applied to
+races and nations, than the fact that the organic
+world had reached its present stage of development
+through the operation of this law. Darwin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span>
+had given currency to these ideas. He had
+denied that there was any inherent tendency to
+development, affirming that we lived in a world of
+chance, and that power comes only to him who exerts
+power&mdash;half truths, all of them.</p>
+
+<p>The Germans as a people have never been born
+again into the light of our higher civilization.
+They are morally blind and politically treacherous.
+Their biological condition is that of the lower
+orders, and the Darwinian law of progress came
+to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its
+absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German
+mind. In his plodding patience, his devotion to details,
+and in many other ways, his mind was German.
+But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility,
+his simplicity, he was anything but German.
+Undoubtedly his teachings bore fruit of a political
+and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.
+The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle
+in their ethical code. Had not they the same
+right to expansion and to the usurpation of the
+territory and to the treasures of their neighbors
+that every weed in the fields and even the vermin
+of the soil and the air have? If they had the
+sanction of natural law, that was enough; they
+were quite oblivious to the fact that with man's
+moral nature had come in a new biological law
+which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with,
+but which has tremendous authority and survival<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span>
+value&mdash;the law of right, justice, mercy, honor, love.</p>
+
+<p>We do not look for the Golden Rule among
+swine and cattle, or among wolves and sharks;
+we look for it among men; we look for honor, for
+heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of
+these things are involved in the Darwinian hypothesis.
+There is no such thing as right or
+wrong in the orders below man. These are purely
+human distinctions. It is not wrong for the wolf
+to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass, but
+an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the
+farthest star. Germany's assault upon the peace
+and prosperity of the world was a crime against
+the very heavens.</p>
+
+<p>Darwin occupied himself only with the natural
+evolution of organic forms, and not with the
+evolution of human communities. He treated
+man as an animal, and fitted him into the zo&ouml;logical
+scheme. He removed him from the realm
+of the miraculous into the plane of the natural.
+For all purposes of biological discussion, man is
+an animal, but that is not saying he is only an
+animal, and still under the law of animal evolution.
+The European man is supposed to have
+passed the stage of savagery, in which the only
+rule of right is the rule of might. To have made
+Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is
+to have debased a sound natural philosophy to a
+selfish and ignoble end.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>Germany lifted the law to the human realm and
+staked her all upon it, and failed. The moral
+sense of the world&mdash;the sense of justice, of fair
+play&mdash;was against her, and inevitably she went
+down. Her leaders were morally blind. When
+the rest of the world talked of moral standards,
+the German leaders said, "We think you are fools."
+But these standards brought England into the
+war&mdash;the sacredness of treaties. They brought the
+United States in. We saw a common enemy in
+Germany, an enemy of mankind. We sent millions
+of men to France for an ideal&mdash;for justice
+and fair play. To see our standards of right and
+justice ignored and trampled upon in this way
+was intolerable. The thought of the world being
+swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said
+to myself from the first, "The Allies have got to
+win; there is no alternative." And what astonishes
+me is that certain prominent Englishmen,
+such as Lord Morley, and others, did not see
+it. Would they have sat still and watched Germany
+destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel
+and make ready to destroy England? The very
+framework of our moral civilization would have
+been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his
+natural selection theory was to lead.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII. THE ROBIN</div>
+
+<p>Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span>
+measure, or best stands the Darwinian test of the
+fittest to survive. His versatility, adaptiveness,
+and fecundity are remarkable. While not an
+omnivorous feeder, he yet has a very wide range
+among fruits and insects. From cherries to currants
+and strawberries he ranges freely, while he
+is the only thrush that makes angle-worms one
+of his dietetic staples and looks upon a fat grub
+as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the
+most diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in
+the fork of a trunk or on a horizontal branch,
+then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your
+porch, then on some coign of vantage about
+your house or barn, or under the shed, or under a
+bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground above
+a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and
+build there on a projecting stone. He even nests
+beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said he never
+sings sweeter than when singing during those
+long Arctic days.</p>
+
+<p>He brings off his first brood in May, and the
+second in June, and if a dry season does not
+seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in
+September. He is a hustler in every sense of the
+word&mdash;a typical American in his enterprise and
+versatility. His voice is the first I hear in the
+morning, and the last at night. Little wonder
+that there are twenty robins to one bluebird, or
+wood thrush, or catbird. The song sparrow is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>
+probably our next most successful bird, but she
+is far behind the robin. We could never have
+a plague of song sparrows or bluebirds, but since
+the robins are now protected in the South as well
+as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a
+plague of robins. Since they may no longer have
+robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is near at
+hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies
+in New York or New England. Yet who does not
+cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a plebeian
+bird, but he adds a touch to life in the
+country that one would not like to miss.</p>
+
+<p>The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper;
+he is doomed always to be a runner. Go slow he
+cannot; his engine is always "in high"&mdash;it starts
+"in high" and stops "in high."</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IX. THE WEASEL</div>
+
+<p>In wild life the race is not always to the swift,
+nor the battle to the strong. For instance, the
+weasel catches the rabbit and the red squirrel,
+both of which are much more fleet of foot than
+is he. The red squirrel can fairly fly through the
+tops of the trees, where the weasel would be entirely
+out of its element, and the rabbit can easily
+leave him behind, and yet the weasel captures
+and sucks the blood of both. Recently, when the
+ground was covered with our first snow, some men
+at work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span>
+slope below them. Their dog rushed down and
+found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it released
+on the approach of the dog and took to the cover
+of a near-by stone wall. The whole story was
+written there on the snow. The bloodsucker had
+pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for
+many yards and then had pulled it down.</p>
+
+<p>Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods
+when they came upon a weasel chasing a red squirrel
+around the trunk of a big oak; round and round
+they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The
+men stood and looked on. It soon became apparent
+that the weasel was going to get the squirrel, so
+they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker.
+Why the squirrel did not take to the tree-tops,
+where the weasel probably would not have
+followed him, and thus make his escape&mdash;who
+knows? One of my neighbors, however, says he
+has seen where a weasel went up a tree and took a
+gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the
+snow, then dragged it to cover and left it dead.
+The weasel seems to inspire such terror in its victim
+that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an
+easy prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes,
+that gliding snakelike form, that fearless, fatelike
+pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell upon
+the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel
+once pursued a hen to my very feet and seized it
+and would not let it go until I put my foot upon it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span>
+and gripped it by the back of the neck with my
+hand. Its methods are a kind of <i>Schrecklichkeit</i> in
+the animal world. It is the incarnation of the
+devil among our lesser animals.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE</div>
+
+<p>We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start
+with the assumption that her methods are at all
+like our methods. We pick out our favorites
+among plants and animals, those that best suit our
+purposes. If we want wool from the sheep, we
+select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If
+we want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want
+cows for quantity of milk, irrespective of quality,
+we select with that end in view; if we want butter-fat,
+we breed for that end, and so on. With our
+fruits and grains and vegetables we follow the same
+course. We go straight to our object with as little
+waste and delay as possible.</p>
+
+<p>Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of
+those qualities in her fruits and grains which best
+enable them to survive. In like manner she subordinates
+her wool and fur and milk to the same
+general purpose. Her one end is to increase and
+multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will be no
+great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there
+will be no prize fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay
+eggs for market.</p>
+
+<p>Those powers and qualities are dominant in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span>
+wild creatures that are necessary for the survival
+of the species&mdash;strength, speed, sharpness of eye
+and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival
+value.</p>
+
+<p>Our hawks could not survive without wing-power
+or great speed, but the crow survives without this
+power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and can
+thrive where the hawk would starve, and also
+because no bird of prey wants him, and, more than
+that, because he is dependent upon nothing that
+requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious
+for reasons that are not obvious. The fox
+in this country requires both speed and cunning,
+but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent
+and unafraid that he walked up to it and killed
+it with his geologist's hammer. Has it no enemies
+in that country?</p>
+
+<p>Nature's course is always a roundabout one.
+Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Man
+wants specific results at once. Nature works
+slowly to general results. Her army is drilled only
+in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using.
+The strength of her species is the strength of the
+obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin
+when we assume that Nature selects as man selects.
+Nature selects solely upon the principle of power of
+survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility.
+He wants some particular good&mdash;a race-horse, a
+draft-horse&mdash;better quality or greater quantity of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span>
+this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with her
+progeny. Only power to win in the competition of
+life counts with her. As I have so often said, she
+plays one hand against the other. The stakes are
+hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one
+to her. She pits one species of plant or animal
+against another&mdash;heads I win, tails you lose. Some
+plants spread both by seed and runners, this
+doubles their chances; they are kept in check
+because certain localities are unfavorable to them.
+I know a section of the country where a species
+of mint has completely usurped the pastures. It
+makes good bee pasturage, but poor cattle pasturage.
+Quack grass will run out other grass
+because it travels under ground in the root as well
+as above ground in the seed.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE</div>
+
+<p>We may say that all the forms in the non-living
+world come by chance, or by the action of the undirected
+irrational physical forces, mechanical or
+mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of
+forces shaping the earth's surface, but the same
+forces are doing two kinds of work, piling up and
+pulling down&mdash;aggregating and accumulating, and
+separating and disintegrating.</p>
+
+<p>It is to me an interesting fact that the striking
+and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as
+a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span>
+pulling-down or degradation process. A natural
+bridge, an obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the
+rocks, the architectural and monumental rock
+forms, such as those in the Grand Ca&ntilde;on and in
+the Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion.
+Water and other aerial forces are the builders
+and sculptors, and the nature and structure of
+the material determine the form. It is as if these
+striking forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting
+for the erosive forces to liberate them. The stratified
+rocks out of which they are carved were not
+laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon
+layer, like the leaves of a book; neither has the
+crumpling and deformation of the earth's crust
+piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic
+and suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible
+workmen have carved out of them in the Grand
+Ca&ntilde;on! It looks as though titanic architects and
+sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only
+little grains of sand and a vast multitude of little
+drops of water, active through geologic ages, were
+the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle.
+If the river could have builded something equally
+grand and beautiful with the material it took out
+of this chasm! But it could not&mdash;poetry at one
+end of the series and dull prose at the other. The
+deposition took the form of broad, featureless,
+uninteresting plains&mdash;material for a new series of
+stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span>
+Ca&ntilde;ons may be carved. Thus the gods of erosion
+are the artists, while the builders of the mountains
+are only ordinary workmen.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">XI</div>
+
+<div class="center">RUMINATIONS</div>
+
+<div class="center">I. MAN A PART OF NATURE</div>
+
+
+<p>This bit of nature which I call myself, and which
+I habitually think of as entirely apart from the
+nature by which I am surrounded, going its own
+way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of
+the nature external to it, is yet as strictly a part of
+the total energy we call nature as is each wave in
+the ocean, no matter how high it raises its crest, a
+part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but
+a little way in separating us from the totality of
+things. Outside of the very limited sphere of what
+we call our spontaneous activities, we too are things
+and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know
+not of.</p>
+
+<p>It is only in action, or in the act of living, that
+we view ourselves as distinct from nature. When
+we think, we see that we are a part of the world in
+which we live, as much so as the trees and the other
+animals are a part. Intellect unites what life separates.
+Our whole civilization is the separating of
+one thing from another and classifying and organizing
+them. We work ourselves away from rude
+Nature while we are absolutely dependent upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>
+her for health and strength. We cease to be savages
+while we strive to retain the savage health and
+virility. We improve Nature while we make war
+upon her. We improve her for our own purposes.
+All the forces we use&mdash;wind, water, gravity, electricity&mdash;are
+still those of rude Nature. Is it not
+by gravity that the water rises to the top stories of
+our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane
+soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns
+hurl a ton of iron twenty miles they pit the greater
+weight against the lesser. The lighter projectile
+goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete
+hurls the hammer because he greatly outweighs it.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH</div>
+
+<p>Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing
+else than a dissolution of the elements of which
+every human being is composed." May we say it is
+like a redistribution of the type after the page is
+printed? The type is unchanged, only the order of
+arrangement is broken up. In the death of the
+body the component elements&mdash;water, lime, iron,
+phosphorus, magnesia, and so on&mdash;remain the
+same, but their organization is changed. Is that
+all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the
+printed page, the idea embodied, is the main matter.
+Can this idea be said to exist independent of the
+type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and
+then not permanently. Then it is only an arrange<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span>ment
+of molecules of matter in the brain, which is
+certainly only temporary. On the printed page it
+is a certain combination of white and black that
+moves the cells of the brain through the eye to
+create the idea. So the conception in our minds
+of our neighbor or friend&mdash;his character, his personality&mdash;exists
+after he is dead, but when our own
+brain ceases to function, where is it then?</p>
+
+<p>We rather resent being summed up in this way
+in terms of physics, or even of psychology. Can
+you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its
+ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology
+describe all men in the same terms; our component
+parts are all the same; but character, personality,
+mentality&mdash;do not these escape your analysis? and
+are they not also real?</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE</div>
+
+<p>Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the
+minister and interpreter of Nature. But man has
+been very slow to see that he is a part of that same
+Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter.
+His interpretation is not complete until he has
+learned to interpret himself also. This he has done
+all unconsciously through his art, his literature, his
+religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one
+phase of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture
+another, his civic orders another, his creeds and
+beliefs and superstitions another, so that at this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span>
+day and age of the world he has been pretty well
+interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far
+off as ever, because the condition of man is not
+static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew into
+the world and experiences new wonder, new joy,
+new loves, new enthusiasms. Nature is infinite,
+and the soul of man is infinite, and the action and
+reaction between the two which gives us our culture
+and our civilization can never cease. When
+man thinks he is interpreting Nature, he is really
+interpreting himself&mdash;reading his own heart and
+mind through the forms and movements that surround
+him. In his art and his literature he bodies
+forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives the
+measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations
+toward the perfect good; in his science he
+illustrates his capacity for logical order and for
+weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the
+night prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck
+or the ground mole, there is no biology to the dog
+or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and
+the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the
+mind of man; they are the order and the logic which
+he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to
+himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony,
+her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions
+he experiences in her presence. The midnight
+skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
+emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span>
+landscape reveals to him his susceptibility to
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the
+statue as existing in the block of marble before the
+sculptor touches it. How easy to fall into such
+false analogies! Can we say that the music existed
+in the flute or in the violin before the musician
+touches them? The statue in the form of an idea
+or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
+and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the
+book exist in the pot of printer's ink? Living
+things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn, the
+chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter
+there is no resurrection or evolution. Life alone
+puts a particular stamp upon it. We may say that
+the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of
+the laws of crystallization, but the house does not
+exist in a thousand of brick in the same sense. It
+exists in the mind of the builder.</p>
+
+<p>The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he
+interprets his own soul through the medium of the
+marble&mdash;the picture is not in the painter's color
+tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in
+the bud; it is in the artist's imagination. The
+apple and the peach and the wheat and the corn
+exist in the soil potentially; life working through
+the laws of physics and chemistry draws their
+materials out and builds up the perfect fruit. To
+decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>
+apply to human things, and not to universal nature.
+We do not interpret the stars when we form the
+constellations. The grouping of the stars in the
+heavens is accidental&mdash;the chair, the dipper, the
+harp, the huntsman, are our fabrications. Does
+Shelley interpret the skylark, or Wordsworth the
+cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
+mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets
+his own heart. Each poet's mind is the die or seal
+that gives the impression to this wax.</p>
+
+<p>All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own
+creation. Out of an unfailing sequence of events
+we frame laws&mdash;the law of gravity, of chemical
+affinity, of magnetism, of electricity&mdash;and refer to
+them as if they had an objective reality, when they
+are only concepts in our own minds. Nature has
+no statute books and no legislators, though we
+habitually think of her processes under these symbols.
+Human laws can be annulled, but Nature's
+laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though
+theology revokes or suspends them in its own
+behalf. It was Joshua's mind that stopped while
+he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers;
+fire and flood, famine and pestilence, are deaf to our
+appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines of Emerson
+was that all true prayers are self-answered&mdash;the
+spirit which the act of prayer begets in the suppliant
+is the answer. A heartfelt prayer for faith<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span>
+or courage or humility is already answered in the
+attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know
+that the official prayers in the churches for victory
+to the armies in the field are of no avail&mdash;and how
+absurd to expect them to be&mdash;but who shall say that
+the prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may
+not steady his hand and clinch his courage? But
+the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for the
+stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is
+as vain as to reach one's hands for the moon.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES</div>
+
+<p>The writers who go directly to life and Nature for
+their material are, in every age, few compared with
+the great number that go to the libraries and
+lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation
+to the primary sources of inspiration. They
+cannot go directly to the fountain-head, but depend
+upon those who can and do. They are like
+those forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that
+have no chlorophyll, and hence cannot get their
+food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid
+in the air; they must draw it from the remains of
+plants that did get it at first-hand from Nature.
+Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the vegetable
+world; it makes the solar power available for life.
+It is in direct and original relation to the sun. It
+also makes animal life possible. The plant can go
+to inorganic nature and through its chlorophyll can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span>
+draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the
+plant, or to the animal that went to the plant, for
+our sustenance.</p>
+
+<p>The secondary men go to books and creeds and
+institutions for their religion, but the original men,
+having the divine chlorophyll, go to Nature herself.
+The stars in their courses teach them. The earth
+inspires them.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. THE COSMIC HARMONY</div>
+
+<p>The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not
+like that which man produces or aims to produce
+in his work&mdash;the order and harmony that will give
+him the best and the quickest results; but it is an
+astronomic order and harmony which flows inevitably
+from the circular movements and circular
+forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and
+evolution are the two feet upon which creation goes.
+All natural forms strive for the spherical. The
+waves on the beach curve and roll and make the
+pebbles round. From the drops of rain and dew to
+the mighty celestial orbs one law prevails. Nature
+works to no special ends; she works to all ends; and
+her harmony results from her universality. The
+comets are apparently celestial outlaws, but they
+all have their periodic movements, and make their
+rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space,
+which undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies
+and failures of order, as they undoubtedly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span>
+are. What else can we call them? When a new
+star suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one
+blazes up, and from a star of the tenth magnitude
+becomes one of the first, and then slowly grows
+dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe,
+an astronomic accident on a cosmic scale. Had
+such things occurred frequently enough, would not
+the whole solar system have been finally wrecked,
+or could it even have begun? For the disharmonies
+in Nature we must look to the world of the
+living things, but even here the defeats and failures
+are the exception&mdash;else there would be no living
+world. Organic evolution reaches its goal despite
+the delays and suffering and its devious course.
+The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last,
+though its course double and redouble upon itself
+scores of times, and it travels ten miles to advance
+one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable
+life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a
+thunderbolt that shatters a living tree, are all disharmonies
+of Nature. In fact, one may say that
+disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and
+all forms of what we call evil are disharmonies, because
+their tendency is to defeat the orderly development
+of life.</p>
+
+<p>The disharmonies in Nature in both the living
+and the non-living worlds tend to correct themselves.
+When Nature cannot make both ends meet,
+she diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span>
+for her creatures, she lessens the number of mouths
+to be fed. A surplus of food, on the other hand,
+tends to multiply the mouths.</p>
+
+<p>Man often introduces an element of disorder into
+Nature. His work in deforesting the land brings
+on floods and the opposite conditions of drought.
+He destroys the natural checks and compensations.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS</div>
+
+<p>The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean
+are not merely the result of a local agitation of the
+waters. The pulse of the earth is in them. The
+pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They
+are more cosmic than terrestrial. The earth wears
+her seas like a loose garment which the sun and
+moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to
+side. Only the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the
+heavenly influences. The great inland bodies of
+water are unresponsive to them&mdash;they are too small
+for the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not
+equally true that only great souls are moved by the
+great fundamental questions of life? What a
+puzzle the tides must have been to early man!
+What proof they afford of the cosmic forces that
+play upon us at all times and hold us in their net!
+Without the proof they afford, we should not know
+how we are tied to the solar system. The lazy,
+reluctant waters&mdash;how they follow the sun and
+moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span>
+the world"! The land feels the pull also and
+would follow if it could. But the mobile clouds
+go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign.
+The pull of the sun and the moon is upon you and
+me also, but we are all unconscious of it. We are
+bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE</div>
+
+<p>It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn,
+in his "Origin and Evolution of Life," makes no
+account of the micro-organisms or unicellular lives
+that are older than the continents, older than the
+Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged
+even to our times. I saw in the Grand Ca&ntilde;on of
+the Colorado where they were laid down horizontally
+on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the
+hand of a mason building the foundation of a
+superstructure. All the vast series of limestone
+rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute
+living bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up
+of the skeletons of diatoms. Some of our polishing
+powders are made from these rocks. Formed of
+pure silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons
+of organisms of many exquisite forms, <i>Foraminifer&aelig;</i>.
+The Pyramids are said to be built of rocks
+formed by these organisms. "No single group of
+the animal kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter,
+"has contributed, or is at present contributing, so
+largely as has the <i>Foraminifer&aelig;</i> to the formation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span>
+of the earth's crust." In the face of these facts,
+how unsatisfactory seem Professor Osborn's statements
+that life probably originated on the continents,
+either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils,
+in the fresh waters of continental pools, or in the
+slightly saline waters of the "bordering primordial
+seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the
+mark. There is no variation during geologic time
+of these primordial living organisms. All conceivable
+changes of environment have passed over
+them, but they change not. Bacteria struggle
+together, one form devouring another form. Unicellular
+life long precedes multicellular. Biologists
+usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed;
+with the latter begins development or evolution,
+and the peopling of the world with myriads of
+animal forms.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE</div>
+
+<p>Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes
+the shortest way to her ends." She is like ourselves,
+she is ourselves written large&mdash;written in
+animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of
+that of which she has the most. She is lavish of
+her leaves, but less so of her flowers, still less of
+her fruit, and less yet of her germinal parts. The
+production of seed is a costly process to the plant.
+Many trees yield fruit only every other year.</p>
+
+<p>I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span>
+she has the most. Behold the clouds of pollen from
+the blooming pines and from the grasses in the
+meadow. She is less parsimonious with her
+winged seeds, such as of the maple and the elm, than
+with her heavy nuts&mdash;butternuts, hickory-nuts,
+acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend
+upon the agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter
+them. She offers them the wage of the sweet
+kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than
+they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds
+of her berries she offers the delectable pulp: "Do
+this chore for me, and you will find the service its
+own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and
+woods hold seeds that must be distributed by animal
+agency. Even the fiery arum or Indian
+turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red
+berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds.
+The mice and the squirrels doubtless give them a
+wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds
+have the sting taken out of them. You cannot
+poison a hen with strychnine.</p>
+
+<p>We ourselves are covetous of those things of
+which we have but few, extravagant with those of
+which we have an abundance. When the Western
+farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he
+sees his own account in it. We husband our white
+pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are stingy
+with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech
+and chestnut.</p>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center">XII</div>
+
+<div class="center">NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD</div>
+
+
+<p>As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover
+new acts in Nature's drama. They are,
+however, the old acts, played again and again,
+which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed
+have I been in the rise and fall of the curtain,
+and in the entrances and exits of the more
+familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during
+each season, I detect a few new acts on the vast
+stage; and as long as I live I expect to cogitate and
+speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest
+in the whole performance.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">I. SUNRISE</div>
+
+<p>The most impressive moment of the day here in
+the Catskills is the rising of the sun. From my
+cot on the porch I see the first flash of his coming.
+Before that I see his rays glint here and there
+through the forest trees which give a mane to the
+mountain crest. The dawn comes very gently.
+I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually
+become conscious of a faint luminousness in the
+eastern sky. This slowly increases and changes to
+a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten minutes
+that fades into a light bluish tinge&mdash;the gold turns<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span>
+to silver. After some minutes the sky, just at the
+point where the sun is to appear, begins to glow
+again, as if the silver were getting warm; a minute
+or two more and the brow of the great god is above
+the horizon line. His mere brow, as I try to fix
+my eye upon it, fairly smites me blind. The brow
+is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One
+realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old
+earth turns on its axis. You witness the miracle
+of the transition of the dawn into day. The day
+is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the
+word "boil" to describe this moment?&mdash;"Day boils
+at last." Gilder, I think, speaks of it as a scimitar
+flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate,
+I watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it
+for the first time. It is the critical moment of the
+day. You actually see the earth turning. Later
+in the day one does not note in the same way the
+sun climbing the heavens. The setting sun does
+not impress one, because it is usually enveloped in
+vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his
+rest veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning
+and old at his going down. His gilding of the clouds
+at sunset is a token of a fair day on the morrow;
+his touching them with fire in the morning is a
+token of wind or storm. So much we make of
+these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
+are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction
+of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span>
+is as great as if this were the case, and yet the
+fraction of his light and heat that actually falls
+upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space
+is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed
+by numbers. In our religion we appropriate
+God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows
+us not in this private and particular way, though
+we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">II. NATURE'S METHODS</div>
+
+<p>Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own.
+Man improves upon his inventions, he makes them
+better and better and discards the old. The first
+airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the
+airplane flies hundreds of miles and carries tons of
+weight. Nature has progressed steadily from lower
+to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
+her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the
+perfected models. There is no vacancy at the
+bottom of her series, as there is in the case of man.
+I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting
+them with those of man in any respect. She
+has no method in our sense of the term. She is
+action, and not thought, growth and not construction,
+is internal and not external. To try to
+explain her in terms of our own methods is like
+trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles
+and right lines.</p>
+
+<p>The origin of species is as dark a problem as is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>
+the origin of the secondary rocks. What factors
+or forces entered into the production of the vast
+variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from
+the original Adam rock, the granite, as the races
+of men differ from one another? There is just as
+much room for natural selection to work in one
+case as in the other. We find where two kinds of
+rock touch, one overlying the other, and absolute
+difference in texture and color, and no union between
+them. How account for their juxtaposition?
+Rock begat rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces
+played the chief part, but the origin of each kind
+is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
+of the animal species.</p>
+
+<p>The position of the camel with reference to the
+giraffe in Africa is analogous to that, say, of the
+Catskill conglomerate to the laminated sandstone
+that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates
+into the other. Whence the long neck and
+high withers of the giraffe? The need of high feeding,
+say the selectionists, but other browsing animals
+must have felt the same need. Our moose is
+strictly a browsing animal, and, while his neck and
+shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
+approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a
+long neck also, but it is a low feeder, mainly from
+the ground.</p>
+
+<p>We can only account for man and other higher
+forms of life surviving in the highway of the physi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span>cal
+forces on the ground that the wheels and tramping
+hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit
+them. They learned instinctively to avoid these
+destructive forces. Animal life was developed
+amid these dangers. The physical forces go their
+way as indifferent to life as is your automobile to
+the worms and beetles in the road. Pain and suffering
+are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
+that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter
+how many fall or are crushed by the way; to It
+men are as cheap as fleas; and they have slaughtered
+one another in Europe of late without help or
+hindrance from the Eternal, as do the tribes of
+hostile ants. The wars of the microbes and the
+wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme
+of things. The survivors owe their power of survival
+to the forces that sought their destruction;
+they are strong by what they have overcome; they
+graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can
+say that evil is for us as much as it is against us.
+Pain and suffering are guardian angels; they teach
+us what to shun.</p>
+
+<p>How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is!
+How impossible, for instance, to reduce her use of
+horns to a single rule. In the deer and elk tribe
+the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics.
+They are dropped as the season wanes;
+but the antelopes do not drop their horns, and in
+Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>
+our common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations;
+yet the old ram does not shed his horns.
+Nature will not be consistent.</p>
+
+<p>Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with
+four horns, two on the nose and two on the crown,
+and they were real, permanent, bony growths.</p>
+
+<p>What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given
+to the shovel-footed mole, while the chipmunk,
+who also burrows in the ground, has no special tool
+to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is
+compelled to use his soft, tender little nose as a
+pusher. When the soil which his feet have loosened
+has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he
+shoves it back with his nose.</p>
+
+<p>Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial.
+The Canada thistle sows its seeds upon the wind
+like the common native thistle; then in addition
+it sends a big root underground parallel with its
+surface, and just beyond the reach of the plough,
+which sends up shoots every six or seven inches, so
+that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on
+its conquests like a powerful besieging army,
+both below ground and above.</p>
+
+<p>A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a
+rather peremptory manner, demanding an answer
+by return mail as to why robins are evenly distributed
+over the country instead of collected in
+large numbers in one locality; and if they breed
+in the South; and he insists that my answer be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>
+explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is
+natural law." I wonder that he did not put a
+special-delivery stamp on his letter. He is
+probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.</p>
+
+<p>There seems to be an inherent tendency in
+nearly all living things to scatter, to seek new fields.
+They are obeying the first command&mdash;to increase
+and multiply. Then it is also a question of food,
+which is limited in every locality. Robins do not
+breed in flocks, but in pairs. Every gas is a
+vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is
+a vacuum to the different species of birds that
+breed there. The seed-eaters, the fruit-eaters, the
+insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
+robin&mdash;in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers,
+the warblers&mdash;may and do all live together
+in harmony in the same narrow area.</p>
+
+<p>The struggle of which we have heard so much
+since Darwin's time is mainly a natural sifting and
+distributing process, such as that going on all about
+us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried
+by the winds do not thrive unless they chance to
+fall on suitable ground. All may be "fit" to survive
+and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What
+so frail as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders
+thrive! Nature gives the weak many advantages.</p>
+
+<p>There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species
+with another&mdash;the fleet with the slow, the cunning<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span>
+with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and sharp-eared
+with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with
+the blunt of scent&mdash;which we call natural competition;
+but the slow, the stupid, the dull-eyed,
+dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and
+thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because
+they do not need to be otherwise; the conditions
+of their lives do not require speed and
+sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills,
+the skunk its pungent secretion. All parts of
+nature dovetail together. The deer and the
+antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because
+their enemies have speed and sharp senses. The
+small birds are keen-eyed and watchful because
+the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates
+the gray squirrel, which is above him in size and
+strength, and the chipmunk below him, but he
+does not exterminate either. The chipmunk
+burrows in the ground where the red cannot follow
+him, and he lays up a store of nuts and seeds which
+the red does not. The weasel easily dominates
+the rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and
+traps and weasels.</p>
+
+<p>The sifting of species is done largely by environment,
+the wet, the cold, the heat&mdash;the
+fittest, or those best adapted to their environment,
+survive. For some obscure reason they have a
+fuller measure of life than those who fall by the
+way.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="center2">III. HEADS AND TAILS</div>
+
+<p>I have heard a story of a young artist who, after
+painting a picture of a horse facing a storm, was
+not satisfied with it, and, feeling that something
+was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly
+the great artist said to him, "Turn the
+horse around."</p>
+
+<p>The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse
+turns his tail. Why this difference? Because
+each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and its
+anatomy. How much better suited is the broad,
+square head of the cow, with its heavy coating of
+hair and its ridge of bone that supports its horns,
+to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous
+and sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast
+between their noses and their mode of grazing!
+The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the
+grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse
+bites it off and loves to bite the turf with it. The
+lip of the horse is mobile and sensitive. Then the
+bovine animals fight with their heads, and the
+equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and
+high kicker, the cow a feeble one in comparison.
+The horse will kick with both hind feet, the cow
+with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick"
+in her kind. The tail of the cow is of less protection
+to her than is that of the horse to him. Her great
+need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the
+rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span>
+her bony stern, with its ridges and depressions and
+thin flanks, is less fit in any encounter with storm
+or with beast than is her head. On the other hand,
+the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with
+their huge masses of muscles, his smooth flanks,
+and his tail&mdash;an apron of long, straight, strong hair&mdash;are
+well designed to resist storm and cold. What
+animal is it in Job whose neck is clothed with
+thunder? With the horse, it is the hips that are so
+clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT</div>
+
+<p>If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
+I suppose the breath of the obscene fungus by any
+other name would smell as rank. The defensive
+weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would
+probably not be less offensive if we called him by
+that name alone, instead of the common one by
+which he is universally known.</p>
+
+<p>While in southern California last winter I heard
+of one that took up his abode in the basement of a
+house that stood on the side of a hill in the edge of
+the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where
+all sorts of odds and ends had accumulated. On
+some shelves was a box of miscellaneous articles,
+such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old toothbrushes,
+bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire,
+chips of wood, and the dried foot and leg of a hen.
+One morning, on opening the door of the basement,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span>
+the mistress of the house was surprised to see the
+whole collection of trash laid out in a line across
+the floor. The articles were placed with some degree
+of regularity covering a space about fifteen
+inches wide and ten feet in length. There were
+sixty-one articles in the row.</p>
+
+<p>Having such an unsavory creature in the basement
+of one's house is rather ticklish business;
+not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet fraught
+with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away
+the exhibit and left the door open, hoping their
+uninvited guest would take his departure. But he
+did not. A few nights later he began another collection,
+finding a lot of new material&mdash;among other
+things a box with old atomizer bulbs, four of which
+bulbs he arranged here and there, in the row&mdash;a
+motley array.</p>
+
+<p>What is his object? I confess I do not know.
+No one has seen him do it, as he works at night,
+but there is little doubt that it is his work.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">3</a> The
+Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger
+than a gray squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a>
+<a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">3</span></a> Later investigations point to this having been the work of a wood
+rat instead of a skunk.&mdash;C. B.</p></div>
+
+<p>I wish some one would tell me why this night
+prowler so often seems to spray the midnight air
+with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He
+never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span>
+Eastern species is as free from odor as a squirrel or
+a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by day or night
+in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground
+that lasts for months. While at a friend's house in
+the Catskills last August a wood pussy came up
+behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap.
+We saw him from the window in the early evening,
+and we smelled him. For some reason he betrayed
+his presence. Late that night I was awakened by a
+wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose
+smart, yet in the morning no odor could be detected
+anywhere about the place. Of course the smell is
+much more pronounced in the damp night air
+than by day, yet this does not seem an adequate
+explanation. Does he signal at night to his fellows
+by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I
+have never heard him make a vocal sound. When
+caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs in a stone
+wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping
+his feet. He is the one American who does not
+hurry through life. I have no proof that he ever
+moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he
+ever experiences the feeling of fear, so common to
+nearly all our smaller animals. His track upon the
+snow is that of a creature at peace with all the
+world.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE</div>
+
+<p>Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span>
+some animals than of others. The frog and the
+toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn
+thousands, but most birds lay only five or six
+eggs.</p>
+
+<p>A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a
+miser with the other. She lets loose an army of
+worms upon the forests, and then sends an ichneumon-fly
+to check them. She wastes no perfume
+or color upon the flowers which depend upon the
+wind to scatter their pollen. Cross-fertilization is
+dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways
+to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will
+rob the bones of the fowl of their lime to perfect the
+shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or cunning on
+the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has
+already endowed each of them with a perfect
+means of defense.</p>
+
+<p>Two things Nature is not chary of&mdash;fear and
+pain. She heaps the measure here because fear
+puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them
+from many real dangers. What dangers have
+lurked for man and for most wild things in the
+dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a
+fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic.
+Pain, too, safeguards us; it shields us against real
+dangers. The pains of childbirth are probably no
+check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of
+procreation, especially on the part of the male,
+overcomes all other considerations.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS</div>
+
+<p>Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and
+ticks for the South&mdash;this seems to be Nature's decree,
+at least in this country. The mosquitoes of the
+Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously,
+while our Jersey mosquitoes hesitate and
+parley and make exasperating feints and passes.
+On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a
+swarm of these insects rose out of the grass as if
+they had been waiting for me all the years (as they
+had) and were so hungry that they could not stand
+upon the order of their proceeding, but came headlong.</p>
+
+<p>In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to
+death by the fleas. They were the most sorry,
+forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life was
+evidently a burden to them. I remember that
+Lewis and Clark, in their journey across the continent,
+were greatly pestered by fleas. I have
+found that our woodchucks, when they "hole up"
+in the fall, are full of fleas.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA</div>
+
+<p>I have just been reading, for the third time,
+Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast," my sojourn
+near San Diego for a few months, where so many of
+the scenes and events he describes took place, having
+given me a renewed interest in the book.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is very evident that the climate of southern
+California has greatly changed since Dana was here
+in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in 1832 and
+1833. The change has been from wet to dry.
+At that time his ship collected, and others engaged
+in the same trade collected, hundreds of thousands
+of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from
+cattle grown by the missions between San Diego
+and Santa Barbara. This fact implies good pasturage.
+The cattle grazed on the hills and plains that
+are now, during a large part of the year, as dry as
+a bone. At present cattle left to their own devices
+on this coast would soon starve to death.</p>
+
+<p>Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain,
+mainly from the southeast, which the ship, anchored
+a few miles off the coast, or cruising up and
+down, experienced at all times of year&mdash;one or more
+storms each week, often lasting for days. One
+December he describes it as raining every hour for
+the whole month. The dread of the southeasters
+was ever present with the sailors. One of these,
+lasting three days, which came out of a cloudless
+sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays a southeast
+storm of half a day is, according to my experience,
+an uncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely
+a drop of rain falls here from April till November,
+yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August.
+At present, in some of the interior valleys, where
+they grow alfalfa by means of irrigation, I see<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span>
+herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the season
+of rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle
+do well, but during the long dry season there is no
+pasturage save dry pasturage.</p>
+
+<p>Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season
+here, I have been here during three seasons and
+have so far seen only light rains. To-day (December
+16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as
+you care to dig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in
+grain, and a great cloud of dust streamed out behind
+him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavy
+rainfall in this locality that inundated large sections
+of the country and destroyed much property, the
+dry San Diego River getting out of bounds and
+carrying away bridges and floating houses on its
+banks. But it has been as dry as a highway ever
+since. It is clear that when the big rains do come
+they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly.</p>
+
+
+<div class="center2">VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE</div>
+
+<p>Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on
+my home acres in the Catskills, I noticed that the
+wild strawberry-vines sent out their runners over
+the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the
+turf, just as over the ground. Of course they
+could not take root, but they went through all the
+motions of taking root; the little clusters of leaves
+developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their
+points or stood at "attention," and the runners<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>
+pushed out two or three feet over the barren surface
+and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the
+desert whose strength begins to fail. The first
+knot, or, one might say, the first encampment, was
+about one foot from the last one upon the turf, the
+next one about eight inches farther in; then the
+distance dropped to six inches, then to four. I
+think the runner finally gave it up and stopped
+reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently
+draws its main sustenance from the one next behind
+it, and when this one fails to reach the soil it
+loses heart and can give little succor to the next in
+front. The result is that the stools become smaller
+and smaller, and the distances between them less
+and less, down the whole line.</p>
+
+<p>Nature's methods are seen in the little as well
+as in the big, and these little purple runners of the
+vine pushing out in all directions show the all-round-the-circle
+efforts of Nature as clearly as do
+the revolving orbs in sidereal space. Her living
+impulses go out in all directions. She scatters her
+seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots.
+She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as
+upon the land. She knows not our parsimony nor
+our prudence. We say she is blind, but without
+eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live to
+particular ends, and are limited to particular
+spheres, have need of eyes. Nature has all time
+and all space and all ends. Delays and failure she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span>
+knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do
+not reach their goal, the trouble corrects itself; they
+finally stop searching for it in that direction, and
+the impulse of the plant goes out stronger and fuller
+on other sides.</p>
+
+<p>If the rains were especially designed to replenish
+our springs and supply our growing crops, the
+clouds might reasonably be expected to limit their
+benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the
+rains are older than are we and our crops, and it is
+we who must adjust ourselves to them, not they
+to us.</p>
+
+<p>The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized
+vision. Does the blood need eyes to find its
+way to the heart and lungs? Does the wind need
+eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop
+its winged seeds? It drops them upon all spots, and
+each kind in due time finds its proper habitat, the
+highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants,
+hitting their marks as surely as do others.</p>
+
+<p>Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps
+are numbered and must go in a particular direction,
+but the goal of all-seeing Nature is everywhere,
+and she arrives before she starts. She has no
+plan and no method, and she is not governed.</p>
+
+<p>These conceptions express too little, not too
+much. Nature's movements are circular; her
+definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The
+rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span>
+more an end than is the rising vapor. Each is a
+part of the great circuit of beneficent and malevolent
+forces upon which our life (and all life) depends,
+upon which the making of the soil of the
+earth and the shaping of the landscape depend;
+all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and
+perfume of the world, all the glory of cloud and
+sky, all the hazards of flood and storm, all the terror
+of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit
+of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back
+again through the rivers to the sea. In our geologic
+time there is, in this circuit of the waters, more that
+favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say,
+we should not be here. The enormous destruction
+of human life, of all life, which has taken place and
+will continue to take place, in this beneficent circuit,
+is only an incident in the history of the globe;
+the physical forces are neither for nor against it;
+they are neutral; life to be here at all has to run
+these risks; has to run the gantlet of these forces,
+and to get many a lash and gash in the running.
+Against the suffering and death incident thereto
+there is no insurance save in the wit of man himself.
+All this wit has been developed and sharpened
+by much waste and suffering. We learn to deal
+with difficulties through the discipline of the difficulties
+themselves. If man were finally to learn to
+control the rains and the floods, it would be through
+the experience which they themselves bring him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span>
+The demons that destroy him are on his side when
+he strikes with the strength which they give him.
+Gravity, which so often crushes and overthrows
+him, is yet the source of all his might. The fire
+that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same
+fire that warms him and drives his engines across
+the continent.</p>
+
+<p>There is no god that pities us or weeps over our
+sufferings, save the god in our own breasts. We
+have life on heroic terms. Nature does not baby
+us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take
+our chances with all other forms of life. Our special
+good fortune is that we are capable of a higher development,
+capable of profiting to a greater extent
+by experience, than are the lower forms of life.
+And here is the mystery that has no solution: we
+came out of the burning nebul&aelig; just as our horse
+and dog, but why we are men and they are still
+horse and dog we owe to some Power, or, shall
+I say, to the chance working of a multitude of
+powers, that are beyond our ken. That some
+Being willed it, designed it, no; yet it was in some
+way provided for in the constitution of the world.</p>
+
+<div class="center">THE END</div>
+<hr />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217<br />218<br />219</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>INDEX</h3>
+
+<ul class="IX">
+<li>
+Agassiz, Louis, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</li><li>
+Air, light and heavy, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li><li>
+Albatross, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li><li>
+Animal life, abundance, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li><li>
+Antlers, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li><li>
+Ants, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li><li>
+Army trucks, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li><li>
+Arum, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li><li>
+Automobile trip, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>-26.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Bacon, Francis, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li><li>
+Barton, W. Va., <a href="#Page_119">119</a>.</li><li>
+Bee, honey, spirit of the hive, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>-62;
+<ul><li>
+intelligence, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li><li>
+communication, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li><li>
+their world, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>;</li><li>
+sting, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Bee, leaf-cutter, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li><li>
+Beech, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Birds, living with, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;<ul><li>
+flight, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>-38;</li><li>
+and cats, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</li><li>
+nesting near houses, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>-59;</li><li>
+home sense, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>;</li><li>
+nests of most species built by the females, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>;</li><li>
+and dead trees, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>;</li><li>
+song, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;</li><li>
+at Pine Knot, Va., <a href="#Page_102">102</a>-05;</li><li>
+of southern California, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>-32;</li><li>
+community of mind in flocks, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Birds' nests, finding, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>-81.</li><li>
+Bluebird, endearing qualities, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li><li>
+experience with a pair, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>-48.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Bobolink, song flight, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li><li>
+Bolar Springs, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li><li>
+Brain, as organ of the mind, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li><li>
+Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li><li>
+Bumble-bee, carpenter, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li><li>
+Bunting, indigo, nesting, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li><li>
+Bunting, painted, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li><li>
+Butterflies, flight, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>;
+flocking, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Butterfly, monarch, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Buzzard, turkey, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>-34.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Cacti, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-48.</li><li>
+California, southern, observations in, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>-51;<ul><li>
+coast, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>;</li><li>
+mountains, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</li><li>
+climate and soil, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>;</li><li>
+bird-song, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li><li>
+birds, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>-32;</li><li>
+change of climate in, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>-12.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Cambium layer, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li><li>
+Carpenter, W. B., quoted, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Catbird, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;<ul><li>
+stealthiness, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</li><li>
+experience with a pair, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>-66;</li><li>
+fondness for butter, <a href="#Page_66">66</a>;</li><li>
+theatrical, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>;</li><li>
+notes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Caterpillars, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>-94.</li><li>
+Causes, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>-67.</li><li>
+Cedar-bird, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li><li>
+Chance, in animal life, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li><li>
+Cheat River, W. Va., <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li><li>
+Chipmunks, two in a den, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;<ul><li>
+storing currants, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>;</li><li>
+carrying provender, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Chippie. <i>See</i> Sparrow, chipping.</li><li>
+Chlorophyll, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li><li>
+Chrysalis, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li><li>
+Condor, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>.</li><li>
+Connellsville, Pa., <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li><li>
+Cormorant, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li><li>
+Cosmos, the, order and harmony of, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>-93.</li><li>
+Cow, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li><li>
+Crow, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+needs no great wing-power, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>Crow, fish, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li><li>
+Cuckoo, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>;<ul><li>
+solemnity, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;</li><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li><li>
+young, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li><li>
+food, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Cuckoo, black-billed, notes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting-habits, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Cuckoo, yellow-billed, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., at San Diego, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_211">211</a>.</li><li>
+Darwin, Charles, quoted, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>;<ul><li>
+his eager study of natural history, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li><li>
+observations during the voyage of the Beagle, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</li><li>
+failure of his theory, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>-69;</li><li>
+his mind, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>;</li><li>
+treated man as an animal, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Darwin, George Howard, on the tides, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</li><li>
+Darwinism, a cause of the World War, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-75.</li><li>
+Death, an analogy of, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li><li>
+Desert, vegetation of the, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-48.</li><li>
+Dove, mourning, <i>or</i> turtle-dove, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Earth, the, quiverings of the surface, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>-71;<ul><li>
+the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Edison, Thomas A., <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>;<ul><li>
+contrasted with Mr. Ford, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>-25.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Elm, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li><li>
+Erosion, as sculpture, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>-83.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Fabre, Jean Henri, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;<ul><li>
+quoted, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Far-away, the, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li><li>
+Fear in animals, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li><li>
+Fireflies, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li><li>
+Firestone, H. S., <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125</a>.</li><li>
+Fish, schools of, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li><li>
+Fleas, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li><li>
+Flies, intelligence, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li><li>
+Foraminifer&aelig;, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Ford, Henry, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>;<ul><li>
+contrasted with Mr. Edison, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>-24.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Foxes, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>.</li><li>
+Frog, wood, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Germans, Darwinism, and the World War, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-75.</li><li>
+Giraffe, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Girls, two West Virginia, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li><li>
+Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li><li>
+God, man appropriating, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li><li>
+Goldfinch, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;<ul><li>
+chorus singing, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>-42;</li><li>
+notes, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</li><li>
+notes of young, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>;</li><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Grand Ca&ntilde;on, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Grass, the wonder of, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</li><li>
+Grasshoppers, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Great Smoky Mts., <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li><li>
+Greensborough, Pa., <a href="#Page_112">112</a>.</li><li>
+Grosbeak, rose-breasted, nesting, <a href="#Page_65">65</a>.</li><li>
+Grouse, ruffed, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li><li>
+Gull, herring, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li><li>
+Gulls, flight, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Hawk, red-tailed, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li><li>
+Hawks, flight, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li><li>
+Haymaking, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>-76.</li><li>
+Hen-hawk, flight, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>.</li><li>
+Hornets, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li><li>
+Horns, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li><li>
+Horse, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>.</li><li>
+Horseshoe Run, W. Va., <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li><li>
+Hummingbird, ruby-throated, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<ul><li>
+bathing in dew, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>;</li><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</li><li>
+a fairy bird, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Hurley, Edward N., <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li><li>
+Huxley, Thomas Henry, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>;<ul><li>
+quoted, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Ibis, white, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li><li>
+Insects, their world, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>-25, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;<ul><li>
+senses, <a href="#Page_24">24</a>;</li><li>
+reaction to heat,</li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span>cold, and vibrations, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li><li>
+antenn&aelig;, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>;</li><li>
+the ruling sex among, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Interpretation, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-90.</li><li>
+Ironweed, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+James, William, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li><li>
+Jay, blue, notes, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li><li>
+Joe-Pye-weed, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>.</li><li>
+Junco, young, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</li><li>
+abundance, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Kepler, Johann, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>.</li><li>
+Killdeer, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li><li>
+Kingbird, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+and bees, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Leaves, autumn, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-3.</li><li>
+Lemmings, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li><li>
+Life, origin of, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li><li>
+Life, human, analogies, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>-27.</li><li>
+Lightning-bugs. <i>See</i> Fireflies.</li><li>
+Lowell, James Russell, quoted, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>.</li><li>
+Lubbock, Sir John, quoted, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+McCarthy, Denis Aloysius, quoted, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>.</li><li>
+Maeterlinck, Maurice, quoted, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;<ul><li>
+on the bee, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>-63.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Man, and Darwinism, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>;<ul><li>
+a part of nature, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>-86;</li><li>
+interpretation of nature and of himself, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-90;</li><li>
+mystery of his evolution, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Maple, sugar, susceptibility to atmospheric changes, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>.</li><li>
+Maples, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Marcus Aurelius, quoted, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li><li>
+Meadowlark, song flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li><li>
+Measuring-worm, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li><li>
+Mice, wild, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;
+barking trees, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>.</li><li>
+Microphone, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li><li>
+Microseisms, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</li><li>
+Mind, community of, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>-55.</li><li>
+Mockingbird, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li><li>
+Moose, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Mosquitoes, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li><li>
+Moth, luna, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.</li><li>
+Mouse, jumping, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</li><li>
+Mouse, white-footed, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li><li>
+Mullets, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Natural history about home, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li><li>
+Nature, her methods unlike ours, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>-81, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;<ul><li>
+interpreting, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-90;</li><li>
+lavishness and parsimony, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</li><li>
+puzzling and contradictory, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;</li><li>
+all-seeing, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>-14;</li><li>
+her movements circular, <a href="#Page_214">214</a>-16.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Nighthawk, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li><li>
+Nonpareil, <i>or</i> painted bunting, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li><li>
+North Carolina, a countryman of, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li><li>
+Northern Hemisphere, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Oak, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+Odd and even numbers, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>-65.</li><li>
+Oriole, Baltimore, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>-52, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Oriole, Bullock's, nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li><li>
+Oriole, orchard, nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>.</li><li>
+Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on the origin of life, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li><li>
+Ostrich, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Owl, screech, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>-47.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Pacific Ocean, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li><li>
+Pain, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>.</li><li>
+Pear-trees, autumn color, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>.</li><li>
+Pelican, California brown, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li><li>
+Pennsylvania, motor trip through, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>-13.</li><li>
+Pewee, wood, nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<ul><li>
+its plaint, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Ph&oelig;be, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>-54, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_59">59</a>, <a href="#Page_60">60</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Pigeon, wild, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li><li>
+Pine Knot, Va., visit to, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-08.</li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span>Pipit, American, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Pittsburgh, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>.</li><li>
+Plover, killdeer, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li><li>
+Porcupine, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Rabbit, its protection, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>;<ul><li>
+caught by a weasel, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Rainbow tints, in dew, etc., <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li><li>
+Rat, wood, <a href="#Page_207">207</a> <i>note</i>.</li><li>
+Reasons, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>-67.</li><li>
+Redstart, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li><li>
+Road-mending, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li><li>
+Robin, young, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;<ul><li>
+nest, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>-55, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li><li>
+fear of man, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;</li><li>
+fittest to survive, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li><li>
+versatility, 176;</li><li>
+a hustler, 176;</li><li>
+danger of a plague of robins, 177;</li><li>
+a runner, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Rocks, origin of the secondary, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li><li>
+Roosevelt, Theodore, visit to Pine Knot, Va., with, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-08;<ul><li>
+knowledge of India, <a href="#Page_101">101</a></li><li>
+opinion of Taft, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>;</li><li>
+killing a mosquito, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li><li>
+protection of the President, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>;</li><li>
+bird-gazing, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>;</li><li>
+letter from, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Salamander, orange-colored, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>.</li><li>
+San Diego, Cal., <a href="#Page_210">210</a>-12.</li><li>
+Sandstone, in the Catskills, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li><li>
+Sap, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>-8.</li><li>
+Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li><li>
+Scorpion, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li><li>
+Seals, hair, in California, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>-51.</li><li>
+Sex, the ruling, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li><li>
+Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;<ul><li>
+on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Shrew, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li><li>
+Skunk, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>-08.</li><li>
+Snakes, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li><li>
+Sources, original, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li><li>
+South, characteristics of the, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li><li>
+Southern Hemisphere, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li><li>
+Sparrow, story of a nest, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>.</li><li>
+Sparrow, chipping <i>or</i> social, nest, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>.</li><li>
+Sparrow, song, song flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>;<ul><li>
+nesting, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li><li>
+singing, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Sparrow, vesper, nesting, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>-84;<ul><li>
+its names, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>;</li><li>
+appearance and habits, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>;</li><li>
+courted by a skylark, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Species, origin of, an insoluble problem, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>-69, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li><li>
+Spider, trap-door, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>-43.</li><li>
+Spiders, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>;<ul><li>
+genius of, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Spider-webs, rainbows in, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li><li>
+Squirrel, gray, caught by a weasel, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li><li>
+Squirrel, red, chased by a weasel, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li><li>
+Strawberry-vines, wild, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>-14.</li><li>
+Struggle, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>.</li><li>
+Sunrise, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li><li>
+Survival of the fit, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</li><li>
+Swallow, bank, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li><li>
+Swallow, barn, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;<ul><li>
+parental anxiety, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li><li>
+notes, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li><li>
+pleasing qualities, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Swallow, cliff, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>.</li><li>
+Swallow, tree, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li><li>
+Swallows, feeding, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;<ul><li>
+hibernation, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Swift, chimney, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>.</li><li>
+Sycamore, autumn color, <a href="#Page_3">3</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Taft, William Howard, <a href="#Page_105">105</a>.</li><li>
+Telepathy, <a href="#Page_155">155</a>.</li><li>
+Thistle, Canada, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li><li>
+Thorns, the use of, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>-48.</li><li>
+Thrasher, brown, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, Alaska hermit, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, hermit, song, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, olive-backed, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li><li>
+Thrush, Wilson's. <i>See</i> Veery.</li><li>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>Thrush, wood, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>;<ul><li>
+manners, <a href="#Page_67">67</a>, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Tides, the, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>.</li><li>
+Titlark. <i>See</i> Pipit.</li><li>
+Trees, leaves, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>-3;<ul><li>
+mechanism of growth, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>-8;</li><li>
+roots and rootlets, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>-6;</li><li>
+what man has in common with, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Tree-toad, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>.</li><li>
+Turnip, Indian, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li><li>
+Turtle-dove. <i>See</i> Dove, mourning.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Uniontown, Pa., <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li><li>
+Universe. <i>See</i> Cosmos.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Van Dyke, John C., on desert plants, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li><li>
+Veery, nesting, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li><li>
+Vireo, nest, young, and mother, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li><li>
+Vireo, red-eyed, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li><li>
+Vireo, yellow-throated, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li><li>
+Vital principle, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li><li>
+&nbsp;</li><li>
+Warbler, Audubon's, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>.</li><li>
+Warbler, Canada, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li><li>
+Warbler, mourning, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>.</li><li>
+Wasp, a solitary, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li><li>
+Water-thrush, <i>or</i> water accentor, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li><li>
+Waxwing, Bohemian, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li><li>
+Weasel, catching rabbits and squirrels, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>;<ul><li>
+an inspirer of terror, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Weather, prophesying the, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>-22.</li><li>
+West Virginia, motor trip through, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>-19.</li><li>
+Whitman, Walt, quoted, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li><li>
+Wolf Creek, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li><li>
+Woodcock, flight song, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li><li>
+Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li><li>
+Woodpeckers, flight, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>.</li><li>
+World War, Darwinism a cause of the, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>-75.</li><li>
+Wren, Bewick's, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li><li>
+Wren, house, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>;<ul><li>
+and nesting-box, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.
+</li></ul></li><li>
+Wren, winter, nest, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+</ul>
+<hr />
+<h5>
+<b>The Riverside Press</b><br />
+CAMBRIDGE &middot; MASSACHUSETTS<br />
+U &middot; S &middot; A</h5>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Under the Maples
+
+Author: John  Burroughs
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2009 [EBook #30246]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDER THE MAPLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Turgut Dincer, Joseph Cooper and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  +-----------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Note:                     |
+  | Alternative spelling for chippie/chippy |
+  | has been retained as it appears in the  |
+  | original publication.                   |
+  +-----------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: _Copyright, 1921, by Charles F. Lummis.
+     All rights reserved._
+
+  THE LAST PORTRAIT OF JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  (March 23, 1921; six days before his death)
+  Made at Pasadena Glen, California, by his long-time
+  friend Charles F. Lummis]
+
+
+  UNDER THE MAPLES
+
+  BY
+  JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+  [Illustration: The Riverside Press]
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+It was while sitting in his hay-barn study in the Catskills and looking
+out upon the maple woods of the old home farm, and under the maples at
+Riverby, that the most of these essays were written, during the last two
+years of the author's life. And it was to the familiar haunts near his
+Hudson River home that his thoughts wistfully turned while wintering in
+Southern California in 1921. As he pictured in his mind the ice breaking
+up on the river in the crystalline March days, the return of the birds,
+the first hepaticas, he longed to be back among them; he was there in
+spirit, gazing upon the river from the summer-house, or from the veranda
+of the Nest, or seated at his table in the chestnut-bark Study, or busy
+with his sap-gathering and sugar-making.
+
+Casting about for a title for this volume, the vision of maple-trees and
+dripping sap and crisp March days playing constantly before his mind,
+one day while sorting and shifting the essays for his new book, he
+suddenly said, "I have it! We'll call it _Under the Maples_!"
+
+His love for the maple, and consequently his pleasure in having hit upon
+this title, can be gathered from the following fragment found among his
+miscellaneous notes: "I always feel at home where the sugar maple grows
+It was paramount in the woods of the old home farm where I grew up. It
+looks and smells like home. When I bring in a maple stick to put on my
+fire, I feel like caressing it a little. Its fiber is as white as a
+lily, and nearly as sweet-scented. It is such a tractable, satisfactory
+wood to handle--a clean, docile, wholesome tree; burning without
+snapping or sputtering, easily worked up into stovewood, fine of grain,
+hard of texture, stately as a forest tree, comely and clean as a shade
+tree, glorious in autumn, a fountain of coolness in summer, sugar in its
+veins, gold in its foliage, warmth in its fibers, and health in it the
+year round."
+
+  CLARA BARRUS
+
+    _The Nest at Riverby_
+  _West Park on the Hudson_
+      _New York_
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. THE FALLING LEAVES                                     1
+
+   II. THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST                         11
+
+  III. THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS                                   32
+
+   IV. BIRD INTIMACIES                                       39
+
+    V. A MIDSUMMER IDYL                                      69
+
+   VI. NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE                               79
+
+  VII. WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT                          101
+
+ VIII. A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY                                  109
+
+   IX. UNDER GENIAL SKIES                                   127
+       I. A Sun-Blessed Land                                127
+      II. Lawn Birds                                        129
+     III. Silken Chambers                                   132
+      IV. The Desert Note                                   143
+       V. Sea-Dogs                                          148
+
+    X. A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES                              152
+       I. Nature's Wireless                                 152
+      II. Maeterlinck on the Bee                            156
+     III. Odd or Even                                       163
+      IV. Why and How                                       165
+       V. An Insoluble Problem                              167
+      VI. A Live World                                      169
+     VII. Darwinism and the War                             172
+    VIII. The Robin                                         175
+      IX. The Weasel                                        177
+       X. Misinterpreting Nature                            179
+      XI. Natural Sculpture                                 181
+
+   XI. RUMINATIONS                                          184
+       I. Man a Part of Nature                              184
+      II. Marcus Aurelius on Death                          185
+     III. The Interpreter of Nature                         186
+      IV. Original Sources                                  190
+       V. The Cosmic Harmony                                191
+      VI. Cosmic Rhythms                                    193
+     VII. The Beginnings of Life                            194
+    VIII. Spendthrift Nature                                195
+
+  XII. NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD                      197
+       I. Sunrise                                           197
+      II. Nature's Methods                                  199
+     III. Heads and Tails                                   205
+      IV. An Unsavory Subject                               206
+       V. Chance in Animal Life                             208
+      VI. Mosquitoes and Fleas                              210
+     VII. The Change of Climate in Southern California      210
+    VIII. All-Seeing Nature                                 212
+
+   INDEX                                                    217
+
+
+
+
+UNDER
+THE MAPLES
+
+I
+
+THE FALLING LEAVES
+
+
+The time of the falling of leaves has come again. Once more in our
+morning walk we tread upon carpets of gold and crimson, of brown and
+bronze, woven by the winds or the rains out of these delicate textures
+while we slept.
+
+How beautifully the leaves grow old! How full of light and color are
+their last days! There are exceptions, of course. The leaves of most of
+the fruit-trees fade and wither and fall ingloriously. They bequeath
+their heritage of color to their fruit. Upon it they lavish the hues
+which other trees lavish upon their leaves. The pear-tree is often an
+exception. I have seen pear orchards in October painting a hillside in
+hues of mingled bronze and gold. And well may the pear-tree do this, it
+is so chary of color upon its fruit.
+
+But in October what a feast to the eye our woods and groves present! The
+whole body of the air seems enriched by their calm, slow radiance. They
+are giving back the light they have been absorbing from the sun all
+summer.
+
+The carpet of the newly fallen leaves looks so clean and delicate when
+it first covers the paths and the highways that one almost hesitates to
+walk upon it. Was it the gallant Raleigh who threw down his cloak for
+Queen Elizabeth to walk upon? See what a robe the maples have thrown
+down for you and me to walk upon! How one hesitates to soil it! The
+summer robes of the groves and the forests--more than robes, a vital
+part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have
+captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar
+rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when
+they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark,
+the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When
+the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what
+sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands
+reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a
+union and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the old
+trees suddenly become! what suppleness and grace invest their branches!
+The leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the cambium layer beneath
+the bark is the girdle of perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial
+expression of the same quality. The leaves have their day and die, but
+the last leaf that comes to the branch is as young as the first. The
+leaves and the blossom and the fruit of the tree come and go, yet they
+age not; under the magic touch of spring the miracle is repeated over
+and over.
+
+The maples perhaps undergo the most complete transformation of all the
+forest trees. Their leaves fairly become luminous, as if they glowed
+with inward light. In October a maple-tree before your window lights up
+your room like a great lamp. Even on cloudy days its presence helps to
+dispel the gloom. The elm, the oak, the beech, possess in a much less
+degree that quality of luminosity, though certain species of oak at
+times are rich in shades of red and bronze. The leaves of the trees just
+named for the most part turn brown before they fall. The great leaves of
+the sycamore assume a rich tan-color like fine leather.
+
+The spider weaves a net out of her own vitals with which to capture her
+prey, but the net is not a part of herself as the leaf is a part of the
+tree. The spider repairs her damaged net, but the tree never repairs its
+leaves. It may put forth new leaves, but it never essays to patch up the
+old ones. Every tree has such a superabundance of leaves that a few more
+or less or a few torn and bruised ones do not seem to matter. When the
+leaf surface is seriously curtailed, as it often is by some insect pest,
+or some form of leaf-blight, or by the ravages of a hail-storm, the
+growth of the tree and the maturing of its fruit is seriously checked.
+To denude a tree of its foliage three years in succession usually
+proves fatal. The vitality of the tree declines year by year till death
+ensues.
+
+To me nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy
+of the mechanism by which it grows and lives, the fine hairlike rootlets
+at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top. The
+rootlets absorb the water charged with mineral salts from the soil, and
+the leaves absorb the sunbeams from the air. So it looks as if the tree
+were almost made of matter and spirit, like man; the ether with its
+vibrations, on the one hand, and the earth with its inorganic compounds,
+on the other--earth salts and sunlight. The sturdy oak, the gigantic
+sequoia, are each equally finely organized in these parts that take hold
+upon nature. We call certain plants gross feeders, and in a sense they
+are; but all are delicate feeders in their mechanism of absorption from
+the earth and air.
+
+The tree touches the inorganic world at the two finest points of its
+structure--the rootlets and the leaves. These attack the great crude
+world of inorganic matter with weapons so fine that only the microscope
+can fully reveal them to us. The animal world seizes its food in masses
+little and big, and often gorges itself with it, but the vegetable,
+through the agency of the solvent power of water, absorbs its
+nourishment molecule by molecule.
+
+A tree does not live by its big roots--these are mainly for strength
+and to hold it to the ground. How they grip the rocks, fitting
+themselves to them, as Lowell says, like molten metal! The tree's life
+is in the fine hairlike rootlets that spring from the roots. Darwin says
+those rootlets behave as if they had minute brains in their extremities.
+They feel their way into the soil; they know the elements the plant
+wants; some select more lime, others more potash, others more magnesia.
+The wheat rootlets select more silica to make the stalk; the pea
+rootlets select more lime: the pea does not need the silica. The
+individuality of plants and trees in this respect is most remarkable.
+The cells of each seem to know what particular elements they want from
+the soil, as of course they do.
+
+The vital activity of the tree goes on at three points--in the leaves,
+in the rootlets, and in the cambium layer. The activity of the leaf and
+rootlet furnishes the starchy deposit which forms this generative
+layer--the milky, mucilaginous girdle of matter between the outer bark
+and the wood through which the tree grows and increases in size.
+Generation and regeneration take place through this layer. I have called
+it the girdle of perpetual youth. It never grows old. It is annually
+renewed. The heart of the old apple-tree may decay and disappear, indeed
+the tree may be reduced to a mere shell and many of its branches may die
+and fall, but the few apples which it still bears attest the fact that
+its cambium layer, at least over a part of its surface, is still
+youthful and doing its work. It is this layer that the yellow-bellied
+woodpecker, known as the sapsucker, drills into and devours, thus
+drawing directly upon the vitality of the tree. But his ravages are
+rarely serious. Only in two instances have I seen dead branches on an
+apple-tree that appeared to be the result of his drilling.
+
+What we call the heart of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no
+vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It
+adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a
+tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged
+in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and
+adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a
+plant or a tree are like the laborers in the field that produce for us
+the raw material of our food, while the leaves are like our many devices
+for rendering it edible and nourishing. The rootlets continue their
+activity in the fall, after the leaves have fallen, and thus gorge the
+tree with fluid against the needs of the spring. In the growing tree or
+vine the sap, charged with nourishment, flows down from the top to the
+roots. In the spring it evidently flows upward, seeking the air through
+the leaves. Or rather, we may say that the crude sap always flows
+upward, while the nutritive sap flows downward, thus giving the tree a
+kind of double circulation.
+
+A tree may be no more beautiful and wonderful when we have come to a
+knowledge of all its hidden processes, but it certainly is no less so.
+We do not think of the function of the leaves, nor of the bark, nor of
+the roots and rootlets, when we gaze upon a noble oak or an elm; we
+admire it for its form, its sturdiness, or its grace; it is akin to
+ourselves; it is the work of a vast community of cells like those that
+build up our own bodies; it is a fountain of living matter rising up out
+of the earth and splitting up and spreading out at its top in a spray of
+leaves and flowers; and if we could see its hidden processes we should
+realize how truly like a fountain it is. While in full leaf a current of
+water is constantly flowing through it, and flowing upward against
+gravity. This stream of water is truly its life current; it enters at
+the rootlets under the ground and escapes at the top through the leaves
+by a process called transpiration. All the mineral salts with which the
+tree builds up its woody tissues,--its osseous system, so to speak,--the
+instruments with which it imprisons and consolidates the carbon which it
+obtains from the air, are borne in solution in this stream of water. Its
+function is analogous to that of the rivers which bring the produce and
+other material to the great cities situated upon their banks. A cloud of
+invisible vapor rises from the top of every tree and a thousand
+invisible rills enter it through its myriad hairlike rootlets. The trees
+are thus conduits in the circuit of the waters from the earth to the
+clouds. Our own bodies and the bodies of all living things perform a
+similar function. Life cannot go on without water, but water is not a
+food; it makes the processes of metabolism possible; assimilation and
+elimination go on through its agency. Water and air are the two ties
+between the organic and the inorganic. The function of the one is mainly
+mechanical, that of the other is mainly chemical.
+
+As the water is drawn in at the roots, it flows out at the top, to which
+point it rises by capillary attraction and a process called osmosis.
+Neither of them is a strictly vital process, since both are found in the
+inorganic world; but they are in the service of what we call a vital
+principle. Some physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a vital
+principle. Huxley thought we might as well talk about the principle of
+aqueosity in water. We are the victims of words. The sun does not shoot
+out beams or rays, though the eye reports such; but it certainly sends
+forth energy; and it is as certain that there is a new activity in
+matter--some matter--that we call vital.
+
+Matter behaves in a new manner; builds up new compounds and begets
+myriads of new forms not found in the inorganic world, till it finally
+builds up the body and mind of man. Death puts an end to this activity
+alike in man and tree, and a new kind of activity sets in--a
+disorganizing activity, still with the aid of water and air and living
+organisms. It is like the compositor distributing his type after the
+book is printed. The micro-organisms answer to the compositor, but they
+are of a different kind from those which build up the body in the first
+instance. But the living body as a whole, with its complex of
+cooerdinating organs and functions--what attended to that? The cells
+build the parts, but what builds the whole?
+
+How many things we have in common with the trees! The same mysterious
+gift of life, to begin with; the same primary elements--carbon,
+nitrogen, oxygen, and so on--in our bodies; and many of the same vital
+functions--respiration, circulation, absorption, assimilation,
+reproduction. Protoplasm is the basis of life in both, and the cell is
+the architect that builds up the bodies of both. Trees are rooted men
+and men are walking trees. The tree absorbs its earth materials through
+the minute hairs on its rootlets, called fibrillae, and the animal body
+absorbs its nutriment through analogous organs in the intestines, called
+lacteals.
+
+Whitman's expression "the slumbering and liquid trees" often comes to my
+mind. They are the words of a poet who sees hidden relations and
+meanings everywhere. He knows how fluid and adaptive all animate nature
+is. The trees are wrapped in a kind of slumber in winter, and they are
+reservoirs of living currents in summer. If all living bodies came
+originally out of the sea, they brought a big dower of the sea with
+them. The human body is mainly a few pinches of earth salts held in
+solution by several gallons of water. The ashes of the living tree bulk
+small in comparison with the amount of water it holds. Yes, "the
+slumbering and liquid trees." They awaken from their slumber in the
+spring, the scales fall from their buds, the fountains within them are
+unsealed, and they again become streams of living energy, breaking into
+leaf and bloom and fruit under the magic of the sun's rays.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE PLEASURES OF A NATURALIST
+
+
+I
+
+How closely every crack and corner of nature is packed with life,
+especially in our northern temperate zone! I was impressed with this
+fact when during several June days I was occupied with road-mending on
+the farm where I was born. To open up the loosely piled and decaying
+laminated rocks was to open up a little biological and zooelogical
+museum, so many of our smaller forms of life harbored there. From
+chipmunks to ants and spiders, animal life flourished. We disturbed the
+chipmunks in their den a foot and a half or more beneath the loosely
+piled rocks. There were two of them in a soft, warm nest of dry,
+shredded maple-leaves. They did not wait to be turned out of doors, but
+when they heard the racket overhead bolted precipitately. Two living
+together surprised me, as heretofore I had never known but one in a den.
+Near them a milk snake had stowed himself away in a crevice, and in the
+little earthquake which we set up got badly crushed. Two little
+red-bellied snakes about one foot long had also found harbor there.
+
+The ants rushed about in great consternation when their eggs were
+suddenly exposed. In fact, there was live natural history under every
+stone about us. Some children brought me pieces of stone, which they
+picked up close by, which sheltered a variety of cocoon-building
+spiders. One small, dark-striped spider was carrying about its ball of
+eggs, the size of a large pea, attached to the hind part of its body.
+This became detached, when she seized it eagerly and bore it about held
+between her legs. Another fragment of stone, the size of one's hand,
+sheltered the chrysalis of some species of butterfly which was attached
+to it at its tail. It was surprising to see this enshrouded creature,
+blind and deaf, wriggle and thrash about as if threatening us with its
+wrath for invading its sanctuary. One would about as soon expect to see
+an egg protest.
+
+Thus the naturalist finds his pleasures everywhere. Every solitude to
+him is peopled. Every morning or evening walk yields him a harvest to
+eye or ear.
+
+The born naturalist is one of the most lucky men in the world. Winter or
+summer, rain or shine, at home or abroad, walking or riding, his
+pleasures are always near at hand. The great book of nature is open
+before him and he has only to turn the leaves.
+
+A friend sitting on my porch in a hickory rocking-chair the other day
+was annoyed by one of our small solitary wasps that seemed to want to
+occupy the chair. It held a small worm in its legs. She would "shoo" it
+away, only to see it back in a few seconds. I assured her that it did
+not want to sting her, but that its nest was somewhere in the chair.
+And, sure enough, as soon as she quieted down, it entered a small
+opening in the end of one of the chair arms, and deposited its worm, and
+presently was back with another, and then a third and a fourth; and
+before the day was done it came with little pellets of mud and sealed up
+the opening.
+
+
+II
+
+My morning walk up to the beech wood often brings me new knowledge and
+new glimpses of nature. This morning I saw a hummingbird taking its bath
+in the big dewdrops on a small ash-tree. I have seen other birds bathe
+in the dew or raindrops on tree foliage, but did not before know that
+the hummer bathed at all.
+
+I also discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when
+saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning,
+exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute
+spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow.
+In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a
+pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. Of course I
+could not see the completed bow in so small an area. These fragments are
+as unapproachable as the bow in the clouds. I also saw that where a
+suspended dewdrop becomes a jewel, or displays rainbow tints, you can
+see only one at a time--to the right or left of you. It also is a
+fragment of a rainbow. Those persons who report beholding a great
+display of prismatic effects in the foliage of trees, or in the grass
+after a shower, are not to be credited. You may see the drops glistening
+in the sun like glass beads, but they will not exhibit prismatic tints.
+In only one at a time will you see rainbow tints. Change your position,
+and you may see another, but never a great display of prismatic tints at
+one time.
+
+In my walk the other morning I turned over a stone, looking for spiders
+and ants. These I found, and in addition there were two cells of one of
+our solitary leaf-cutters, which we as boys called "sweat bees," because
+they came around us and would alight on our sweaty hands and arms as if
+in quest of salt, as they probably were. It is about the size of a honey
+bee, of lighter color, and its abdomen is yellow and very flexible. It
+carries its pollen on its abdomen and not upon its thighs. These cells
+were of a greenish-brown color; each of them was like a miniature barrel
+in which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egg
+hatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment.
+These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits of
+leaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon the
+other. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings from
+leaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, a
+dozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the most
+workmanlike manner.
+
+In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out her
+nesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she had
+cut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and,
+holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen her
+carry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About the
+period of hatching, I do not know.
+
+
+III
+
+Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their game
+up as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which they
+drive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings ago
+the air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the
+size of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happened
+to be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep
+past. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a very
+conspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How
+many hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day!
+Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and other
+insect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!
+
+
+IV
+
+We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. We
+see little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures are
+cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookout
+for them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which,
+except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the night
+prowlers--skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls--yes, and mice.
+
+The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know is
+active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called
+the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to
+suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later it
+was literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.
+
+Turn over a stone in the fields and behold the consternation among the
+small folk beneath it,--ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders,--all
+objecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil,
+but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As I
+write these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the
+roadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants which
+grew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment and
+rot, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep,
+and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of the
+nuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesser
+rodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts.
+
+
+V
+
+In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature,
+Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:
+
+  Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
+  inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean
+  ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains--warm mineral
+  springs--the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the
+  upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of
+  perpetual snow--all support organic beings.
+
+Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In the
+earth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the
+mud--he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was never
+scanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardships
+to add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the
+comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys of
+hundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions to
+glean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany or
+zooelogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a great
+altitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which they
+called "puna," and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with a
+twinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossil
+shells."
+
+His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge.
+Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biological
+facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere his
+insatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a different
+purpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read him
+for that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils,
+in reptiles, in volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with each of
+these subjects in mind. I recently had in mind the problem of the
+soaring condor, and I re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had
+studied and mastered that subject, too. If you are interested in seeing
+how the biological characteristics of the two continents, North and
+South America, agree or contrast with each other, you will find what
+you wish to know. You will learn that in South America the
+lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North
+America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps
+itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that
+the obscene fungus, or _Phallus_, taints the tropical forests, as a
+similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and
+that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders
+for their young, just as in North America. Of course there are new
+species of animal and plant life, but not many. The influence of
+environment in modifying species is constantly in his mind.
+
+
+VI
+
+The naturalist can content himself with a day of little things. If he
+can read only a word of one syllable in the book of nature, he will make
+the most of that. I read such a word the other morning when I perceived,
+when watching a young but fully fledged junco, or snowbird, that its
+markings Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young of birds
+always for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parent
+stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have
+speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco
+shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral
+white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper
+sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the
+white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of its
+forbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields,
+but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in the
+woods, and constructs a very artistic nest of dry grass and hair which
+is so well hidden that the passer-by seldom detects it.
+
+Another small word I read about certain of the rocks in my native
+Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray sandstone, that when you have split
+them open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown them up with
+dynamite, instead of the gray fresh surface of the rock greeting you, it
+is often a surface of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled or
+electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from the first muddy day of
+creation. I have such a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It is
+amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of doorstones fall upon it
+with soap and hot water, and utterly fail to make any impression upon
+it. Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with primal mud. The
+fresh-water origin of the Catskill rocks no doubt in some way accounts
+for it.
+
+
+VII
+
+We are all interested students of the weather, but the naturalist
+studies it for some insight into the laws which govern it. One season I
+made my reputation as a weather prophet by predicting on the first day
+of December a very severe winter. It was an easy guess. I saw in Detroit
+a bird from the far north, a bird I had never before seen, the Bohemian
+waxwing, or chatterer. It breeds above the Arctic Circle and is common
+to both hemispheres. I said, When the Arctic birds come down, be sure
+there is a cold wave behind them. And so it proved.
+
+When the birds fail to give one a hint of the probable character of the
+coming winter, what reliable signs remain? These remain: When December
+is marked by sudden and violent extremes of heat and cold, the winter
+will be broken; the cold will not hold. I have said elsewhere that the
+hum of the bee in December is the requiem of winter. But when the season
+is very evenly spaced, the cold slowly and steadily increasing through
+November and December, no hurry, no violence, then be prepared for a
+snug winter.
+
+As to wet and dry summers, one can always be guided by the rainfall on
+the Pacific coast; a shortage on the western coast means an excess on
+the eastern. For four or five years past California has been short of
+its rainfall; so much so that quite general alarm is felt over the
+gradual shrinkage of their stored-up supplies, the dams and reservoirs;
+and during the summer seasons the parts of New England and New York with
+which I am acquainted have had very wet seasons--floods in midsummer,
+and full springs and wells at all times. The droughts have been
+temporary and local.
+
+We say, "As fickle as the weather," but the meteorological laws are
+pretty well defined. All signs fail in a drought, and all signs fail in
+a wet season. At one time the south wind brings no rain, at another time
+the north and northwest winds do bring rain. The complex of conditions
+over a continental area of rivers and lakes and mountain-chains is too
+vast for us to decipher; it inheres in the nature of things. It is one
+of the potencies and possibilities which matter possesses. We can take
+no step beyond that.
+
+
+VIII
+
+There seems to me to be false reasoning in the argument from analogy
+which William James uses in his lectures on "Human Immortality." The
+brain, he admits, is the organ of the mind, but may only sustain the
+relation to it, he says, which the wire sustains to the electric current
+which it transmits, or which the pipe sustains to the water which it
+conveys.
+
+Now the source and origin of the electric current is outside the wire
+that transmits it, and it could sustain no other than a transient
+relation to any outside material through which it passed. But if we
+know anything, we know that the human mind or spirit is a vital part of
+the human body; its source is in the brain and nervous system; hence, it
+and the organ through which it is manifested are essentially one.
+
+The analogy of the brain to the battery or dynamo in which the current
+originates is the only logical or permissible one.
+
+
+IX
+
+Maeterlinck wrote wisely when he said:
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life,
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all we feel a sort of
+  earthly brotherhood with them.... There is something, on
+  the other hand, about the insect that does not belong to
+  the habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One
+  would be inclined to say that the insect comes from
+  another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more
+  insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+
+Certainly more cruel and monstrous than our own. Among the spiders, for
+instance, the female eats the male and often devours her own young. The
+scorpion does the same thing. I know of nothing like it among our land
+animals outside the insect world.
+
+The insects certainly live in a wonderland of which we have little
+conception. All our powers are tremendously exaggerated in these little
+people. Their power makes them acquainted with the inner molecular
+constitution of matter far more intimately than we can attain to by our
+coarse chemical analysis. Our world is agitated by vibrations, coarse
+and fine, of which our senses can take in only the slower ones. If they
+exceed three thousand a second, they become too shrill for our ears. It
+is thought that the world of sound with the insects begins where ours
+leaves off. The drums and tubes of insects' ears are very minute. What
+would to us be a continuous sound is to them a series of separate blows.
+We begin to hear blows as continuous sounds when they amount to about
+thirty a second. The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; the
+cabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; and
+some species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin to
+think in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and
+vibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed the
+same microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed! We
+might see a puff of smoke as a flock of small blue butterflies, or hear
+the hum of a mosquito as the blast of a trumpet. On the other hand, so
+much that disturbs us must escape the insects, because their senses are
+too fine to take it in. Doubtless they do not hear the thunder or feel
+the earthquake.
+
+The insects are much more sensitive to heat and cold than we are, and
+for reasons. The number of waves in the ether that gives us the
+sensation of heat is three or four million millions a second. The number
+of tremors required to produce red light is estimated at four hundred
+and seventy-four million millions a second, and for the production of
+violet light, six hundred and ninety-nine million millions a second. No
+doubt the insects react to all these different degrees of vibration.
+Those marvelous instruments called antennae seem to put them in touch
+with a world of which we are quite oblivious.
+
+
+X
+
+To how many things our lives have been compared!--to a voyage, with its
+storms and adverse currents and safe haven at last; to a day with its
+morning, noon, and night; to the seasons with their spring, summer,
+autumn, and winter; to a game, a school, a battle.
+
+In one of his addresses to workingmen Huxley compared life to a game of
+chess. We must learn the names and the values and the moves of each
+piece, and all the rules of the game if we hope to play it successfully.
+The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the
+universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.
+But it may be questioned if the comparison is a happy one. Life is not a
+game in this sense, a diversion, an aside, or a contest for victory over
+an opponent, except in isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess
+will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle
+where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more
+vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life
+is cooeperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I
+suppose business is more often like a game than is life--your gain is
+often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
+rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that
+suggests a game of any kind.
+
+We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three
+things--money, goods, labor--and the greatest of these is labor. Labor
+is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires
+to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, the
+latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe and
+in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from nature
+what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands or
+under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us from
+obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us.
+
+The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen to
+whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their
+problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful
+suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen,
+artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through
+experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many persons
+who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces and
+conditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have of
+the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?
+
+Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastly
+more logical force in his figures than in those of most writers.
+
+Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a
+mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and
+noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then
+its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life
+that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to
+many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructive
+force.
+
+
+XI
+
+I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted to know why the
+meadow, or field, mice gnawed or barked the apple-trees when there was a
+deep coverlid of snow upon the ground. Was it because they found it
+difficult to get up through the deep, frozen snow to the surface to get
+seeds to eat? He did not seem to know that meadow mice are not
+seed-eaters, but that they live on grass and roots and keep well hidden
+beneath the ground during the day, when there is a deep fall of snow
+coming up out of their dens and retreats and leading a free holiday life
+beneath the snow, free from the danger of cats, foxes, owls, and hawks.
+Life then becomes a sort of picnic. They build new nests on the surface
+of the ground and form new runways, and disport themselves apparently in
+a festive mood. The snow is their protection. They bark the trees and
+take their time. When the snow is gone, their winter picnic is at an
+end, and they retreat to their dens in the ground and beneath flat
+stones, and lead once more the life of fear.
+
+
+XII
+
+Sitting on my porch recently, wrapped in my blanket, recovering from a
+slight indisposition, I was in a mood to be interested in the everyday
+aspects of nature before me--in the white and purple lilacs, in the
+maple-leaves nearly full grown, in the pendent fringe of the
+yellowish-white bloom of the chestnut and oak, in the new shoots of the
+grapevines, and so forth. All these things formed only a setting or
+background for the wild life near by.
+
+The birds are the little people that peep out at me, or pause and regard
+me curiously in this great temple of trees,--wrens, chippies, robins,
+bluebirds, catbirds, redstarts, and now and then rarer visitants. A few
+days earlier, for a moment, a mourning ground warbler suddenly appeared
+around the corner, on the ground, at the foot of the steps, and glanced
+hastily up at me. When I arose and looked over the railing, it had gone.
+Then the speckled Canada warbler came in the lilac bushes and syringa
+branches and gave me several good views. The bay-breasted warbler was
+reported in the evergreens up by the stone house, but he failed to
+report to me here at "The Nest." The female redstart, however, came
+several times to the gravel walk below me, evidently looking for
+material to begin her nest. And the wren, the irrepressible house wren,
+was and is in evidence every few minutes, busy carrying nesting-material
+into the box on the corner of the veranda. How intense and emphatic she
+is! And the male, how he throbs and palpitates with song! Yesterday an
+interloper appeared. He or she climbed the post by the back way, as it
+were, and hopped out upon the top of the box and paused, as if to see
+that the coast was clear. He acted as if he felt himself an intruder.
+Quick as a flash there was a brown streak from the branch of a maple
+thirty feet away, and the owner of the box was after him. The culprit
+did not stop to argue the case, but was off, hotly pursued. I must not
+forget the pair of wood thrushes that are building a nest in a maple
+fifty or more feet away. How I love to see them on the ground at my
+feet, every motion and gesture like music to the eye! The head and neck
+of the male fairly glows, and there is something fine and manly about
+his speckled breast.
+
+A pair of catbirds have a nest in the barberry bushes at the south end
+of the house, and are in evidence at all hours. But when the nest is
+completed, and the laying of eggs begins, they keep out of the public
+eye as much as possible. From the front of the stage they retreat behind
+the curtain.
+
+One day as I sat here I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush down
+in the currant-bushes below me. Instantly I was transported to the deep
+woods and the trout brooks of my native Catskills. I heard the murmuring
+water and felt the woodsy coolness of those retreats--such magic hath
+associative memories! A moment before a yellow-throated vireo sang
+briefly in the maple, a harsh note; and the oriole with its insistent
+call added to the disquieting sounds. I have no use for the oriole. He
+has not one musical note, and in grape time his bill is red, or purple,
+with the blood of our grapes.
+
+But the most of these little people are my benefactors, and add another
+ray of sunshine to the May day. I shall not soon forget the spectacle
+of that rare little warbler peeping around the corner of the porch,
+like a little fairy, and then vanishing.
+
+The mere studying of the birds, seeking mere knowledge of them, is not
+enough. You must live with the birds, so to speak; have daily and
+seasonal associations with them before they come to mean much to you.
+Then, as they linger about your house or your camp, or as you see them
+in your walks, they are a part of your life, and help give tone and
+color to your day.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS
+
+
+To what widely different use birds put their power of flight! To the
+great mass of them it is simply a means of locomotion, of getting from
+one point to another. A small minority put their wing-power to more
+ideal uses, as the lark when he claps his wings at heaven's gate, and
+the ruffed grouse when he drums; even the woodcock has some other use
+for his wings than to get from one point to another. Listen to his
+flight song in the April twilight up against the sky.
+
+Our small hawks use their power of flight mainly to catch their prey, as
+does the swallow skimming the air all day on tireless wing, but some of
+the other hawks, such as our red-tailed hawk, climb their great spirals
+apparently with other motives than those which relate to their daily
+fare. The crow has little other use for his wings than to gad about like
+a busy politician from one neighborhood to another. In Florida I have
+seen large flocks of the white ibis performing striking evolutions high
+up against the sky, evidently expressive of the gay and festive feeling
+begotten by the mating instinct.
+
+The most beautiful flyer we ever see against our skies is the unsavory
+buzzard. He is the winged embodiment of grace, ease, and leisure.
+Judging from appearances alone, he is the most disinterested of all the
+winged creatures we see. He rides the airy billows as if only to enjoy
+his mastery over them. He is as calm and unhurried as the orbs in their
+courses. His great circles and spirals have a kind of astronomic
+completeness. That all this power of wing and grace of motion should be
+given to an unclean bird, to a repulsive scavenger, is one of the
+anomalies of nature. He does not need to hurry or conceal his approach;
+what he is after cannot flee or hide; he has no enemies; nothing wants
+him; and he is at peace with all the world.
+
+The great condor of South America, in rising from the ground, always
+faces the wind. It is often captured by tempting it to gorge itself in a
+comparatively narrow space. But if a strong enough wind were blowing at
+such times, it could quickly rise over the barrier. Darwin says he
+watched a condor high in the air describing its huge circles for six
+hours without once flapping its wings. He says that, if the bird wished
+to descend, the wings were for a moment collapsed; and when again
+expanded, with an altered inclination, the momentum gained by the rapid
+descent seemed to urge the bird upwards with the even and steady
+movement of a paper kite. In the case of any bird _soaring_, its motion
+must be sufficiently rapid for the action of the inclined surface of
+its body on the atmosphere to counterbalance its gravity. The force to
+keep up the momentum of a body moving in a horizontal plane in the air
+(in which there is so little friction) cannot be great, and this force
+is all that is wanted. The movement of the neck and body of the condor,
+we must suppose, is sufficient for this. However this may be, it is
+truly wonderful and beautiful to see so great a bird, hour after hour,
+without any apparent exertion, wheeling and gliding over mountain and
+river.
+
+The airplane has a propelling power in its motor, and it shifts its
+wings to take advantage of the currents. The buzzard and condor do the
+same thing. They are living airplanes, and their power is so evenly and
+subtly distributed and applied, that the trick of it escapes the eye.
+But of course they avail themselves of the lifting power of the
+air-currents.
+
+All birds know how to use their wings to propel themselves through the
+air, but the mechanism of the act we may not be able to analyze. I do
+not know how a butterfly propels itself against a breeze with its
+quill-less wings, but we know that it does do it. As its wings are
+neither convex nor concave, like a bird's, one would think that the
+upward and downward strokes would neutralize each other; but they do
+not. Strong winds often carry them out over large bodies of water; but
+such a master flyer as the monarch beats its way back to shore, and,
+indeed, the monarch habitually flies long distances over salt water when
+migrating along our seacoast in spring and fall.
+
+At the moment of writing these paragraphs, I saw a hen-hawk flap heavily
+by, pursued by a kingbird. The air was phenomenally still, not a leaf
+stirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat his wings vigorously. No
+soaring now, no mounting heavenward, as I have seen him mount till his
+petty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and returned to earth. But
+the next day, with a fairly good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks for
+many minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the skies, till they
+became very small objects against the clouds, and not once did they flap
+their wings! Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top and sailed
+straight into the face of the wind, till he was probably over his mate
+or young, when, with half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-tops
+like an arrow.
+
+In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the air may be divided into
+three grand classes: those which use their wings simply to transport
+themselves from one place to another,--the same use we put our legs
+to,--those which climb the heavens to attain a wide lookout, either for
+the pleasure of soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to scan a
+wide territory in search of food or prey, and those which feed as they
+fly. Most of our common birds are examples of the first class. Our hawks
+and buzzards are examples of the second class. Swallows, nighthawks, and
+some sea-birds are examples of the third class. A few of our birds use
+their wings to gain an elevation from which to deliver their songs--as
+the larks, and some of the finches; but the robins and the sparrows and
+the warblers and the woodpeckers are always going somewhere. The hawks
+and the buzzards are, comparatively speaking, birds of leisure.
+
+Every bird and beast is a master in the use of its own tools and
+weapons. We who look on from the outside marvel at their skill. Here is
+the carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about the verge-board of
+my porch-roof as I write this. It darts swiftly this way and that, and
+now and then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of whirring wings,
+as often does the hummingbird. How it does it, I do not know. I cannot
+count or distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At the same time,
+the chimney swifts sweep by me like black arrows, on wings apparently as
+stiff as if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air, now sailing.
+In some way they suggest winged gimlets. How thin and scimitar-like
+their wings are! They are certainly masters of their own craft.
+
+In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far below the body as
+they do above it. Note the crow flapping his way through the air. He is
+a heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His wings probably
+move through an arc of about ninety degrees. The phoebe flies with a
+peculiar snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird, with a mincing
+and hovering flight; it tiptoes through the air. The woodpeckers gallop,
+alternately closing and spreading their wings. The ordinary flight of
+the goldfinch is a very marked undulatory flight; a section of it, the
+rise and the fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The bird goes half
+that distance or more with wings closed. This is the flight the male
+indulges in within hearing distance of his brooding mate. During the
+love season he occasionally gives way to an ecstatic flight. This is a
+level flight, performed on round, open wings, which beat the air
+vertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song season is common to
+many of our birds. I have seen even the song sparrow indulge in it,
+rising fifty feet or more and delivering its simple song with obvious
+excitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock, inspired by the grand passion,
+rises upon whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and floats and
+circles at an altitude of a hundred feet or more, and in rapid
+smackering and chippering notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasy
+with our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight and is sharp and
+hurried, both flight and song differing radically from its everyday
+performance. One thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually on
+the wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk of all our singing
+birds. His season is brief but hilarious. In his level flight he seems
+to use only the tips of his wings, and we see them always below the
+level of his back. Our common birds that have no flight-song, so far as
+I have observed, are the bluebird, the robin, the phoebe, the social
+sparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the wood warblers, and
+most of the ground warblers.
+
+Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines had this to say about
+the flight of sea-gulls: "Sweeping around in circles, occasionally
+elevating themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide down and up
+the aerial inclines without apparently any effort whatever. But a close
+observation will show that at every turn the angle of inclination of the
+wings is changed to meet the new conditions. There is continual movement
+with power--by the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine only
+through mechanism obeying a mind not nearly so well instructed."
+
+The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing round and round, in a
+brisk breeze, on unbending wing, only now and then righting itself with
+a single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides upon the storm.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+BIRD INTIMACIES
+
+
+When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination to seek out new lands
+in my own country, or in other countries, to see what Nature is doing
+there, and what guise she wears, something prompts me to pause, and
+after a while to say to myself: "Look a little closer into the nature
+right at your own door; do a little intensive observation at home, and
+see what that yields you. The enticement of the far-away is mostly in
+your imagination; let your eyes and your imagination play once more on
+the old familiar birds and objects."
+
+One season in my walks to the woods I was on the lookout for a natural
+bracket among the tree-branches, to be used in supporting a book-shelf.
+I did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree, within a few feet
+from the corner of my own house, I found what I was searching for,
+perfect in every particular--the right angle and the supporting brace,
+or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have not forgotten.
+
+I find that one has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness and
+indifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild life
+about him to realize how much interesting natural history is being
+enacted every day before his very eyes--in his own garden and dooryard
+and apple-orchard and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and
+sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one rides or walks or sits
+under the trees, or loiters about the fields or woods, the play of wild
+life is going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed with the
+seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available for his instruction and
+entertainment. On every farm in the land a volume of live natural
+history goes to waste every year because there is no historian to note
+the happenings.
+
+The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens--a screen of
+leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert
+and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere
+fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that
+take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course
+of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have!
+The drama of wild life is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the
+stage before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other stages.
+
+I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing along the road
+between my place and the railway station one early May day became aware
+that a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees over their
+heads. It was the annual _saengerfest_ of the goldfinches--one of the
+prettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musical
+reunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, many
+hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and in
+the groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to
+the surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to account
+for. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birds
+sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it is difficult to
+identify the singers. It is a minor strain, but multitudinous, and fills
+all the air. The males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if to
+celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which, with the elm-trees,
+afford them their earliest food-supply. While they are singing they are
+busy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down to
+the ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut up
+to ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal flowering
+when they become spheres of fragile silver down.
+
+Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called a
+dandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bring
+the sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss to
+decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days as
+well as on fair. It all has a decidedly festive air, like the fete-days
+of humans. I know of nothing like it among other birds. It is the
+manifestation of something different from the flocking instinct; it is
+the social and holiday instinct, bringing the birds together for a brief
+season, as if in celebration of some special event or purpose. I have
+observed it in my vicinity every spring for many years, usually in April
+or early May, and it is the prettiest and most significant bird episode,
+involving a whole species, known to me.
+
+The goldfinch has many pretty ways. He is one of our most amiable birds.
+So far as my knowledge goes, he is not capable of one harsh note. His
+tones are all either joyous or plaintive. In his spring reunions they
+are joyous. In the peculiar flight-song in which he indulges in the
+mating season, beating the air vertically with his round, open wings,
+his tones are fairly ecstatic. His call to his mate when she is
+brooding, and when he circles about her in that long, billowy flight,
+the crests of his airy waves being thirty or forty feet apart, calling,
+"Perchic-o-pee, perchic-o-pee," as if he were saying, "For love of thee,
+for love of thee," and she calling back, "Yes, dearie; yes, dearie"--his
+tones at such times express contentment and reassurance.
+
+When any of his natural enemies appear--a hawk, a cat, a jay--his tones
+are plaintive and appealing. "Pit-y, pit-y!" he cries in sorrow and not
+in anger.
+
+When with his mate he leads their brood about the August thistles, the
+young call in a similar tone. When in July the nesting has begun, the
+female talks the prettiest "baby talk" to her mate as he feeds her. The
+nest-building rarely begins till thistledown can be had--so literally
+are all the ways of this darling bird ways of softness and gentleness.
+The nest is a thick, soft, warm structure, securely fastened in the fork
+of a maple or an apple-tree.
+
+None of our familiar birds endear themselves to us more than does the
+bluebird. The first bluebird in the spring is as welcome as the blue sky
+itself. The season seems softened and tempered as soon as we hear his
+note and see his warm breast and azure wing. His gentle manners, his
+soft, appealing voice, not less than his pleasing hues, seem born of the
+bright and genial skies. He is the spirit of the April days incarnated
+in a bird. He has the quality of winsomeness, like the violet and the
+speedwell among the flowers. Not strictly a songster, yet his every note
+and call is from out the soul of harmony. The bluebird is evidently an
+offshoot from the thrush family, and without the thrush's gift of song;
+still his voice affords us much of the same pleasure.
+
+How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer
+them suitable nesting-retreats! Bring them something from nature,
+something with the bark on--a section of a dry beech or maple limb in
+which the downy woodpecker has excavated his chamber and passed the
+winter or reared his brood; fasten it in early spring upon the corner of
+your porch, or on the trunk of a near-by tree, and see what interesting
+neighbors you will soon have. One summer I brought home from one of my
+walks to the woods a section, two or three feet long, of a large yellow
+birch limb which contained such a cavity as I speak of, and I wired it
+to one of the posts of the rustic porch at Woodchuck Lodge. The next
+season a pair of bluebirds reared two broods in it. The incubation of
+the eggs for the second brood was well under way when I appeared upon
+the scene in early July. My sudden presence so near their treasures, and
+my lingering there with books and newspapers, disturbed the birds a good
+deal. The first afternoon the mother bird did not enter the cavity for
+hours. I shall always remember the pretty and earnest manner in which
+the male tried to reassure her and persuade her that the danger was not
+so imminent as it appeared to be, probably encouraging a confidence in
+his mate which he did not himself share. The mother bird would alight at
+the entrance to the chamber, but, with her eye fixed upon the man with
+the newspaper, feared to enter. The male, perched upon the telegraph
+wire fifty feet away, would raise his wings and put all the love and
+assurance in his voice he was capable of, apparently trying to dispel
+her fears. He would warble and warble, and make those pretty wing
+gestures over and over, saying so plainly: "It is all right, my dear,
+the man is harmless--absorbed there in his newspaper. Go in, go in, and
+keep warm our precious eggs!" How long she hesitated! But as night grew
+near she grew more and more anxious, and he more and more eloquent.
+Finally she alighted upon the edge of the overhanging roof and peered
+down hesitatingly. Her mate applauded and encouraged till finally she
+made the plunge and entered the hole, but instantly came out again; her
+heart failed her for a moment; but she soon returned and remained
+inside. Then her mate flew away toward the orchard, uttering a cheery
+note which doubtless she understood.
+
+The birds soon became used to my presence and their household matters
+progressed satisfactorily. Both birds took a hand in feeding the young,
+which grew rapidly. When they were nearly ready to leave the nest, a
+cruel fate befell them: I slept upon the porch, and one night I was
+awakened by the cry of young bluebirds, and the sound of feet like those
+of a squirrel on the roof over me. Then I heard the cry of a young bird
+proceed from the butternut-tree across the road opposite the house. I
+said to myself, "A squirrel or an owl is after my birds." The cry coming
+so quickly from the butternut-tree made me suspect an owl, and that the
+bird whose cry I heard was in his talons. I was out of my cot and up to
+the nest in a moment, but the tragedy was over; the birds were all gone,
+and the night was silent. In the morning I found that a piece of the
+brittle birch limb had been torn away, enlarging the entrance to the
+cavity so that the murderous talons of the owl could reach in and seize
+the young birds. I had been aroused in time to hear the marauder on the
+roof with one, and then hear its cry as he carried it to the tree. In
+the grass in front I found one of the young, unable to fly, but
+apparently unhurt. I put it back in the nest, but it would not stay. The
+spell of the nest was broken, and the young bird took to the grass
+again. The parent birds were on hand, much excited, and, when I tried to
+return the surviving bird to the nest, the male came at me fiercely,
+apparently charging the whole catastrophe to me.
+
+We had strong proof the previous season that an owl, probably the
+screech owl, prowled about the house at night. A statuette of myself in
+clay which a sculptor was modeling was left out one night on the porch,
+and in the morning its head was unusually bowed. The prints of a bird's
+talons upon the top told what had happened. In the bronze reproduction
+of that statuette the head has more of a droop than the artist at first
+planned to give it.
+
+The next season the bluebirds occupied the cavity in the birch limb
+again, but before my arrival in July the owls had again cleaned them
+out. In so doing they had ripped the cavity open nearly to the bottom.
+For all that, early the following May bluebirds were occupying the
+cavity again. It held three eggs when I arrived. I looked over the
+situation and resolved to try to head off the owl this time, even at the
+risk of driving the bluebirds away. I took a strip of tin several inches
+wide and covered the slit with it and wired it fast. Then I obtained a
+broad strip of dry birch-bark, wrapped it about the limb over the tin,
+and wired it fast, leaving the entrance to the nest in its original
+form. I knew the owl could not slit the tin; the birch-bark would hide
+it and preserve in a measure the natural appearance of the branch. When
+the bluebirds saw what had happened to their abode, they were a good
+deal distressed; they could no longer see their eggs through the slit
+which the owl had made, and they refused to enter the cavity. They hung
+about all day, uttering despondent notes, approaching the nest at times,
+but hesitating even to alight upon the roof above it. Occasionally the
+female would fly away toward the distant woods or hills uttering that
+plaintive, homesick note which seemed to mean farewell. The male would
+follow her, calling in a more cheery and encouraging tone. Once the
+couple were gone three or four hours, and I concluded they had really
+deserted the place. But just before sundown they were back again, and
+the female alighted at the entrance to the nest and looked in. The male
+called to her cheerily; still she would not enter, but joined him on the
+telephone wire, where the two seemed to hold a little discussion.
+Presently the mother bird flew to the nest again, then to the roof above
+it, then back to the nest, and entered it till only her tail showed,
+then flew back to the wire beside her mate. She was evidently making up
+her mind that the case was not hopeless. After a little more
+maneuvering, and amid the happy, reassuring calls of her mate, she
+entered the nest cavity and remained, and I was as well pleased as was
+her mate.
+
+No owls disturbed them this time, and the brood of young birds was
+brought off in due season. In July a second brood of four was
+successfully reared and sent forth on their career.
+
+The oriole nests in many kinds of trees--oaks, maples, apple-trees,
+elms--but her favorite is the elm. She chooses the end of one of the
+long drooping branches where a group of small swaying twigs affords her
+suitable support. It is the most unlikely place imaginable for any but a
+pendent nest, woven to half a dozen or more slender, vertical twigs,
+and swaying freely in the wind. Few nests are so secure, so hidden, and
+so completely sheltered from the rains by the drooping leaves above and
+around it. It is rarely discoverable except from directly beneath it. I
+think a well-built oriole's nest would sustain a weight of eight or ten
+pounds before it would be torn from its moorings. They are also very
+partial to the ends of branches that swing low over the highway. One May
+I saw two female orioles building their nests twenty or twenty-five feet
+above our State Road, where automobiles and other vehicles passed nearly
+every minute all the day. An oriole's nest in a remote field far from
+highways and dwellings is a rare occurrence.
+
+Birds of different species differ as widely in skill in nest-building as
+they do in song. From the rude platform of dry twigs and other coarse
+material of the cuckoo, to the pendent, closely woven pouch of the
+oriole, the difference in the degree of skill displayed is analogous to
+the difference between the simple lisp of the cedar-bird, or the little
+tin whistle of the "chippie," and the golden notes of the wood thrush,
+or the hilarious song of the bobolink.
+
+Real castles in the air are the nests of the orioles; no other nests are
+better hidden or apparently more safe from the depredations of crows and
+squirrels. To start the oriole's nest successfully is quite an
+engineering feat. The birds inspect the branches many times before they
+make a decision. When they have decided on the site, the mother bird
+brings her first string or vegetable fiber and attaches it to a twig by
+winding it around and around many times, leaving one or both ends
+hanging free. I have nests where these foundation strings are wound
+around a twig a dozen times. In her blind windings and tuckings and
+loopings the bird occasionally ties a substantial knot, but it is never
+the result of a deliberate purpose as some observers contend, but purely
+a matter of chance. When she uses only wild vegetable fibers, she
+fastens it to the twig by a hopeless kind of tangle. It is about the
+craziest kind of knitting imaginable. After the builder has fastened
+many lines to opposite twigs, their ends hanging free, she proceeds to
+span the little gulf by weaving them together. She stands with her claws
+clasped one to each side, and uses her beak industriously, looping up
+and fastening the loose ends. I have stood in the road under the nest
+looking straight up till my head swam, trying to make out just how she
+did it, but all I could see was the bird standing astride the chasm she
+was trying to bridge, and busy with the hanging strings. Slowly the maze
+of loose threads takes a sacklike form, the bottom of the nest thickens,
+till some morning you see the movement of the bird inside it; her beak
+comes through the sides from within, like a needle or an awl, seizes a
+loose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightens
+it. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of any
+particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it were
+the work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no conscious
+method of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is not
+something builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethought
+enter; it is the result of the blind groping of instinct which rarely
+errs, but which does not see the end from the beginning, as reason does.
+The oriole sometimes overhands the rim of her nest with strings and
+fibers to make it firm, and to afford a foundation for her to perch
+upon, but it is like the pathetic work which an untaught blind child
+might do under similar conditions. The birds use fine, strong strings in
+their nest-building at their peril. Many a tragedy results from it. I
+have an oriole's nest sent me from Michigan on the outside of which is a
+bird's dried foot with a string ingeniously knotted around it. It would
+be difficult to tie so complicated a knot. The tragedy is easy to read.
+Another nest sent me from the Mississippi Valley is largely made up of
+fragments of fish-line with the fish-hooks on them. But there is no sign
+that the bird came to grief using this dangerous material. Where the
+lives of the wild creatures impinge upon our lives is always a
+danger-line to them. They are partakers of our bounty in many ways, but
+they pay a tax to fate in others.
+
+The orioles in my part of the country always use the same material in
+the body of their nests--a kind of soft, gray, flaxlike fiber which they
+apparently get from some species of everlasting flower. Woven together
+and quilted through with strings and horse-hairs, it makes strong, warm,
+feltlike walls. In the nest sent me from Michigan the walls are made of
+something that suggests brown human hair, except that it is too hard and
+brittle for hair.
+
+Our orchard oriole also makes a pendent nest, but not so deep and
+pocketlike as that of the Baltimore oriole, and showing no such
+elaborate use of strings and hairs. It is made entirely of some sort of
+dried grass, very elaborately woven together.
+
+Bullock's oriole of California weaves its nest entirely of the long,
+strong threads which it draws out of the palm-leaves. The only one I
+have seen was suspended from the under side of one of those leaves.
+
+I think the prize nest of the woods, if we except the nest of the
+hummingbird, is that of the wood pewee. It is as smooth and compact and
+symmetrical as if turned in a lathe out of some soft, feltlike
+substance. Of course, the phoebe's artistic masonry under the shelving
+rocks, covered with moss and lined with feathers, or with the finest dry
+grass and bark fibers, sheltered from the storms and beyond the reach
+of four-footed prowlers, is almost ideal. It certainly is a happy
+thought.
+
+The least flycatcher, the kingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, the
+indigo-bird, are all fine nest-builders, each with a style of its own.
+
+About the most insecure nest in our trees is that of the little social
+sparrow, or "chippie." When the sudden summer storms come, making the
+tree-tops writhe as if in agony, I think of this frail nest amid the
+tossing branches. Pass through the grove or orchard after the tempest is
+over, and you are pretty sure to find several wrecked nests upon the
+ground. "Chippie" has never learned the art of nest-building in trees.
+She is a poor architect. She should have kept to the ground or to the
+low bushes. The true tree nest-builders weave their nests fast to the
+branches, but "Chippie" does not; she simply arranges her material
+loosely between them, where the nest is supported, but not secured. She
+seems pathetically ignorant of the fact that there are such things as
+wind and storm. Hence her frail structure is more frequently dislodged
+from the trees than that of any other bird.
+
+Recently, after a day of violent northwest wind, I found a wrecked
+robin's nest and eggs upon the lawn under a maple--not a frequent
+spectacle. The robin's firm masonry is usually proof against wind and
+rain, but in this case the nest was composed almost entirely of dry
+grass; there was hardly a trace of mud in it, hence it was flexible and
+yielding, and had no grip of the branches. It was evidently the second
+nest of the pair this season, and the second nest in summer of any
+species of bird is frailer and more of a makeshift than the first nest
+in spring. Comparatively few of our birds attempt to bring off a second
+brood unless the first attempt has been defeated, but the robin is sure
+to bring off two, and may bring off three. But the robin is a hustler,
+probably the most enterprising of all our birds. I recall a mother robin
+that, in late June, repaired a nest in a climbing rosebush which her
+first brood had vacated only a week before. A brood of wood thrushes
+which left their nest about the same time was still being fed by their
+parents about the place.
+
+The song sparrow, the social sparrow, the phoebe, the bluebird, all
+build a second nest. The first brood of the bluebird will be looked
+after by the father in some near-by grove or orchard, while the mother
+starts a new family in the old nest. If all goes well with them, those
+two bluebird families will unite and keep together in a loose flock till
+they migrate in the fall.
+
+So many of our birds nest about our houses and lawns and gardens and
+along our highways, that at first sight it seems as if they must be
+drawn there by a sense of greater security for their eggs and young. The
+robin has become almost a domestic institution. It is rarely that one
+finds a robin's nest very far from a human habitation. One spring there
+were four robins' nests on my house and outbuildings--in the vines, on
+window-sills, or other coigns of vantage. There were at the same time at
+least fifteen robins' nests on my lot of sixteen acres, and I am quite
+certain that I have not seen all there were. They were in sheds and
+apple-trees and spruces and cedars, in the ends of piles of grape-posts,
+in rosebushes, in the summer-house, and on the porch. We did not expect
+to get one of the early cherries, and might count ourselves lucky if we
+got any of the later ones.
+
+A robin has built her nest in my summer-house. She abuses me so when I
+try to tarry there, after incubation has begun, that I take no comfort
+and presently withdraw. Until her brood has flown, I am practically a
+stranger in my open-air rest-house and study.
+
+When the fish crows come egging in the spruces and maples about the
+house, and I hear the screaming of the robins, I seize my gun and rush
+out to protect them, but am not always successful, as the mischief is
+often done before I get within reach; I am not sure but that the robins
+think--if they think at all--that I am in league with the crows to
+despoil them. I was not in time to save the eggs of the wood thrush the
+other morning, when I heard the alarm calls of the birds, but I had the
+satisfaction of seeing the black marauder go limping over the hill,
+dropping quills from his wings at nearly every stroke. I am sure he will
+not come back. The fish crow is one of the most active enemies of our
+small birds. Of course, he only obeys his instincts in hunting out and
+devouring their eggs and young, but I fancy I obey something higher than
+instinct when I protest with powder and shot.
+
+The birds do not mind the approach of the domestic animals, such as the
+cow, the horse, the sheep, the pig, and they are only a little
+suspicious of the dog, but the appearance of the cat fills them with
+sudden alarm. I think that birds that have never before seen a cat join
+in the hue and cry. What alarms one alarms all within hearing. The
+orioles are probably the most immune from the depredations of crows and
+jays and owls of all our birds, and yet they will join in the cry of
+"Thief, thief!" when a crow appears. (The alarm cry of birds will even
+arrest the attention of four-footed beasts, and often bring the
+sportsman's stalking to naught.)
+
+I fancy that Phoebe selects our sheds and bridges and porticoes for
+her nesting-sites because they are so much more numerous than the
+overhanging rocks where her forbears built. For the same reason certain
+of the swallows and the swifts select our barns and chimneys.
+
+If the birds themselves are not afraid to draw near us, why should their
+instinct lead them to feel that their enemies will be afraid of us? How
+do they know that a jay or a crow or a red squirrel will be less timid
+than they are? And why also, if they have such confidence in us, do they
+raise such a hue and cry when we pass near their nests? The robin in my
+summer-house knew, if she knew anything, that I had never raised a
+finger against her. On the contrary, my hoe in the garden had unearthed
+many a worm and slug for her. Still she sees in me only a possible
+enemy, and tolerate me with my book or my newspaper near her nest she
+will not. Another robin has built her nest in a rosebush that has been
+trained to form an arch over the walk that leads to the kitchen door and
+only a few yards from it; but whenever we pass and repass she scurries
+away with loud, angry protests and keeps it up as long as we are in
+sight, so that we do not feel at all complimented by her settling down
+so near us. If one's appearance is so alarming, even when he is going to
+hoe the garden, why did the intolerant bird set up her household gods so
+near? If I keep away her enemies, why will she not be gracious enough to
+regard me as her friend? The robin that trusted her brood to the
+sheltering vines of the woodshed, and lined her nest with the hair of
+our old gray horse--why should she scream, "Murder!" whenever any of us
+go to the well a few feet away?
+
+What is the real explanation of the fact that so many of our birds nest
+so near our dwellings and yet show such unfriendliness when we come near
+them? Their apparent confidence, on the one hand, contradicts their
+suspicion on the other. Is it because we have here the workings of a new
+instinct which has not yet adjusted itself to the workings of the older
+instinct of solicitude for the safety of the nest and young? My own
+interpretation is that birds are not drawn near us by any sense of
+greater security in our vicinity. It is evident from the start that
+there is an initial fear of us to be overcome. How, then, could the
+sense of greater safety in our presence arise? Fear and trust do not
+spring from the same root. How should the robins and thrushes know that
+their enemies--the jays, the crows, and the like--are more afraid of
+human beings than they are themselves? Hunted animals pursued by wolves
+or hounds will at times take refuge in the haunts of men, not because
+they expect human protection, but because they are desperate, and
+oblivious to everything save some means of escape. If the hunted deer or
+fox rushes into an open shed or a barn door, it is because it is
+desperately hard-pressed, and sees and knows nothing but some object or
+situation that it may place between itself and its deadly enemy. The
+great fear obliterates all minor fears.
+
+The key to the behavior of the birds in this respect may be found in the
+Darwinian theory of natural selection. From the first settlement of the
+country a few of the common birds, attracted by a more suitable or more
+abundant food-supply, or other conditions, must inevitably have nested
+near human dwellings. These birds would thrive better and succeed in
+bringing off more young than those that nested in more exposed places.
+Hence, their progeny would soon be in the ascendancy. All animals seem
+to have associated memory. These birds would naturally return to the
+scenes and conditions of their youth, and start their nests there. It
+would not be confidence in men that would draw them; rather would the
+truth be that the fear of man is inadequate to overcome or annul this
+home attraction.
+
+The catbird does not come to our vines on the veranda to nest from
+considerations of safety, but because her line of descent runs through
+such places. The catbirds and robins and phoebe-birds that were reared
+far from human habitations doubtless return to such localities to rear
+their young. The home sense in birds is strong. I have positive proof in
+a few instances of robins and song sparrows returning successive years
+to the same neighborhood. It is very certain, I think, that the
+phoebe-birds that daub our porches with their mud, and in July leave
+a trail of minute creeping and crawling pests, were not themselves
+hatched and reared in the pretty, moss-covered structure under the
+shelving rocks in the woods, or on the hillsides.
+
+How different from the manners of the robins are the manners of a pair
+of catbirds that have a nest in the honeysuckle against the side of the
+first-floor sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from the nature of the
+catbird than the hue and cry which the robin at times sets up. The
+catbird is sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline _mew_ is her
+characteristic note. She never raises her voice like the town-crier, as
+the robin does, perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold him.
+The catbird peers and utters her soft protest from her hiding-place in
+the bushes. This particular pair of catbirds appeared in early May and
+began slyly to look over the situation in the vines and bushes about the
+house. All their proceedings were very stealthy; they were like two dark
+shadows gliding about, avoiding observation--no tree-tops or house-tops
+for them, but coverts close to the ground. We hoped they would divine
+safety in the shadow of the cottage, but tried to act as if oblivious of
+their goings and comings. We saw them now and then stealthily inspecting
+the tangle of honeysuckle on the east side of the veranda, where a robin
+last season reared a brood, and the low hedge of barberry-bushes on the
+south side of the cottage, where a song sparrow had her nest. If they
+come, which will they take, we wondered. Several times in the early
+morning I heard the male singing vivaciously and confidently in the
+thick of the honeysuckle. I guessed that the honeysuckle was the choice
+of the male, and that his song was a paean in praise of it, addressed to
+his mate. But it was nearly a week before his musical argument prevailed
+and the site was apparently agreed upon.
+
+When the nest-building actually began, the birds were so shy about it
+that, watch as I might, I failed to catch them in the act. One morning I
+saw the mother bird in the garden with nesting-material in her beak, but
+she failed to come to the honeysuckle with it while I watched from a
+near-by covert. At the same time robins were flying here and there with
+loaded beaks, and wood thrushes were going through the air trailing long
+strips of white paper behind them, but the catbird was an emblem of
+secrecy itself. She, too, brought fragments of white paper to her nest,
+but no one saw her do it. Like other nest-builders, she apparently put
+in her big strokes of work in the early morning before the sleepers on
+the veranda were stirring. A few times my inquisitive eye, cautiously
+peering over the railing, started her from the vine, but I never saw her
+enter it with leaf, stick, or straw; yet slowly the nest grew and came
+into shape, and finally received its finishing touches. So cautiously
+had the birds proceeded that, were they capable of concepts like us, I
+should fancy they flattered themselves that we had not the least
+suspicion of their little secret. The male ceased to sing near the house
+after the nest was begun. So much time elapsed after the finishing of
+the nest before the first egg appeared in it that some members of the
+household feared the birds had deserted it, especially as they were not
+seen about the premises for several days. But the weather was wet and
+cool, and the eggs ripened slowly. Then one morning the birds were seen
+again, and one blue-green egg was discovered in the nest. The next
+morning another egg was added, and a third egg on the third morning, and
+a fourth on the fourth morning. In due time incubation began, and
+thenceforth all went well with our dusky neighbors.
+
+It is an anxious moment for all birds when their young leave the nest.
+One noontime by the unusual mewing of a parent catbird I felt sure that
+the critical time had come. Sure enough, there sat one of the young on a
+twig a few inches above the nest, motionless and hushed. No lusty
+response to the agitated cry of the mother, as is usually the case with
+the robin. "No publicity" is the watchword of the young catbirds as well
+as of the old. An hour or two later another young one was perched on a
+branch, and before night, when no one was looking, they both
+disappeared, leaving two motionless birds in the nest. The next morning
+early, without any signs of alarm or agitation on the part of the old
+birds, they took the important step. It could hardly have been much of a
+flight with any of them, as their wing-quills were only partially
+developed, and their tails were mere stubs. For several days afterward
+no sign or sound of old or young was seen or heard. They were probably
+keeping well concealed in the near-by trees or in the vines and
+currant-bushes in the vineyard. In about a week the whole family
+appeared briefly in upper branches of the maples near the house. The
+young were distinguishable from the old only by their shorter tails. A
+few days later the parent birds were seen moving stealthily through the
+vines and bushes about the house, or perching on the near-by stakes that
+supported the wire netting. Are they coming back for a second brood? was
+the question in our minds.
+
+Soon we began to hear snatches of song from the male, then one morning a
+regular old-time burst of joy from him in the vine that held the old
+nest. Then he sang in a syringa-bush near the window on the south side
+of the cottage, and both birds were soon seen paying frequent visits to
+the bush. We felt sure another brood was in the air. Whether or not the
+first brood were now shifting for themselves, we did not know; they
+never again appeared upon the scene. Finally, on the morning of the
+Fourth of July, the foundation of a new nest was started in the
+syringa-bush three feet from the ground, and barely four feet from the
+window!
+
+We had a view of the proceedings that the first site did not afford us.
+The old nest appeared to be in perfect condition, but there was
+evidently no thought with the birds of using it again, as the robins
+sometimes do, and as bluebirds and cliff swallows always do. A new nest,
+built of material almost identical with that of the old, and in a more
+exposed position, was decided upon. It progressed rapidly, and I was
+delighted to find that the male assisted in the building. Indeed, he was
+fully as active as the female. Very often they were both in the nest
+with material at the same moment. They seemed to agree perfectly. At
+first I got the impression that the male was not quite as decided as the
+female, and hesitated more, once or twice bringing material that he
+finally rejected. But he soon warmed up to the work and certainly did
+his share.
+
+With most species of our birds the nest is entirely built by the female.
+With the robin, the wood thrush, the phoebe, the oriole, the
+hummingbird, the pewee, and many others, the male is only an interested
+spectator of the proceeding. He usually attends his mate in her quest
+for material, but does not lend a hand, or a bill. I think the cock
+wren assists in nest-building. I know the male cedar-bird does, and
+probably the male woodpeckers do also. The male rose-breasted grosbeak
+assists in incubation, and has been seen to sing upon the nest. It seems
+fair to infer that he assists in the nest-building also, but I am not
+certain that he does, and I have heard another observer state that in a
+nest which he watched the female apparently did it all.
+
+My catbirds both worked overtime one afternoon at least, being on their
+job as late as seven o'clock. In three days the nest was done, all but
+touching up the interior. During the construction I laid out pieces of
+twine and bits of white paper on the bushes and wire netting, also some
+loose material from the outside of the old nest; all was quickly used.
+How much labor the birds would have saved themselves had they pulled the
+old nest to pieces and used the material a second time! I have known the
+oriole to start a nest, then change her mind, and then detach some of
+her strings and fibers and carry them to the new site; and I once saw a
+"chebec" whose eggs had been destroyed pull the old nest to pieces and
+rebuild it in a tree a hundred feet away.
+
+The male catbird is slightly brighter and fresher-looking than his mate,
+but we could easily tell her by her often simulating the actions of a
+young bird when she came with material in her beak; she would alight on
+a near-by post and slightly spread and quiver her wings in a tender,
+beseeching kind of way. She would do this also when bringing food to her
+first brood. When one of the parent birds of any species simulates by
+voice or manner the young birds, it is always the female; her heart
+would naturally be more a-quiver with anticipation than that of the
+male.
+
+On the fifth day the nest was completed and received its first egg.
+There was considerable delay with the second egg, but it appeared on the
+second or third day, and the third egg the following day. Then
+incubation began. In twenty days from the day the nest was begun, the
+birds were hatched, and in eleven days more they had quietly left the
+nest.
+
+A friend of mine who has a summer home on one of the trout-streams of
+the Catskills discovered that the catbird was fond of butter, and she
+soon had one of the birds coming every day to the dining-room window for
+its lump of fresh butter, and finally entering the dining-room, perching
+on the back of the chair, and receiving its morsel of butter from a fork
+held in the mistress's hand. I think the butter was unsalted. My friend
+was convinced after three years that the same pair of birds returned to
+her each year, because each season the male came promptly for his
+butter.
+
+The furtive and stealthy manners of the catbird contrast strongly with
+the frank, open manners of the thrushes. Its cousin the brown thrasher
+goes skulking about in much the same way, flirting from bush to bush
+like a culprit escaping from justice. But he does love to sing from the
+April tree-tops where all the world may see and hear, if said world does
+not come too near. In the South and West the thrasher also nests in the
+vicinity of houses, but in New York and New England we must look for him
+in remote, bushy fields. I do not know of any bad traits that go with
+the thrasher's air of suspicion and secrecy, but I do know of one that
+goes with the catbird's--I have seen her perch on the rim of another
+bird's nest and deliberately devour the eggs. But only once. Whether or
+not she frequently does this, I have no evidence. If she does, she is
+doubtless so sly about it that she escapes observation.
+
+I welcomed the catbird, though she is not so attractive a neighbor as
+the wood thrush. She has none of the wood thrush's dignity and grace.
+She skulks and slinks away like a culprit, while the wood thrush stands
+up before you or perches upon a limb, and turns his spotted waistcoat
+toward you in the most open and trusting manner. In fact, few birds have
+such good manners as the wood thrush, and few have so much the manner of
+a Paul Pry and eavesdropper as the catbird. The flight of the wood
+thrush across the lawn is such a picture of grace and harmony, it is
+music to the eye. The catbird seems saying, "There, there! I told you
+so, pretty figure, pretty figure you make!" But the courteous thrush
+(just here I heard the excited calls of robins and the hoarse, angry caw
+of a crow, and rushed out hatless to see a fish crow fly away from the
+maple in front of the Study, pursued by a mob of screeching robins. He
+took refuge in the spruces above the house where the collected robins
+abused him from surrounding branches. On my appearance he flew away, and
+the robins dispersed)--but the courteous thrush, I say, invites the
+good-breeding in you which he himself shows. The thrush never has the
+air of a culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other air. But I
+welcome them both. One shall stand for the harmony and repose of bird
+life, and the other for its restlessness and curiosity. The songs and
+the manners of birds correspond. The catbird, the brown thrasher, and
+the mockingbird are all theatrical in their manners--full of gestures of
+tail and wings, and their songs all imply an audience, while the serene
+melody of the thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of their
+behavior.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A MIDSUMMER IDYL
+
+
+As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the wide-open doors of a
+big hay-barn, busy with my pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my
+farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I idly contrast his harvest
+with mine. I have to admit that he succeeds with his better than I do
+with mine, though he can make hay only while the sun shines, while I can
+reap and cure my light fancies nearly as well in the shade as in the
+sun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. But
+I have this advantage over him--I might make literature out of his
+haymaking, or might reap his fields after him, and gather a harvest he
+never dreamed of. What does Emerson say?
+
+  One harvest from the field
+    Homeward bring the oxen strong;
+  A second crop thine acres yield,
+    Which I gather in a song.
+
+But the poet, like the farmer, can reap only where he has sown, and if
+Emerson had not scattered his own heart in the fields his Muse would not
+reap much there. Song is not one of the instruments with which I gather
+my harvest, but long ago, as a farm boy, in haymaking, and in driving
+the cows to and from the pasture, I planted myself there, and whatever
+comes back to me now from that source is honestly my own. The second
+crop which I gather is not much more tangible than that which the poet
+gathers, but the farmer as little suspects its existence as he does that
+of the poet. I can use what he would gladly reject. His daisies, his
+buttercups, his orange hawkweed, his yarrow, his meadow-rue, serve my
+purpose better than they do his. They look better on the printed page
+than they do in the haymow. Yes, and his timothy and clover have their
+literary uses, and his new-mown hay may perfume a line in poetry. When
+one of our poets writes, "wild carrot blooms nod round his quiet bed,"
+he makes better use of this weed than the farmers can.
+
+Certainly a midsummer day in the country, with all its sights and
+sounds, its singing birds, its skimming swallows, its grazing or
+ruminating cattle, its drifting cloud-shadows, its grassy perfumes from
+the meadows and the hillsides, and the farmer with his men and teams
+busy with the harvest, has material for the literary artist. A good hay
+day is a good day for the writer and the poet, because it has a certain
+crispness and pureness; it is positive; it is rich in sunshine; there is
+a potency in the blue sky which you feel; the high barometer raises your
+spirits; your thoughts ripen as the hay cures. You can sit in a circle
+of shade beneath a tree in the fields, or in front of the open hay-barn
+doors, as I do, and feel the fruition and satisfaction of nature all
+about you. The brimming meadows seem fairly to purr as the breezes
+stroke them; the trees rustle their myriad leaves as if in gladness; the
+many-colored butterflies dance by; the steel blue of the swallows' backs
+glistens in the sun as they skim the fields; and the mellow boom of the
+passing bumble-bee but enhances the sense of repose and contentment that
+pervades the air. The hay cures; the oats and corn deepen their hue; the
+delicious fragrance of the last wild strawberries is on the breeze; your
+mental skies are lucid, and life has the midsummer fullness and charm.
+
+As I linger here I note the oft-repeated song of the scarlet tanager in
+the maple woods that crown a hill above me, and in the loft overhead two
+broods of swallows are chattering and lining up their light-colored
+breasts on the rims of their nests, or trying their newly fledged wings
+while clinging to its sides. The only ominous and unwelcome sound is the
+call of the cuckoo, which I hear and have heard at nearly all hours for
+many days, and which surely bodes rain. The countryman who first named
+this bird the "rain crow" hit the mark. The cuckoo is a devourer of
+worms and caterpillars, and why he should be interested in rain is hard
+to see. The tree-toad calls before and during a shower, mainly, I think,
+because he likes to have his back wet, but why a well-dressed bird like
+the cuckoo should become a prophet of the rain is a mystery, unless the
+rain and the shadows are congenial to the gloomy mood in which he
+usually seems to be. He is the least sprightly and cheery of our birds,
+and the part of doleful prophet in our bird drama suits him well.
+
+A high barometer is best for the haymakers and it is best for the human
+spirits. When the smoke goes straight up, one's thoughts are more likely
+to soar also, and revel in the higher air. The persons who do not like
+to get up in the morning till the day has been well sunned and aired
+evidently thrive best on a high barometer. Such days do seem better
+ventilated, and our lungs take in fuller draughts of air. How curious it
+is that the air should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light when
+it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days when it is an effort to move,
+and the grasshopper is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the
+trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we are on its crest, and are
+buoyed up both in mind and in body, on the crisp, bright days when the
+air seems to offer us no resistance. We know that the heavier salt
+sea-water buoys us up more than the fresh river or pond water, but we do
+not feel in the same way the lift of the high barometric wave. Even the
+rough, tough-coated maple-trees in spring are quickly susceptible to
+these atmospheric changes. The farmer knows that he needs sunshine and
+crisp air to make maple-sugar as well as to make hay. Let the high
+blue-domed day with its dry northwest breezes change to a warmer,
+overcast, humid day from the south, and the flow of sap lessens at once.
+It would seem as if the trees had nerves on the outside of their dry
+bark, they respond to the change so quickly. There is no sap without
+warmth, and yet warmth, without any memory of the frost, stops the flow.
+
+The more the air presses upon us the lighter we feel, and the less it
+presses upon us the more "logy" we feel. Climb to the top of a mountain
+ten thousand feet high, and you breathe and move with an effort. The air
+is light, water boils at a low temperature, and our lungs and muscles
+seem inadequate to perform their usual functions. There is a kind of
+pressure that exhilarates us, and an absence of pressure that depresses
+us.
+
+The pressure of congenial tasks, of worthy work, sets one up, while the
+idle, the unemployed, has a deficiency of haemoglobin in his blood. The
+Lord pity the unemployed man, and pity the man so over-employed that the
+pressure upon him is like that upon one who works in a tunnel filled
+with compressed air.
+
+Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of the
+harvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day--the high
+blue dome, the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still white
+in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, the
+clover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds
+of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds still
+vocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. Very soon it
+will begin to ebb, the stalks of the meadow grasses will become dry and
+harsh, the clover will fade, the girlish daisies will become coarse and
+matronly, the birds will sing fitfully or cease altogether, the pastures
+will turn brown, and the haymakers will find the hay half cured as it
+stands waiting for them in the meadows.
+
+What a wonderful thing is the grass, so common, so abundant, so various,
+a green summer snow that softens the outlines of the landscape, that
+makes a carpet for the foot, that brings a hush to the fields, and that
+furnishes food to so many and such various creatures! More than the
+grazing animals live upon the grass. All our cereals--wheat, barley,
+rye, rice, oats, corn--belong to the great family of the grasses.
+
+Grass is the nap of the fields; it is the undergarment of the hills. It
+gives us the meadow, a feature in the northern landscape so common that
+we cease to remark it, but which we miss at once when we enter a
+tropical or semi-tropical country. In Cuba and Jamaica and Hawaii I saw
+no meadows and no pastures, no grazing cattle, none of the genial,
+mellow look which our landscape presents. Harshness, rawness, aridity,
+are the prevailing notes.
+
+From my barn-door outlook I behold meadows with their boundary line of
+stone fences that are like lakes and reservoirs of timothy and clover.
+They are full to the brim, they ripple and rock in the breeze, the green
+inundation seems about to overwhelm its boundaries, all the surface
+inequalities of the land are wiped out, the small rocks and stones are
+hidden, the woodchucks make their roads through it, immersed like
+dolphins in the sea. What a picture of the plenty and the flowing
+beneficence of our temperate zone it all presents! Nature in her kinder,
+gentler moods, dreaming of the tranquil herds and the bursting barns.
+Surely the vast army of the grass hath its victories, for the most part
+noiseless, peace-yielding victories that gladden the eye and
+tranquillize the heart.
+
+The meadow presents a pleasing picture before it is invaded by the
+haymakers, and a varied and animated one after it is thus invaded; the
+mowing-machine sending a shudder ahead of it through the grass, the
+hay-tedder kicking up the green locks like a giant, many-legged
+grasshopper, the horserake gathering the cured hay into windrows, the
+white-sleeved men with their forks pitching it into cocks, and, lastly,
+the huge, soft-cheeked loads of hay, towering above the teams that draw
+them, brushing against the bar-ways and the lower branches of the trees
+along their course, slowly winding their way toward the barn. Then the
+great mows of hay, or the shapely stacks in the fields, and the battle
+is won. Milk and cream are stored up in well-cured hay, and when the
+snow of winter fills the meadows as grass fills them in summer, the
+tranquil cow can still rest and ruminate in contentment.
+
+As the swallows sweep out and in near my head they give out an angry
+"Sleet, sleet," as if my presence had suddenly become offensive to them.
+I know what makes the change in their temper. The young are leaving
+their nests, and at such eventful times the parent birds are always
+nervous and anxious. When any of our birds launch a family into the
+world they would rather not have spectators, and you are pretty sure to
+be abused if you intrude upon the scene. The swallow can put a good deal
+of sharp emphasis into that "Sleet, sleet," though she is not armed to
+make any of her threats good. Who knows that all will go well with them
+when they first make the plunge into space with their untried wings? A
+careful parent should keep the coast clear.
+
+They have been testing their wings for several days, clinging to the
+sides of the nest and beating the wings rapidly. And now comes the
+crucial moment of letting go and attempting actual flight. Several of
+them have already done it, and I see them resting on the dead limbs of a
+plum-tree across the road. But more are to follow, and parental anxiety
+is still rife. I shall be sorry when the spacious hayloft becomes
+silent. That affectionate "Wit, wit" and that contented and caressing
+squeaking and chattering give me a sense of winged companionship. The
+old barn is the abode of friendly and delicate spirits, and the sight of
+them and the sound of them surely bring a suggestion of poetry and
+romance to these familiar scenes.
+
+Is not the swallow one of the oldest and dearest of birds? Known to the
+poets and sages and prophets of all peoples! So infantile, so helpless
+and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, the
+child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in
+the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly
+food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly
+coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape
+of a bird! Only in the free fields of the summer air could it have got
+that steel-blue of the wings and that warm tan of the breast. Of course
+I refer to the barn swallow. The cliff swallow seems less a child of the
+sky and sun, probably because its sheen and glow are less, and its shape
+and motions less arrowy. More varied in color, its hues yet lack the
+intensity, and its flight the swiftness, of those of its brother of the
+haylofts. The tree swallows and the bank swallows are pleasing, but they
+are much more local and restricted in their ranges than the
+barn-frequenters. As a farm boy I did not know them at all, but the barn
+swallows the summer always brought.
+
+After all, there is but one swallow; the others are particular kinds
+that we specify. How curious that men should ever have got the notion
+that this airy, fairy creature, this playmate of the sunbeams, spends
+the winter hibernating in the mud of ponds and marshes, the bedfellow of
+newts and frogs and turtles! It is an Old-World legend, born of the
+blindness and superstition of earlier times. One knows that the rain of
+the rainbow may be gathered at one's feet in a mud-puddle, but the
+fleeting spectrum of the bow is not a thing of life. Yet one would as
+soon think of digging up a rainbow in the mud as a swallow. The swallow
+follows the sun, and in August is off for the equatorial regions, where
+it hibernates on the wing, buried in tropical sunshine.
+
+Well, this brilliant day is a good day for the swallows, a good day for
+the haymakers, and a good day for him who sits before his open barn door
+and weaves his facts and midsummer fancies into this slight literary
+fabric.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+NEAR VIEWS OF WILD LIFE
+
+
+The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own way
+so quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate an
+interest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a line
+of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. One
+thing is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surer
+way to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In the
+blackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest or
+the indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed my
+fish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled the
+branch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. I
+unwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbled
+upon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; on
+still another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossy
+softness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log.
+
+Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fisherman
+often sees the nest of the phoebe-bird, which does not cease to please
+for the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry.
+On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far less
+pleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
+the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.
+
+Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight
+on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye
+upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the
+roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her
+secret--a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the
+finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited
+her first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season.
+Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably her
+first brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added an
+egg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out,
+the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said when
+she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they were
+mildewed.
+
+These ground-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the great
+common of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every
+hour--the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels,
+coons by night, and crows and hawks by day--what bird-lover does not
+experience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
+nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly;
+he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate.
+Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves a
+purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it is
+placed. What a center of solicitude and forethought.
+
+Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road,
+is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any other
+ground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden.
+The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only a
+nest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blind
+man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A little
+screen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of the
+nest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand did
+the mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with drooping
+wings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting up
+the whole performance.
+
+A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of the
+male many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
+one male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stone
+wall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford a
+hint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a very
+successful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall and
+in the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usually
+precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and
+breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.
+
+When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself
+into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
+her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays
+of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the
+hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be
+considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely
+placed in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of
+Canada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few square
+yards, the grazing is very poor. I do not think that the chances are one
+in fifty that the hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that the
+problem presented itself to the bird as it does to me, but her instinct
+was as sure a guide as my reason is to me--or a surer one.
+
+The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by a New England bird-lover,
+Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned writer on our birds, fifty or more years
+ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by our earlier
+writers. It haunts the hilly pastures and roadsides in the Catskill
+region. It is often called the road-runner, from its habit of running
+along the road ahead when one is driving or walking--a very different
+bird, however, from the road-runner of the Western States. The vesper is
+larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and russet, and does not
+frequent our gardens and orchards as does the latter. In color it
+suggests the European skylark; the two lateral white quills in its tail
+enhance this impression. One season a stray skylark, probably from Long
+Island or some other place where larks had been liberated, appeared in a
+broad, low meadow near me, and not finding his own kind paid court to a
+female vesper sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt pestered
+her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately and seemed much
+embarrassed by the attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.
+
+When the young of any species appear, the solicitude and watchfulness of
+the mother bird are greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the
+vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of my harmless
+character now for several weeks and, one would think, must know that her
+precious secret is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in her
+beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards away, she maneuvers
+around for a minute or two, flying up to the telephone wire or a few
+yards up or down the road, and finally approaches the nest with much
+hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her in the act. When she comes
+again and again and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.
+
+After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the half-fledged young were
+lying on the ground in front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous
+marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I could not divine.
+
+What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently so wise on some
+occasions and so absurd on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food
+to her young, going through the same tactics over and over, learns no
+more than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think;
+hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom of
+nature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to us
+sheer folly under changed conditions.
+
+When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better of her, she often
+devours the food she has in her beak, so fearful is she of betraying her
+precious secret. But the next time she comes she may only maneuver
+briefly before approaching the nest, and then again hesitate and parley
+with her fears and make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I had
+only just appeared upon the scene.
+
+One of the best things a bird-lover can have in front of his house or
+cabin is a small dead tree with numerous leafless branches. Many kinds
+of birds love to perch briefly where they can look around them. I would
+not exchange the old dead plum-tree that stands across the road in front
+of my lodge for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It bears a
+perpetual crop of birds. Of course the strictly sylvan birds, such as
+the warblers, the vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit thrushes,
+do not come, but many kinds of other birds pause there during the day
+and seem to enjoy the unobstructed view.
+
+All the field and orchard and grove birds come. In early summer the
+bobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows
+below, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comes
+and shows his brilliant front. The purple finch, the goldfinch, the
+indigo bunting, the bluebird, the kingbird, the phoebe-bird, the great
+crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee, the high-hole,
+the downy woodpecker, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy,
+pause there in the course of the day, and some of them several times
+during the day. Occasionally the scarlet tanager lights it up with his
+vivid color.
+
+But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song sparrow whose mate
+has a nest not far off. Here he perches and goes through his repertoire
+of three or four different songs from dawn till nightfall, pausing only
+long enough now and then to visit his mate or to refresh himself with a
+little food. He repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening
+his plumage in the intervals. He sings several hundred times a day and
+has been doing so for many weeks. The house wren during the
+breeding-season repeats his song thousands of times a day, while the
+red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning till night for several
+months. How a conscious effort like that would weary our human singers
+and their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious, in our sense, of
+what they are doing.
+
+When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle this singing sparrow
+presents! A little wild bird sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its
+voice in song hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
+
+In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, but
+viewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a song
+of praise and thanksgiving--joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mate
+and brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, a
+voice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving for
+the universal beneficence without which you and I and the little bird
+would not be here? In foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain
+and the cold do not silence him.
+
+There are few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the call
+of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of
+despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint
+of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from
+pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to
+being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay,
+with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in that
+category, were it not for their songs when the love passion makes
+optimists even of them. The strain of the hermit thrush which floats
+down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but
+more as the shades of night are falling--what does this pure, serene,
+exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words,
+
+  God's in his heaven--
+  All's right with the world!
+
+The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone, but what puts it
+into his heart to do that? Certainly it is good to have a mate and a
+brood!
+
+A new season brings new experiences with the same old familiar birds, or
+new thoughts about them. This season I have had new impressions of our
+cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen. Of the two species, the
+black-billed and the yellow-billed, the former prevails in the latitude
+of New England, and the latter farther south. We cannot hail our
+black-billed as "blithe newcomer," as Wordsworth does his cuckoo.
+"Doleful newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing cheery or
+animated in his note, and he is about as much a "wandering voice" as is
+the European bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of flowers. He is
+a prophet of the rain, and the country people call him the rain crow.
+All his notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His nesting-instincts
+seem to lead him, or rather her, to the thorn-bushes as inevitably as
+the grass finch's lead her to the grass.
+
+The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and inefficient bird that it is
+interesting to see it doing things. One of our young poets has a verse
+in which he sings of
+
+  The solemn priestly bumble-bee
+  That marries rose to rose.
+
+He might apply the same or similar adjectives to the cuckoo. Solemn and
+priestly, or at least monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and
+suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights, or is gay and
+cheerful like our other birds, I have yet to witness it.
+
+During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by my
+door toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill.
+One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch very
+still and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on the
+tentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh,
+guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two he
+began to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose the
+nest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped or
+flitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note every
+minute or two.
+
+After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thorny
+branches which separated the thicket from the meadow and stepped
+outside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the nest
+on an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was covering
+her half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off,
+withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls.
+
+In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, while
+another barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened,
+while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The most
+mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if
+petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents
+was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke
+the parents up and they got down to real work in caring for their
+charge.
+
+The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellow
+stripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell.
+
+That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo--how long in the
+history of its race since it mastered it and became its own
+nest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is.
+Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree,
+with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs a
+foot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking
+nest and nursery I ever beheld--a mere platform of twigs about four
+inches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material,
+looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this very
+thorn.
+
+In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, which
+is their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green
+worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest worm
+that is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in
+force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of the
+worms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a day
+with a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it is
+doing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is a
+solemn creature; its note is almost funereal.
+
+Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive about its nesting-habits
+as any of the sparrows. The male bird seems to know that his brilliant
+color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far away from the nest,
+singing at all hours of the day in a circle around it, the radius of
+which must be more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest was near
+the house, almost under the clothes-line, in a low blackberry-bush,
+partly masked by tall-growing daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass
+near it, when off went the little brown bird with her sharp, chiding
+manners. She is a very emphatic creature. It is yea and nay with her
+every time.
+
+The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is not a very pleasing
+singer, but an all-day one and an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer
+birds. In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows and
+goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds. Their range of
+food is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them taking
+food of any kind.
+
+How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if we
+look closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
+woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on a
+cushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smooth
+exposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself up
+to a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping or
+looping along.
+
+I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of my
+straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
+an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind
+legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt
+for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for
+a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping
+worm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a little
+silvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a brief
+season of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitable
+place and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some other
+bird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and on
+dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.
+
+A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and a
+quarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother of
+the green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousand
+times, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have--a traveling
+arch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than your
+head, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standing
+twenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is a
+puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose.
+
+With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go
+looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to
+go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By
+chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes
+looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
+of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig,
+six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it the
+creature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, then
+turns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. This
+it explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, then
+loops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored,
+profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measures
+off another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves.
+
+Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way like
+this? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but
+has there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm?
+The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth into
+surrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to be
+sure that no chance to make a new connection is missed.
+
+Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet,
+lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it
+would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night
+posing as a twig.
+
+Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a
+hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes short
+work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemed
+to be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs
+or bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yards
+from me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy
+bird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart of
+all the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the winged
+jewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders--it came
+like a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly.
+
+All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of their own, all except the
+woodchuck; wherever he is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is
+known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a real sylvan frog, as
+pretty as a bird, the color of the dry leaves, slender and elegant in
+form and quick and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one in the bed
+of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand toward him and stroked his back
+with a twig. If you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put a spell
+upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized. He was instantly responsive to my
+passes. He began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my finger
+instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly, rose up more upon his
+feet, and bowed his head. As I continued the titillation he began to
+give forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if he were going to
+break out in song. He did not, but he seemed loath to go his way. How
+different he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in large numbers
+make a multitudinous croaking and clucking in the little wild pools in
+spring! He wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in the pools
+celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice is off them, and then in two
+or three days he takes to the open woods and assumes the assimilative
+coloring of the dry leaves.
+
+The little orange-colored salamander, a most delicate and highly colored
+little creature, is as harmless as a baby, and about as slow and
+undecided in its movements. Its cold body seems to like the warmth of
+your hand. Yet in color it is as rich an orange as the petal of the
+cardinal flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an outside color;
+it is a glow, and renders the creature almost transparent, an effect as
+uniform as the radiance of a precious stone. Its little,
+innocent-looking, three-toed foot, or three and a half toed--how
+unreptilian it looks through my pocket glass! A baby's hand is not more
+so. Its throbbing throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes with
+a glint of gold above them--only a close view of these satisfies one.
+
+Here is another remarkable transformation among the small wild folk. In
+the spring he is a dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;
+now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the woods. This is said
+to be an immature form, which returns to the ponds and matures the next
+season; but whether it is the male or the female that assumes this
+bright hue, or both, I do not know. The coat seems to be its midsummer
+holiday uniform which is laid aside when it goes back to the marshes to
+hibernate in the fall.
+
+Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means of protection that do
+not at once appear. In the case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or
+other disagreeable secretion, which would cause any animal to repent
+that took it in its mouth. It is even less concerned at being caught
+than is the skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.
+
+In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon the domain of another
+sylvan denizen, the chipmunk. One afternoon one suddenly came up from
+the open field below me with his pockets full of provender of some sort;
+just what sort I wondered, as there was no grain or seeds or any dry
+food that it would be safe to store underground for the winter.
+
+Beholding me sitting there within two yards of his den was a great
+surprise to him. He eyed me a long time--squirrel time--making little,
+spasmodic movements on the flat stone above his den. At a motion of my
+arm he darted into his hole with an exultant chip. He was soon out with
+empty pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little tocsin of
+distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan folk might hear. As I made no
+sign, he soon ceased and went about his affairs.
+
+All this time, behind and above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposed
+that lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of her
+chrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fern
+screen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless as
+the snow, and her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and delicate
+as--well, as only those of a luna moth can be. It is as immaculate as an
+angel. With a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple
+sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her for the night.
+
+While I was loitering there on the threshold of the woods, observing the
+small sylvan folk, about a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was
+a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than a score of years,
+the nest of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Some friends were camping
+there with their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech woods, and
+passed and repassed hourly within a few yards of the nest, and, although
+they each had sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen nor
+heard the birds during the two days they had been there.
+
+While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of a
+thrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food in
+its beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew down
+to a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, about
+ten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flew
+out of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movements
+sent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. I
+parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was the
+nest with two half-fledged young.
+
+A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to a
+sparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chanced
+to see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained
+four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
+carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were
+not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would
+alight upon the wall to make observations.
+
+But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious
+bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked
+into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds
+usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to
+find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
+strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they
+seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them,
+I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them
+and watched.
+
+I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped
+some food into an open mouth and disappeared.
+
+Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the
+woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
+morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy
+basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery,
+brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground
+enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was
+in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown
+solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a
+part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the
+dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders'
+cocoons--all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.
+
+I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths
+instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
+flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and
+uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
+away!" This I soon did.
+
+Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But
+the red-eyed vireo sings on into September--not an ecstatic strain, but
+a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WITH ROOSEVELT AT PINE KNOT
+
+
+It was in May during the last term of his Presidency that Roosevelt
+asked me to go with him down to Pine Knot, Virginia, to help him name
+his birds. I stayed with him at the White House the night before we
+started. I remember that at dinner[1] there was an officer from the
+British army stationed in India, and the talk naturally turned on Indian
+affairs. I did not take part in it because I knew nothing about India,
+but Roosevelt was so conversant with Indian affairs and Indian history
+that you would think he had just been cramming on it, which I knew very
+well he had not. But that British officer was put on his mettle to hold
+his own. In fact, Roosevelt knew more about India and England's relation
+to it than the officer seemed to know. It was amazing to see the
+thoroughness of his knowledge about India.
+
+  [1] Mr. Burroughs's memory played him false here. The
+  incident he speaks of was at a dinner in the White House,
+  just before starting on the Yellowstone trip, in 1903.
+    C. B.
+
+The next morning we started off for Virginia, taking an early train.
+
+Pine Knot is about one hundred miles from Washington. I think we left
+the train at Charlottesville, Virginia, and drove about ten miles to
+Pine Knot; the house is a big barnlike structure on the edge of the
+woods, a mile from the nearest farmhouse.
+
+Before we reached there we got out of the wagon and walked, as there
+were a good many warblers in the trees--the spring migration was on. It
+was pretty warm; I took off my overcoat and the President insisted on
+carrying it. We identified several warblers there, among them the
+black-poll, the black-throated blue, and Wilson's black-cap. He knew
+them in the trees overhead as quickly as I did.
+
+We reached Pine Knot late in the afternoon, but as he was eager for a
+walk we started off, he leading, as if walking for a wager. We went
+through fields and woods and briers and marshy places for a mile or
+more, when we stopped and mopped our brows and turned homeward without
+having seen many birds.
+
+Mrs. Roosevelt took him to task, I think, when she saw the heated
+condition in which we returned, for not long afterwards he came to me
+and said: "Oom John, that was no way to go after birds; we were in too
+much of a hurry." I replied, "No, Mr. President, that isn't the way I
+usually go a-birding." His thirst for the wild and the woods, and his
+joy at returning to these after his winter in the White House, had
+evidently urged him on. He added, "We will try a different plan
+to-morrow."
+
+So on the morrow we took a leisurely drive along the highways. Very soon
+we heard a wren which was new to me. "That's Bewick's wren," he said. We
+got out and watched it as it darted in and out of the fence and sang.
+
+I asked him if he knew whether the little gray gnatcatcher was to be
+seen there. I had not seen or heard it for thirty years. "Yes," he
+replied, "I saw it the last time I was here, over by a spring run."
+
+We walked over to some plum-trees where there had been a house at one
+time. No sooner had we reached the spot than he cried, "There it is
+now!" And sure enough, there it was in full song--a little bird the
+shape of a tiny catbird, with a very fine musical strain.
+
+As we were walking in a field we saw some birds that were new to me.
+Roosevelt also was puzzled to know what they were till we went among
+them and stirred them up, discovering that they were females of the blue
+grosbeak, with some sparrows which we did not identify.
+
+In the course of that walk he showed me a place where he had seen what
+he had thought at the time to be a flock of wild pigeons. He described
+how they flew, the swoop of their movements, and the tree where they
+alighted. I was skeptical, for it had long been thought that wild
+pigeons were extinct, but that fact had not impressed itself upon his
+mind. He said if he had known there could be any doubt about it, he
+would have observed them more closely. I was sorry that he had not, as
+it was one of the points on which I wanted indisputable evidence. We
+talked with the colored coachman about the birds, as he also had seen
+them. His description agreed with Roosevelt's, and he had seen wild
+pigeons in his youth; still I had my doubts. Subsequently Roosevelt
+wrote me that he had come to the conclusion that they had been mistaken
+about their being pigeons.
+
+One day while there, as we were walking through an old weedy field, I
+chanced to spy, out of the corner of my eye, a nighthawk sitting on the
+ground only three or four yards away. I called Roosevelt's attention to
+it and said, "Now, Mr. President, I think with care you can drop your
+hat over that bird." So he took off his sombrero and crept up on the
+bird, and was almost in a position to let his hat drop over it when the
+bird flew to a near tree, alighting lengthwise on the branch as this
+bird always does. Roosevelt approached it again cautiously and almost
+succeeded in putting his hand upon it; the bird flew just in time to
+save itself from his hand.
+
+One Sunday after church he took me to a field where he had recently seen
+and heard Lincoln's sparrow. We loitered there, reclining upon the dry
+grass for an hour or more, waiting for the sparrow, but it did not
+appear.
+
+During my visit there we named over seventy-five species of birds and
+fowl, he knowing all of them but two, and I knowing all but two. He
+taught me Bewick's wren and the prairie warbler, and I taught him the
+swamp sparrow and one of the rarer warblers; I think it was the pine
+warbler. If he had found the Lincoln sparrow again, he would have been
+one ahead of me.
+
+I remember talking politics a little with him while we were waiting for
+the birds, and, knowing that he was expecting Taft to be his successor,
+I expressed my doubts as to Taft's being able to fill his shoes.
+
+"Oh, yes, he can," he said confidently; "you don't know him as well as I
+do."
+
+"Of course not," I admitted; "but my feeling is that, though Taft is an
+able and amiable man, he is not a born leader."
+
+(I am glad to say that Mr. Taft's recent course in support of the
+proposed League of Nations has quite brought me around to Roosevelt's
+estimate of him.)
+
+Pine Knot is a secluded place in the woods. One evening as we sat in the
+lamplight, he reading Lord Cromer on Egypt, and I a book on the
+man-eating lions of Tsavo, and Mrs. Roosevelt sitting near with her
+needlework, suddenly Roosevelt's hand came down on the table with such a
+bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a
+slightly nettled tone, "Why, my dear, what _is_ the matter?"
+
+He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would almost have demolished
+an African lion.
+
+It occurred to me later that evening how risky it was for the President
+of the United States to be so unprotected--without a guard of any
+kind--in that out-of-the-way place, and I expressed something of this to
+him, suggesting that some one might "kidnap" him.
+
+"Oh," he answered, slapping his hand on his hip pocket, "I go armed, and
+they would have to be mighty quick to get the drop on me."
+
+Shortly after that, to stretch my legs a little and listen to the night
+sounds in the Virginia woods, I went out around the cabin and almost
+immediately heard some animal run heavily through the woods not far from
+the house. I thought perhaps it was a neighboring dog, but, on speaking
+of it to Mrs. Roosevelt, was told that two secret service men came every
+night at nine o'clock and stood on guard till morning, spending the day
+at a farmhouse in that vicinity. She did not let the President know of
+this because it would irritate him.
+
+The only flower we saw there which was new to me was the Indian pink.
+Roosevelt seemed to know the flowers as well as he did the birds. Pink
+moccasin-flowers and the bird's-foot violet were common in that
+locality.
+
+On our return trip, Roosevelt's secretary being on the train, Roosevelt
+threw himself into the dictation of many letters, the wrens and the
+warblers already sidetracked for the business of the Administration.
+
+I passed another night at the White House, and in the morning early we
+went out on the White House grounds to look for birds, our quest seeming
+to attract the puzzled attention of the passers-by.
+
+"They often stare at me as though they thought me crazy," he said, "when
+they see me gazing up into the trees."
+
+"Well, now they will think I am your keeper," I said.
+
+"Yes, and I your nurse," laughed Mrs. Roosevelt.
+
+When I left, Roosevelt gave me a list of the birds that we had seen
+while at Pine Knot and hoped that I would sometime write up the trip; in
+fact, for years after, whenever we would meet, almost the first thing he
+would say was, "Have you written up our Pine Knot trip yet, Oom John?"
+And his disappointment at my failure to do so was always
+unmistakable.[2]
+
+  [2] The following letter may be of interest in this
+  connection.
+    C. B.
+
+  DEAR OOM JOHN:
+
+  Did you ever get the pamphlet on Concealing Coloration? If
+  not, I will send you another. I do hope that you will
+  include in your coming volume of sketches a little account
+  of the time you visited us at Pine Knot, our little
+  Virginia camp, while I was President. I am very proud of
+  you, Oom John, and I want the fact that you were my guest
+  when I was President, and that you and I looked at birds
+  together, recorded there--and don't forget that I showed
+  you the blue grosbeak and the Bewick's wren, and almost
+  all the other birds I said I would!
+
+  Ever yours,
+
+  THEODORE ROOSEVELT
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+A STRENUOUS HOLIDAY
+
+
+One August a few years ago (1918) I set out with some friends for a two
+weeks' automobile trip into the land of Dixie--joy-riders with a
+luxurious outfit calculated to be proof against any form of discomfort.
+
+We were headed for the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina. I
+confess that mountains and men that do not smoke suit me better. Still I
+can stand both, and I started out with the hope that the great
+Appalachian range held something new and interesting for me. Yet I knew
+it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with
+younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not
+warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was
+younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter
+half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in
+order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new
+scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more
+strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.
+
+Pennsylvania is an impressive State, so vast, so diversified, so
+forest-clad--the huge unbroken Alleghany ranges with their deep valleys
+cutting across it from north to south; the world of fine farms and rural
+homesteads in the eastern half, and the great mining and manufacturing
+interests in the western, the source of noble rivers; and the storehouse
+of many of Nature's most useful gifts to man.
+
+The great Lincoln Highway, of course, follows the line of least
+resistance, but it has some formidable obstacles to surmount, and it
+goes at them very deliberately; and, in a powerful car, gives one a
+sense of easy victory. But I smile as I remember persons with lighter
+cars standing beside them at the foot of those long, winding ascents,
+nursing and encouraging them, as it were, and preparing them for the
+heavy task before them. An almost perfect road, worthy of its great
+namesake, but an Alleghany range which you cannot get around or through
+gives the automobilist pause.
+
+As we were hurled along over the great highway the things I remember
+with the most satisfaction were the groups or processions of army trucks
+we met coming east. The doom of kaiserism was written large on that
+Lincoln Highway in that army of resolute, slow-moving army trucks. Dumb,
+khaki-colored fighters on wheels, staunch, powerful-looking, a host of
+them, rolling eastward toward the seat of war, some loaded with
+soldiers, some with camp equipments, and all hinting of the enormous
+resources the fatuous Kaiser had let loose upon himself in this far-off
+land. On other highways the weapons and materials of war were converging
+toward the great seaports in the same way. The silent, grim,
+processions--how impressive they were!
+
+Pittsburgh is a city that sits with its feet in or very near the lake of
+brimstone and fire, and its head in the sweet country air of the
+hill-tops. I think I got nearer the infernal regions there than I ever
+did in any other city in this country. One is fairly suffocated at times
+driving along the public highway on a bright, breezy August day. It
+might well be the devil's laboratory. Out of such blackening and
+blasting fumes comes our civilization. That weapons of war and of
+destructiveness should come out of such pits and abysses of hell-fire
+seemed fit and natural, but much more comes out of them--much that
+suggests the pond-lily rising out of the black slime and muck of the
+lake bottoms.
+
+We live in an age of iron and have all we can do to keep the iron from
+entering our souls. Our vast industries have their root in the geologic
+history of the globe as in no other past age. We delve for our power,
+and it is all barbarous and unhandsome. When the coal and oil are all
+gone and we come to the surface and above the surface for the white
+coal, for the smokeless oil, for the winds and the sunshine, how much
+more attractive life will be! Our very minds ought to be cleaner. We may
+never hitch our wagons to the stars, but we can hitch them to the
+mountain streams, and make the summer breezes lift our burdens. Then the
+silver age will displace the iron age.
+
+The western end of Pennsylvania is one vast coal-mine. The farmer has
+only to dig into the side of the hill back of his house and take out his
+winter's fuel. I was surprised to see how smooth and gentle and grassy
+the hills looked. It is a cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it
+seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly
+care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black
+remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling
+and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying
+down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that
+wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed it all out.
+
+Our first camp was at Greensborough, thirty or more miles southeast of
+Pittsburgh, an ideal place--a large, open oak grove on a gentle eminence
+well carpeted with grass, with wood and water in abundance. But the
+night was chilly. Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily
+warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with
+plenty of blankets, Sleep enters your tent very reluctantly. She
+tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got
+up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the
+"long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth
+was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.
+
+The talk that first night around the camp-fire gave us an inside view of
+many things about which we were much concerned. The ship question was
+the acute question of the hour and we had with us for a few days
+Commissioner Hurley, of the Shipping Board, who could give us first-hand
+information, which he did to our great comfort.
+
+Our next stop was near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where for that night we
+slept indoors.
+
+On the following day one of the big cars had an accident--the fan broke,
+and the iron punctured the radiator. It looked as if we should be
+delayed until a new radiator could be forwarded from Pittsburgh. We made
+our way slowly to Connellsville, where there was a good garage, but the
+best workmen there shook their heads; they said a new radiator was the
+only remedy. All four arms of the fan were broken off and there was no
+way to mend them. This verdict put Mr. Ford on his mettle. "Give me a
+chance," he said, and, pulling off his coat and rolling up his sleeves,
+he fell to work. In two hours we were ready to go ahead. By the aid of
+drills and copper wire the master mechanic had stitched the severed arms
+to their stubs, soldered up the hole in the radiator, and the disabled
+car was again in running order.
+
+On August the 31st we made our camp on the banks of a large, clear creek
+in West Virginia called Horseshoe Run. A smooth field across the road
+from the creek seemed attractive, and I got the reluctant consent of the
+widow who owned it to pitch our camp there, though her patch of
+roasting-ears near by made her hesitate; she had probably had
+experiences with gypsy parties, and was not impressed in our favor even
+when I gave her the names of two well-known men in our party. But Edison
+was not attracted by the widow's open field; the rough, grassy margin of
+the creek suited him better, and its proximity to the murmuring,
+eddying, rocky current appealed to us all, albeit it necessitated our
+mess-tent being pitched astride a shallow gully, and our individual
+tents elbowing one another in the narrow spaces between the boulders.
+But wild Nature, when you can manage her, is what the camper-out wants.
+Pure elements--air, water, earth--these settle the question; Camp
+Horseshoe Run had them all. It was here, I think, that I got my first
+view of the nonpareil, or painted bunting--a bird rarely seen north of
+the Potomac.
+
+An interesting object near our camp was an old, unused grist-mill, with
+a huge, decaying overshot oaken water-wheel. We all perched on the
+wheel and had our pictures taken.
+
+At our lunch that day, by the side of a spring, a twelve-year-old girl
+appeared in the road above us with a pail of apples for sale. We invited
+her into our camp, an invitation she timidly accepted. We took all of
+her apples. I can see her yet with her shining eyes as she crumpled the
+new one-dollar bill which one of the party placed in her hand. She did
+not look at it; the feel of it told the story to her. We quizzed her
+about many things and got straight, clear-cut answers--a very firm,
+level-headed little maid. Her home was on the hill above us. We told her
+the names of some of the members of the party, and after she had
+returned home we saw an aged man come out to the gate and look down upon
+us. An added interest was felt whenever we came in contact with any of
+the local population. Birds and flowers and trees and springs and mills
+were something, but human flowers and rills of human life were better. I
+do not forget the other maiden, twelve or thirteen years old, to whom we
+gave a lift of a few miles on her way. She had been on a train five
+times, and once had been forty miles from home. Her mother was dead and
+her father lived in Pennsylvania, and she was living with her
+grandfather. When asked how far it was to Elkins she said, "Ever and
+ever so many miles."
+
+The conspicuous roadside flowers for hundreds of miles, in fact, all the
+way from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were the purple eupatorium, or
+Joe-Pye-weed, and the ironweed--stately, hardy growths, and very
+pleasing to look upon, the ironweed with its crimson purple, and the
+eupatorium with its massive head of soft, pinkish purple.
+
+August the 22d we reached Cheat River in West Virginia, a large, clear
+mountain trout-brook. It crossed our path many times that day. Every
+mountain we crossed showed us Cheat River on the other side of it. It
+was flowing by a very devious course northwest toward the Ohio. We were
+working south and east.
+
+We made our camp that night on the grounds of the Cheat Mountain Club,
+on the banks of the river--an ideal spot. The people at the big
+clubhouse gave us a hospitable welcome and added much to our comfort. I
+found the forests and streams of this part of West Virginia much like
+those of the Catskills, only on a larger scale, and the climate even
+colder. That night the mercury dropped to thirty. On June the 24th they
+had a frost that killed all their garden truck. The paper outlines of
+big trout which covered the walls in the main room of the clubhouse told
+the story of the rare sport the club-members have there. Evidently Cheat
+River deserves a better name.
+
+The mountains and valleys of the Virginias all present a marked
+contrast to those of New York and Pennsylvania. They were not rubbed
+down and scooped out by the great ice-sheet that played such a part in
+shaping our northern landscapes. The valleys are markedly V-shaped,
+while ours are markedly U-shaped. The valley sides are so steep that
+they are rarely cultivated; the farm land for the most part lies on the
+tops of the broad, rounded hills, though we passed through some broad,
+open river valleys that held miles upon miles of beautiful farms in
+which hay and oats were still being harvested. Everywhere were large
+fields of buckwheat, white with bloom, and, I presume, humming with
+bees.
+
+Here and there, by the rocks and the boulders strewn over the landscape,
+I saw evidences of large local glaciers that had hatched in these
+mountains during the great Ice Age.
+
+We made camp at Bolar Springs on August the 23d--a famous spring, and a
+beautiful spot. We pitched our tents among the sugar maples, and some of
+the party availed themselves of the public bathhouse that spanned the
+overflow of the great spring. The next night our camp was at Wolf Creek,
+not far from the Narrows--a beautiful spot, marred only by its proximity
+to the dusty highway. It was on the narrow, grassy margin of a broad,
+limpid creek in which the fish were jumping. Some grazing horses
+disturbed my sleep early in the morning, but on the whole I have only
+pleasant memories of our camp at Wolf Creek.
+
+We were near a week in Virginia and West Virginia, crossing many times
+the border between the two States, now in one, then in the other, all
+the time among the mountains, with a succession of glorious views from
+mountain-tops and along broad, fertile valleys. Now we were at Warm
+Springs, then at Hot Springs, then at White Sulphur, or at Sweet Water
+Springs. Soft water and hard water, cold water and warm water, mineral
+water and trout-streams, companion one another in these mountains. This
+part of the continent got much folded and ruptured and mixed up in the
+building, and the elements are unevenly distributed.
+
+I think to most of us West Virginia had always been a rather hazy
+proposition, and we were glad to get a clear impression of it. We
+certainly became pretty intimate with the backbone of the continent--or
+with its many backbones, as its skeleton seems to be a very multiplex
+affair. The backbones of continents usually get broken in many places,
+but they serve their purpose just as well. In fact, our old Earth is
+more like an articulate than a vertebrate. Its huge shell is in many
+sections.
+
+One of our camps we named Camp Lee, the name of the owner of the farm.
+One of the boys there, Robert E. Lee, made himself very useful in
+bringing wood and doing other errands.
+
+A privation, which I think Mr. Edison and I felt more than did the
+others, was the scanty or delayed war news; the local papers, picked up
+here and there, gave only brief summaries, and when in the larger towns
+we could get some of the great dailies, the news was a day or two old.
+When one has hung on the breath of the newspapers for four exciting
+years, one is lost when cut off from them.
+
+Such a trip as we were taking was, of course, a kind of a lark,
+especially to the younger members of the party. Upon Alleghany Mountain,
+near Barton, West Virginia, a farmer was cradling oats on a side-hill
+below the road. Our procession stopped, and the irrepressible Ford and
+Firestone were soon taking turns at cradling oats, but with doubtful
+success. A photograph shows the farmer and Mr. Ford looking on with
+broad smiles, watching Mr. Firestone with the fingers of the cradle
+tangled in the oats and weeds, a smile on his face also, but decidedly
+an equivocal smile--the trick was not so easy as it looked. Evidently
+Mr. Ford had not forgotten his cradling days on the home farm in
+Michigan.
+
+Camp-life is a primitive affair, no matter how many conveniences you
+have, and things of the mind keep pretty well in the background.
+Occasionally around the camp-fire we drew Edison out on chemical
+problems, and heard formula after formula come from his lips as if he
+were reading them from a book. As a practical chemist he perhaps has
+few, if any, equals in this country. It was easy to draw out Mr. Ford on
+mechanical problems. There is always pleasure and profit in hearing a
+master discuss his own art.
+
+A plunge into the South for a Northern man is in many ways a plunge into
+the Past. As soon as you get into Virginia there is a change. Things and
+people in the South are more local and provincial than in the North. For
+the most part, in certain sections, at least, the county builds the
+roads (macadam), and not the State. Hence you pass from a fine stone
+road in one county on to a rough dirt road in the next. Toll-gates
+appear. In one case we paid toll at the rate of two cents a mile for the
+cars, and five cents for the trucks. Grist-mills are seen along the way,
+driven by overshot wheels, and they are usually at work. A man or a boy
+on horseback, with a bag of grain or of meal behind him, going to or
+returning from the mill, is a frequent sight; or a woman on horseback,
+on a sidesaddle, with a baby in her arms, attracts your attention. Thus
+my grandmother went to mill in pioneer days in the Catskills.
+
+The absence of bridges over the small streams was to us a novel feature.
+One of the party called these fording places, "Irish bridges." They are
+made smooth and easy, and gave us no trouble. Another Southern feature,
+indicating how far behind our Northern and more scientific farming the
+South still is, are the groups of small haystacks in the meadows with
+poles sticking out of their tops, letting the rain and the destructive
+bacteria into their hearts. Among the old-fashioned features of the
+South much to be commended are the large families. In a farmhouse near
+which we made camp one night there were thirteen children, the eldest of
+whom was at the front in France. The schools were in session in late
+August, and the schoolrooms were well filled with pupils.
+
+No doubt there are many peculiar local customs of which the hurrying
+tourist gets no inkling. At a station in the mountains of North Carolina
+a youngish, well-clad countryman, smoking his pipe, stood within a few
+feet of my friend and me and gazed at us with the simple, blank
+curiosity of a child. There was not the slightest gleam of intelligent
+interest, or self-consciousness in his face; it was the frank stare of a
+five-year-old boy. He belongs to a type one often sees in the mountain
+districts of the South--good human stuff, valiant as soldiers, and
+industrious as farmers, but so unacquainted with the great outside
+world, their unsophistication is shocking to see.
+
+It often seemed to me that we were a luxuriously equipped expedition
+going forth to seek discomfort, for discomfort in several forms--dust,
+rough roads, heat, cold, irregular hours, accidents--is pretty sure to
+come to those who go a-gypsying in the South. But discomfort, after all,
+is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our
+luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization,
+and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully
+endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights,
+just to touch naked reality once more.
+
+Our two chief characters presented many contrasts: Mr. Ford is more
+adaptive, more indifferent to places, than is Mr. Edison. His interest
+in the stream is in its potential water-power. He races up and down its
+banks to see its fall, and where power could be developed. He never
+ceases to lament so much power going to waste, and points out that if
+the streams were all harnessed, as they could easily be, farm labor
+everywhere, indoors and out, could be greatly lessened. He dilates upon
+the benefit that would accrue to every country neighborhood if the
+water-power that is going to waste in its valley streams were set to
+work in some useful industry, furnishing employment to the farmers and
+others in the winter seasons when the farms need comparatively little
+attention. He is always thinking in terms of the greatest good to the
+greatest number. He aims to place his inventions within reach of the
+great mass of the people. As with his touring-car, so with his tractor
+engine, he has had the same end in view. Nor does he forget the
+housewife. He has plans afoot for bringing power into every household
+that will greatly lighten the burden of the women-folk.
+
+Partly owing to his more advanced age, but mainly, no doubt, to his
+meditative and introspective cast of mind, Mr. Edison is far less active
+than is Mr. Ford. When we would pause for the midday lunch, or to make
+camp at the end of the day, Mr. Edison would sit in his car and read, or
+curl up, boy fashion, under a tree and take a nap, while Mr. Ford would
+inspect the stream or busy himself in getting wood for the fire. Mr.
+Ford is a runner and a high kicker, and frequently challenged some of
+the party to race with him. He is also a persistent walker, and from
+every camp, both morning and evening, he sallied forth for a brisk
+half-hour walk. His cheerfulness and adaptability on all occasions, and
+his optimism in regard to all the great questions, are remarkable. His
+good-will and tolerance are boundless. Notwithstanding his practical
+turn of mind, and his mastery of the mechanical arts and of business
+methods, he is through and through an idealist. As tender as a woman, he
+is much more tolerant. He looks like a poet, and conducts his life like
+a philosopher. No poet ever expressed himself through his work more
+completely than Mr. Ford has expressed himself through his car and his
+tractor engine. They typify him; not imposing, nor complex, less
+expressive of power and mass than of simplicity, adaptability, and
+universal service, they typify the combination of powers and qualities
+which make him a beneficent, a likable, and a unique personality. Those
+who meet him are invariably drawn to him. He is a national figure, and
+the crowds that flock around the car in which he is riding, as we pause
+in the towns through which we pass, are not paying their homage merely
+to a successful car-builder or business man, but to a beneficent human
+force, a great practical idealist whose good-will and spirit of
+universal helpfulness they have all felt. He has not only brought
+pleasure and profit into their lives, but has illustrated and written
+large upon the pages of current history a new ideal of the business
+man--that of a man whose devotion to the public good has been a ruling
+passion, and whose wealth has inevitably flowed from the depth of his
+humanitarianism. He has taken the people into partnership with him, and
+has eagerly shared with them the benefits that are the fruit of his
+great enterprise--a liberator, an emancipator, through channels that are
+so often used to enslave or destroy.
+
+In one respect, essentially the same thing may be said of Mr. Edison:
+his first and leading thought has been, What can I do to make life
+easier and more enjoyable to my fellow-men? He is a great chemist, a
+trenchant and original thinker on all the great questions of life,
+though he has delved but little into the world of art and literature--a
+practical scientist, plus a meditative philosopher of profound insight.
+And his humor is delicious. We delighted in his wise and witty sayings.
+A good camper-out, he turns vagabond very easily, can go with hair
+disheveled and clothes unbrushed as long as the best of us, and can
+rough it week in and week out and wear that benevolent smile. He eats so
+little that I think he was not tempted by the chicken-roosts or
+turkey-flocks along the way, nor by the cornfields and apple-orchards,
+as some of us were, but he is second to none in his love for the open
+and for wild nature.
+
+Mr. Firestone belongs to an entirely different type--the clean,
+clear-headed, conscientious business type; always on his job, always
+ready for whatever comes; in no sense an outdoor man; always at the
+service of those around him; a man generous, kindly, appreciative,
+devoted to his family and his friends; sound in his ideas--a
+manufacturer who has faithfully and honestly served his countrymen.
+
+It is after he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip.
+All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In
+retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I
+was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant,
+and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at
+this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, I look upon
+the whole trip with unmixed pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+UNDER GENIAL SKIES
+
+
+I. A SUN-BLESSED LAND
+
+The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West,
+differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the
+coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of
+a world made up of three elements--sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific
+stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating
+floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon
+the Atlantic coast. It justifies its name. The passion and fury of the
+Eastern seas I got no hint of, even in winter. Its rocks, all that I saw
+of them, are soft and friable. The languid waves rapidly wear them down.
+They are non-strenuous rocks, lifted up out of a non-strenuous sea. The
+mountains that tower four or five thousand feet along the coast are of
+the same character. They are young, and while they carry their heads
+very high, they are soft and easily disintegrated compared with the
+granite of our coast.
+
+As a rule, young mountains always wear the look of age, from their deep
+lines and jagged and angular character, while the really old mountains
+wear the look of youth from their comparative smoothness, their
+unwrinkled appearance, their long, flowing lines. Time has taken the
+conceit all out of them.
+
+The annual rainfall in the Far West is only about one third of what it
+is on the eastern side of the continent. And the soil is curiously
+adapted to the climate. Trees flourish and crops are grown there under
+arid conditions that would kill every green thing on the Atlantic
+seaboard. The soil is clay tempered with a little sand, probably less
+than ten per cent of it by weight is sand. I washed the clay out of a
+large lump of it and found the sand a curious heterogeneous mixture of
+small and large, light and dark grains of all possible forms. The soil
+does not bake as do our clay soils, and keeps moist when ours would
+almost defy the plough. Under cultivation it works up into a good
+tillable condition. Its capacity to retain moisture is remarkable, as if
+it were made for a scant rainfall. As a crop-producing soil, it has
+virtues which I am at a loss to account for. Root vegetables grown here
+have a sweetness, and above all, a tenderness, of which we know nothing
+in the East. Much sunshine in our climate makes root vegetables fibrous
+and tough.
+
+I more than half believe that the wonderful sweetness of the bird songs
+here, such as that of the meadowlark, is more or less a matter of
+climate; the quality of the sunshine seems to have affected their vocal
+cords. The clear, piercing, shaft-like note of our meadowlark contrasts
+with that of the Pacific variety as our hard, brilliant blue skies
+contrast with the softer and tenderer skies of this sun-blessed land.
+
+
+II. LAWN BIRDS
+
+To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to
+have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty
+spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and
+plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves--not so highly
+colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black
+phoebe flits about your porch and arbor vines.
+
+Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other
+variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the
+tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are
+next in number.
+
+Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a
+solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the
+American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual
+trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks
+about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a
+teetering motion of the hind part of the body.
+
+While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found
+the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was
+tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain
+such as Alaska alone can afford.
+
+But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the
+ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more
+of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the
+spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a
+few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that
+curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their
+shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and
+powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air--all arrest your
+attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the
+furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings.
+They fly around the world.
+
+The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity
+from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial
+creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the
+motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in
+its behavior?
+
+However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all
+do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are
+all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass,
+but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods
+are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He
+scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making
+frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the
+prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same
+judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and
+evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go
+its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their
+food-supplies.
+
+On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the
+tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and
+pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look
+upon--airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as
+to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white
+and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh
+water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail
+themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which
+discharge on the beach.
+
+There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown
+pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves,
+shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for
+a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at it
+were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air
+for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and
+forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore
+birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the
+water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for
+his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
+down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb
+style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
+creature as before.
+
+A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a bird
+that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--is
+the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the
+face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.
+
+I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above
+the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
+In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate
+to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
+them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of
+the shore.
+
+
+III. SILKEN CHAMBERS
+
+The trap-door spider has furnished me with one of the most interesting
+bits of natural history I have found on the coast. An obliging sojourner
+near me from one of the Eastern States had discovered a large plot of
+uncultivated ground above the beach that abounded in the hidden burrows
+of these curious animals. One afternoon he volunteered to conduct me to
+the place.
+
+The ground was scantily covered with low bushy and weedy growths. My
+guide warned me that the quarry we sought was hard to find. I, indeed,
+found it so. It not only required an "eye as practiced as a blind man's
+touch," it required an eye practiced in this particular kind of
+detective work. My new friend conducted me down into the plot of ground
+and, stopping on the edge of it, said, "There is a nest within two feet
+of me." I fell to scrutinizing the ground as closely as I knew how,
+fairly bearing on with my eyes; I went over the soil inch by inch with
+my eyes, but to no purpose. There was no mark on the gray and brown
+earth at my feet that suggested a trap-door, or any other device. I
+stooped low, but without avail. Then my guide stooped, and with a long
+needle pried up a semicircular or almost circular bit of the gray soil
+nearly the size of a silver quarter of a dollar, which hinged on the
+straight side of it, and behold--the entrance to the spider's castle! I
+was not prepared for anything so novel and artistic--a long silken
+chamber, about three quarters of an inch in diameter, concealed by a
+silken trap-door, an inch in its greatest diameter. The under side of
+the door, a dull white, the color of old ivory, is slightly convex, and
+its top is a brownish gray to harmonize with its surroundings, and
+slightly concave. Its edges are beveled so that it fits into the flaring
+or beveled end of the chamber with the utmost nicety. No joiner could
+have done it better. A faint semicircular raised line of clay as fine as
+a hair gave the only clue. The whole effect, when the door was held
+open, was of a pleasing secret suddenly revealed.
+
+Then we walked about the place, and, knowing exactly what to look for, I
+gave my eyes another chance, but they were slow to profit by it. My
+guide detected one after another, and when I failed, he would point them
+put to me. But presently I caught on, as they say, and began to find
+them unaided.
+
+We often found the lord of the manor on duty as doorkeeper, and in no
+mood to see strangers. He held his door down by inserting his fangs in
+two fine holes near the edge and bracing himself, or, rather, herself
+(as, of course, it is the female), offered a degree of resistance
+surprising in an insect. If one persists with a needle, there is often
+danger of breaking the door. But when one has made a crack wide enough
+to allow one to see the spider, she lets go her hold and rushes farther
+down in her burrow.
+
+Occasionally we found one about half the usual size, indicating a young
+spider, but no other sizes. My guide said they only emerge from their
+tunnel at night, and proved it by an ingenious mechanical device made of
+straws attached to the door. When the door was opened, the straws lifted
+up, but did not fall down when it was closed. Whenever he found the
+straw still up in the morning he knew the door had been opened in the
+night.
+
+As they are nocturnal in habits, they doubtless prey upon other insects,
+such as sow-bugs and crickets, which the night brings forth. Two bright
+specks upon the top of the head appear to be eyes, but they are so small
+they probably only serve to enable them to tell night from day. I think
+these spiders are mainly guided by a marvelously acute tactile sense.
+They probably feel the slightest vibration in the earth or air, unless
+they have a sixth sense of which we know nothing.
+
+All their work, the building and repairing of their nests, as well as
+all their hunting, is done by night. This habit, in connection with
+their extreme shyness, makes the task of getting at their life-histories
+a difficult one. The inside of the burrow seems coated with a finer and
+harder substance than the soil in which they are dug. It is made on the
+spot, the spider mixing some secretion of her own with the clay, and
+working it up into a finer product.
+
+The trap-door sooner or later wears out at the hinge, and is then
+discarded and a new door manufactured. We saw many nests with the old
+door lying near the entrance. The door is made of several layers of silk
+and clay, and is a substantial affair.
+
+The spider families all have the gift of genius. Of what ingenious
+devices and arts are they masters! How wide their range! They spin, they
+delve, they jump, they fly. They are the original spinners. They have
+probably been on their job since carboniferous times, many millions of
+years before man took up the art. And they can spin a thread so fine
+that science makes the astonishing statement that it would take four
+millions of them to make a thread the caliber of one of the hairs of our
+head--a degree of delicacy to which man can never hope to attain.
+
+Trap-doors usually mean surprises and stratagems, secrets and betrayals,
+and this species of the arachnids is proficient in all these things.
+
+The adobe soil on the Pacific coast is as well fitted to the purposes of
+this spider as if it had been made for her special use. But, as in all
+such cases, the soil was not made for her, but she is adapted to it. It
+is radically unlike any soil on the Atlantic coast--the soil for canons
+and the rectangular watercourses, and for the trap-door spider. It is a
+tough, fine-grained homogeneous soil, and when dry does not crumble or
+disintegrate; the cohesion of particles is such that sun-dried brick are
+easily made from it.
+
+This spider is found in New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Jamaica. It
+belongs to the family of _Mygalidae_. It resembles in appearance the
+tarantula of Europe, described by Fabre, and has many of the same
+habits; but its habitation is a much more ingenious and artistic piece
+of workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has no
+door to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind of
+breastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from this
+fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than does
+our spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, her
+fangs, and lines it with silk from her own body.
+
+Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect of
+her kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance--no visible
+drills for such rough work--one wonders how she excavates a burrow six
+inches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and
+how she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has been
+surprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weapons
+with which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the
+_chelicerae_. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, says
+Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon's
+scalpel." And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet
+at a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest.
+Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a
+hole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth.
+
+One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turned
+over, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants of
+the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started the
+construction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed as
+if the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out a
+semicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice,
+each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surrounded
+it, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. I
+read somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit of
+ground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made the
+soil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss like
+the old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in the
+first case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seems
+to know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know."
+
+On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size,
+but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more artfully
+concealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completely
+covered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, and
+had so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eye
+was baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet it
+seemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick I
+found a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Day
+after day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at it
+on the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer of
+the soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength.
+
+Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, according
+to Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they are
+very active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping up
+the supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun,
+Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and the
+organic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can take
+at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and it
+seems to be so, it is most extraordinary.
+
+In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering,
+it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insect
+world and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinck
+has forgotten to point out, is this:
+
+In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondary
+part. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female is
+supreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him.
+Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is the
+female mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider that
+spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with the
+female. The female spider eats up the male after he has served her
+purpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the male
+in the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survives
+the winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on the
+window-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud,
+but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed by
+the female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate,
+but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In
+the vertebrate world it is chiefly among birds of prey that the female
+is the larger and bolder; the care of the young devolves largely upon
+her. Yes, there is another exception: Among the fishes, the females are,
+as a rule, larger than the males; the immense number of eggs which they
+carry brings this about.
+
+There are always exceptions to this dominance of the female in the
+insect world. We cannot corner Nature and keep her cornered. She would
+not be Nature if we could. With the fireflies, it is the male that
+dominates; the female is a little soft, wingless worm on the ground,
+always in the larval state.
+
+In the plant world, also, the male as a rule is dominant. Behold the
+showy catkins of the chestnuts, the butternuts, the hazelnuts, the
+willows, and other trees. The stamens of most flowers are numerous and
+conspicuous. Our Indian corn carries its panicle of pollen high above
+the silken tresses which mother the future ear.
+
+One day I dug up a nest which was occupied by a spider with her brood of
+young ones. I took up a large block of earth weighing ten pounds or
+more, and sank it in a box of earth of its own kind. I kept it in the
+house under observation for a week, hoping that at some hour of day or
+night the spider would come out. But she made no sign. My ingenious
+friend arranged the same mechanical contrivance over the door which he
+had used successfully before. But the latch was never lifted. Madam
+Spider sulked or bemoaned her fate at the bottom of her den. At the end
+of a week I broke open the nest and found her alone. She had evidently
+devoured all her little ones.
+
+I kept two nests with a spider in each in the house for a week, and in
+neither case did the occupant ever leave its nest.
+
+Apparently the young spiders begin to dig nests of their own when they
+are about half-grown. As to where they stay, or how they live up to that
+time, I have no clue. The young we found in several nests were very
+small, not more than an eighth of an inch long. Of the size and
+appearance of the male spider, and where he keeps himself, I could get
+no clue.
+
+One morning I went with my guide down to the spider territory, and saw
+him try to entice or force a spider out of her den. The morning previous
+he had beguiled several of them to come up to the opening by thrusting a
+straw down the burrow and teasing them with it till in self-defense they
+seized it with their fangs and hung on to it till he drew them to the
+surface. But this morning the trick would not work. Not one spider would
+keep her hold. But with a piece of wire bent at the end in the shape of
+a hook, he finally lifted one out upon the ground. How bright and clean
+and untouched she looked! Her limbs and a part of the thorax were as
+black as jet and shone as if they had just been polished. No lady in her
+parlor could have been freer from any touch of soil or earth-stain than
+was she. On the ground, in the strong sunlight, she seemed to be lost.
+We turned her around and tried to induce her to enter the nest again;
+but over and over she ran across the open door without heeding it. In
+the novel situation in which she suddenly found herself, all her wits
+deserted her, and not till I took her between my thumb and finger and
+thrust her abdomen into the hole, did she come to herself. The touch of
+that silk-lined tube caused the proper reaction, and she backed quickly
+into it and disappeared.
+
+Just what natural enemy the trap-door spider has I do not know. I never
+saw a nest that had been broken into or in any way disturbed, except
+those which we had disturbed in our observations.
+
+
+IV. THE DESERT NOTE
+
+I often wonder what mood of Nature this world of cacti which we run
+against in the great Southwest expresses. Certainly something savage and
+merciless. To stab and stab again suits her humor. How well she tempers
+her daggers and bayonets! How hard and smooth and sharp they are! How
+they contrast with the thick, succulent stalks and leaves which bear
+them! It is a desert mood; heat and drought appear to be the exciting
+causes. The scarcity of water seems to stimulate Nature to store up
+water in vegetable tissues, just as it stimulates men to build great
+dams and reservoirs. These giant cacti are reservoirs of water. But why
+spines and prickles and cruel bayonets? They certainly cannot be for
+protection or defense; the grass and other vegetation upon which the
+grazing animals feed are not armed with spines.
+
+If the cacti were created that grazing animals in the desert might have
+something to feed upon, as our fathers' way of looking at things might
+lead us to believe, why was that benevolent plan frustrated by the armor
+of needles and spines?
+
+Nature reaches her hungry and thirsty creatures this broad, mittened
+hand like a cruel joke. It smites like a serpent and stings like a
+scorpion. The strange, many-colored, fascinating desert! Beware! Agonies
+are one of her garments.
+
+All we can say about it is that Nature has her prickly side which
+drought and heat aggravate. In the North our thistles and thorns and
+spines are a milder expression of this mood. The spines on the
+blackberry-bush tend against its propagation for the same reason. Among
+our wild gooseberries, there are smooth and prickly varieties, and one
+succeeds about as well as the other. Apple-and pear-trees in rough or
+barren places that have a severe struggle for life, often develop sharp,
+thorny branches. It is a struggle of some kind which begets something
+like ill-temper in vegetation--heat and drought in the desert, and
+browsing animals and poor soil in the temperate zones. The devil's club
+in Alaska is one mass of spines; why, I know not. It must just be
+original sin. Our raspberries have prickles on their stalks, but the
+large, purple-flowering variety is smooth-stemmed.
+
+Mr. John C. Van Dyke in his work on the desert expresses the belief that
+thorns and spines are given to the desert plants for protection; and
+that if no animal were there that would eat them, they would not have
+these defenses. But I believe if there had never been a browsing animal
+in the desert the cacti would have had their thorns just the same.
+
+Nature certainly arms her animal forms against one another. We know the
+quills of the porcupine are for defense, and that the skunk carries a
+weapon that its enemies dread, but I do not believe that any plant form
+is armed against any creature whose proper food it might become. Cacti
+carry formidable weapons in the shape of spines and thorns, but the
+desert conditions where they are found, heat and aridity, are no doubt
+their primary cause. The conditions are fierce and the living forms are
+fierce.
+
+We cannot be dogmatic about Nature. From our point of view she often
+seems partial and inconsistent. But I would just as soon think that
+Nature made the adobe soil in the arid regions that the human dwellers
+there might have material at hand with which to construct a shelter, as
+that she gives spines and daggers to any of the vegetable forms to
+secure their safety. One may confute Mr. Van Dyke out of his own mouth.
+He says:
+
+  Remove the danger which threatened the extinction of a
+  family, and immediately Nature removes the defensive
+  armor. On the desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn
+  like a point of steel. Follow it from the desert to the
+  high tropical table-lands of Mexico where there is plenty
+  of soil and moisture, plenty of chance for yuccas to
+  thrive, and you will find it turned into a tree and the
+  thorn merely a dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and
+  the pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their
+  cousin, the organ cactus, you will find them growing a
+  soft thorn that would hardly penetrate clothing.
+
+But are they not just as much exposed to browsing animals in the high
+table-lands as in the desert, if not more so?
+
+Mr. Van Dyke asserts that Nature is more solicitous about the species
+than about the individual. She is no more solicitous about the one than
+the other. The same conditions apply to all. But the species are
+numerous; a dozen units may be devoured while a thousand remain. A
+general will sacrifice many soldiers to save his army, he will sacrifice
+one man to save ten, but Nature's ways are entirely different. Both
+contending armies are hers, and she is equally solicitous about both.
+She wants the cacti to survive, and she wants the desert animals to
+survive, and she favors both equally. All she asks of them is that they
+breed and multiply endlessly. Notwithstanding, according to Van Dyke,
+Nature has taken such pains to protect her desert plants, he yet
+confesses that, although it seems almost incredible, it is nevertheless
+true that "deer and desert cattle will eat the cholla--fruit, stem, and
+trunk--though it bristle with spines that will draw blood from the human
+hand at the slightest touch."
+
+This question of spines and thorns in vegetation is a baffling one
+because Nature's ways are so unlike our ways. Darwin failed utterly in
+his theory of the origin of species, because he proceeded upon the idea
+that Nature selects as man selects. You cannot put Nature into a
+formula.
+
+Behold how every branch and twig of our red thorn bristles with cruel
+daggers! But if they are designed to keep away bird or beast from eating
+its fruit, see how that would defeat the tree's own ends! If no creature
+ate its little red apples and thus scattered its seeds, the fruit would
+rot on the ground beneath the branches, and the tribe of red thorns
+would not increase. And increase alone is Nature's end.
+
+It is safe to say, as a general statement, that the animal kingdom is
+full of design. Every part and organ of our bodies has its purpose which
+serves the well-being of the whole. I do not recall any character of
+bird or beast, fish or insect, that does not show purpose, but in the
+plant world Nature seems to allow herself more freedom, or does not work
+on so economical a plan. What purpose do the spines on the prickly ash
+serve? or on the thistles? or on the blackberry, raspberry, gooseberry
+bushes? or the rose? Our purple-flowering raspberry has no prickles, and
+thrives as well as any. The spines on the blackberry and raspberry do
+not save them from browsing cattle, nor their fruit from the birds. In
+fact, as I have said, the service of the birds is needed to sow their
+seeds. The devil's club of Alaska is untouchable, it is so encased in a
+spiny armor; but what purpose the armor serves is a mystery. We know
+that hard conditions of soil and climate will bring thorns on seedling
+pear-trees and plum-trees, but we cannot know why.
+
+The yucca or Spanish bayonet and the century-plant, or American aloe
+(_Agave americana_), are thorny and spiny; they are also very woody and
+fibrous; yet nothing eats them or could eat them. They are no more
+edible than cordwood or hemp ropes. This fact alone settles the defense
+question about spines.
+
+
+V. SEA-DOGS
+
+There is a bit of live natural history out here in the sea in front of
+me that is new and interesting. A bunch of about a dozen hair seals have
+their rendezvous in the unstable waves just beyond the breakers, and
+keep together there week after week. To the naked eye they seem like a
+group of children sitting there on a hidden bench of rock, undisturbed
+by the waves that sweep over them. Their heads and shoulders seem to
+show above the water, and they appear to be having a happy time.
+
+Now and then one may be seen swimming about or lifted up in a wall of
+green-blue transparent water, or leaping above the wrinkled surface in
+the exuberance of its animal spirits. I call them children of the sea,
+until I hear their loud barking, and then I think of them as dogs or
+hounds of the sea. Occasionally I hear their barking by night when it
+has a half-muffled, smothered sound.
+
+They are warm-blooded, air-breathing animals, and there seems something
+incongruous in their being at home there in the cold briny deep--badgers
+or marmots that burrow in the waves, wolves or coyotes that hunt their
+prey in the sea.
+
+Their progenitors were once land animals, but Darwinism does not tell us
+what they were. The whale also was once a land animal, but the testimony
+of the rocks throws no light upon its antecedents. The origin of any new
+species is shrouded in the obscurity of whole geological periods, and
+the short span of human life, or of the whole human history, gives us no
+adequate vantage-ground from which to solve the problem.
+
+I can easily believe that these hair seals are close akin to the dog.
+They have five digits; they bolt their food like dogs; their sense of
+smell is said to be very acute, though how it could serve them in the
+sea does not appear. The young are born upon the land and enter the
+water very reluctantly.
+
+This seal is easily tamed. It has the intelligence of the dog and
+attaches itself to its master as does the dog. Its sense of direction
+and locality is very acute. This group of seals in front of me, day
+after day, and week after week, returns to the same spot in the
+ever-changing waters, without the variation of a single yard, so far as
+I can see. The locality is purely imaginary. It is a love tryst, and it
+seems as if some sixth sense must guide them to it. Locality is as
+unreal in the sea as in the sky, but these few square yards of shifting
+waters seem as real to these seals as if they were a granite ledge. They
+keep massed there on the water at that particular point, with their
+flippers protruding above the surface, as if they were as free from
+danger as so many picnickers. Yet something attracts them to this
+particular place. I know of no other spot along the coast for a hundred
+miles or more where the seals congregate as they do here. What is the
+secret of it? Evidently it is a question of security from their enemies.
+At this point the waves break much farther out than usual, which
+indicates a hidden reef or bench of rocks, and comparatively shallow
+water. This would prevent their enemies, sharks and killer whales, from
+stealing up beneath them and pulling them down. I do not hear their
+barking in the early part of the night, but long before morning their
+half-muffled baying begins. Old fishermen tell me that they retire for
+the night to the broad belts of kelp that lie a hundred yards or more
+out to sea. Doubtless the beds of kelp also afford them some protection
+from their enemies. The fishermen feel very bitter toward them on
+account of the fish they devour, and kill them whenever opportunity
+offers. Often when I lie half asleep in the small hours of the morning,
+I seem to see these amphibian hounds pursuing their quarry on the
+unstable hills and mountains of the sea, and giving tongue at short
+intervals, as did the foxhounds I heard on the Catskills in my youth.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A SHEAF OF NATURE NOTES
+
+
+I. NATURE'S WIRELESS
+
+The Spirit of the Hive, which Maeterlinck makes so much of, seems to
+give us the key to the psychic life of all the lower orders. What one
+knows, all of that kind seem to know at the same instant. It seems as if
+they drew it in with the air they breathed. It is something like
+community of mind, or unity of mind. Of course it is not an intellectual
+process, but an emotional process; not a thought, as with us, but an
+impulse.
+
+So far as we know there is nothing like a council or advisory board in
+the hive. There are no decrees or orders. The swarm is a unit. The
+members act in concert without direction or rule. If anything happens to
+the queen, if she is lost or killed, every bee in the hive seems to know
+it at the same instant, and the whole swarm becomes greatly agitated.
+The division of labor in the hive is spontaneous: the bees function and
+cooeperate as do the organs in our own bodies, each playing its part
+without scheme or direction.
+
+This community of mind is seen in such an instance as that of the
+migrating lemmings from the Scandinavian peninsula. Vast hordes of these
+little creatures are at times seized with an impulse to migrate or to
+commit suicide, for it amounts to that. They leave their habitat in
+Norway and, without being deflected by any obstacle, march straight
+toward the sea, swimming lakes and rivers that lie in their way. When
+the coast is reached, they enter the water and continue on their course.
+Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive
+with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of
+insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal
+life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same
+unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse. The annual
+migration of the caribou in the North is an illustration. In the
+flocking birds this unity of mind is especially noticeable. The vast
+armies of passenger pigeons which we of an older generation saw in our
+youth moved like human armies under orders. They formed a unit. They
+came in countless hordes like an army of invasion, and they departed in
+the same way. Their orders were written upon the air; their leaders were
+as intangible as the shadows of their wings. The same is true of all our
+flocking birds; a flock of snow buntings, or of starlings, or of
+blackbirds, will act as one body, performing their evolutions in the air
+with astonishing precision.
+
+In Florida, in the spring when the mating-instinct is strong, I have
+seen a flock of white ibises waltzing about the sky, going through
+various intricate movements, with the precision of dancers in a ballroom
+quadrille. No sign, no signal, no guidance whatever. Let a body of men
+try it under the same conditions, and behold the confusion, and the
+tumbling over one another! At one moment the birds would wheel so as to
+bring their backs in shadow, and then would flash out the white of their
+breasts and under parts. It was like the opening and shutting of a giant
+hand, or the alternate rapid darkening and brightening of the sail of a
+tacking ice-boat. This is the spirit of the flock. When a hawk pursues a
+bird, the birds tack and turn as if linked together. When one robin
+dashes off in hot pursuit of another, behold how their movements exactly
+coincide! The hawk-hunted bird often escapes by reaching the cover of a
+tree or a bush, but not by dodging its pursuer, as a rabbit or a
+squirrel will dodge a dog. Schools of fish act with the same
+machine-like unity.
+
+In the South, I have seen a large area of water, acres in extent,
+uniformly agitated by a school of mullets apparently feeding upon some
+infusoria on the surface, and then instantly, as if upon a given signal,
+the fish would dive and the rippling cease. It showed a unity of action
+as of ten thousand spindles controlled by electricity.
+
+How quickly the emotion of fear is communicated among the wild animals!
+How wild and alarmed the deer become after the opening of the first day
+of the shooting season. Those who have not seen or heard a hunter seem
+to feel the impending danger.
+
+The great flocks of migrating butterflies (the monarch) illustrate the
+same law. In the fall they are all seized with this impulse to go South
+and thousands of them march in one body. At night they roost in the
+trees. I have seen photographs of them in which they appeared like a new
+kind of colored foliage covering the trees. In the return flight in the
+spring, the same massing again occurs. Recently the Imperial Valley in
+California was invaded by a vast army of worms moving from east to west.
+In countries that have been cursed with a plague of grasshoppers
+witnesses of the spectacle describe them as moving in the same way. They
+stopped or delayed railway trains and automobiles, their crushed bodies
+making the rails and highways as slippery as grease would have made
+them. Ten million or ten billion behaving as one.
+
+This community of mind stands the lower orders in great stead. It makes
+up to them in a measure for the want of reason and judgment. In what we
+call telepathy we get hints of the same thing among ourselves. Telepathy
+is probably a survival from our earlier animal state.
+
+
+II. MAETERLINCK ON THE BEE
+
+Maeterlinck, in his "Life of the Bee" resists the
+conclusion of Sir John Lubbock that flies are more
+intelligent than honey bees:
+
+  If you place in a bottle half a dozen bees [says Sir
+  John], and the same number of flies, and lay the bottle
+  down horizontally with its base to the window, you will
+  find that the bees will persist till they die of
+  exhaustion or hunger in their endeavors to discover an
+  issue through the glass; while the flies, in less than two
+  minutes, will all have sallied forth through the neck on
+  the opposite side.
+
+The flies are more intelligent than the bees because their problems of
+life are much more complicated; they are fraught with many more dangers;
+their enemies lurk on all sides; while the bees have very few natural
+enemies. There are no bee-catchers in the sense that there are scores of
+flycatchers. I know of no bird that preys upon the worker bees. The
+kingbird is sometimes called the "bee martin" because he occasionally
+snaps up the drones. All our insectivorous birds prey upon the flies;
+the swallows sweep them up in the air, the swifts scoop them in, while,
+besides the so-called flycatchers, the cedar-birds, the thrushes, the
+vireos, and all other soft-billed birds, subsist more or less upon them.
+Try to catch a big blow-fly upon the window-pane and see how difficult
+the trick is, while with a honey bee it is no trick at all. Or try to
+"swat" the ordinary house-fly with your hand. See how he squares himself
+and plants himself as your threatening hand approaches! He is ready for
+a trial of speed. He seems to know that your hand is slower than he is,
+and he is right in most cases. Now try a honey bee. The case is
+reversed. The bee has never been stalked; it shows no fear; and to crush
+it is as easy as to crush a beetle.
+
+The wit and cunning of all animals are developed by their struggle for
+existence. The harder the struggle, the more their intelligence. Our
+skunk and porcupine are very stupid because they do not have to take
+thought about their own safety; Nature has done that for them.
+
+To bolster up his case, Maeterlinck urges that "the capacity for folly
+so great in itself argues intelligence," which amounts to saying that
+the more fool you are, the more you know.
+
+Buffon did not share Maeterlinck's high opinion of the intelligence of
+the bee; he thought the dog, the monkey, and the majority of other
+animals possess far more; an opinion which I share. Indeed, of free
+intelligence the bee possesses very little. The slave of an
+overmastering instinct, as our new nature poet, McCarthy, says,
+
+  She makes of labor an eternal lust.
+
+Bees do wonderful things, but do them blindly. They work as well (or
+better) in the darkness as in the light. The Spirit of the Hive knows
+and directs all. The unit is the swarm, and not the individual bee.
+
+The bee does not know fear; she does not know love. She will defend the
+swarm with her life, but her fellows she heeds not.
+
+It is very doubtful if the individual bees of the same hive recognize
+one another at all outside the hive. Every beehunter knows how the bees
+from the same tree will clip and strike at one another around his box,
+when they are first attracted to it. After they are seriously engaged in
+carrying away his honey, they pay no attention to one another or to bees
+from other swarms. That bees tell one another of the store of honey they
+have found is absurd. The unity of the swarm attends to that.
+
+Maeterlinck tells of a little Italian bee that he once experimented upon
+during an afternoon, the results showing that this bee had told the news
+of her find to eighteen bees! Its "vocabulary" stood it in good stead!
+
+Maeterlinck's conception of the Spirit of the Hive was an inspiration,
+and furnishes us with the key to all that happens in the hive. The
+secret of all its economies are in the phrase. Having hit upon this
+solution, he should have had the courage to stand by it. But he did not.
+He is continually forgetting it and applying to his problem the
+explanations we apply in our dealings with one another. He talks of the
+power of the bees to give "expression to their thoughts and feelings";
+of their "vocabulary," phonetic and tactile; he says that the
+"extraordinary also has a name and place in their language"; that they
+are able to "communicate to each other news of an event occurring
+outside the hive"; all of which renders his Spirit of the Hive
+superfluous. He quotes from a French apiarist who says that the explorer
+of the dawn,--the early bee,--like the early bird that catches the worm,
+returns to the hive with the news that "the lime-trees are blooming
+to-day on the banks of the canal"; "the grass by the roadside is gay
+with white clover"; "the sage and the lotus are about to open"; "the
+mignonette and the lilies are overflowing with pollen." Whereupon the
+bees must organize quickly and arrange to divide the work. They probably
+call a council of the wise ones and after due discussion and formalities
+proceed to send out their working expeditions. "Five thousand of the
+sturdiest will sally forth to the lime-trees, while three thousand
+juniors go and refresh the white clover." "They make daily calculations
+as to the means of obtaining the greatest possible wealth of saccharine
+liquid."
+
+When Maeterlinck speaks of "the hidden genius of the hive issuing its
+commands," or recognizes the existence among the bees of spiritual
+communications that go beyond a mere "yes" or "no," he is true to his own
+conception.
+
+The division of labor among hive bees is of course spontaneous, like all
+their other economies--not a matter of thought, but of instinct.
+
+Maeterlinck and other students of the honey bee make the mistake of
+humanizing the bee, thus making them communicate with one another as we
+communicate. Bees have a language, they say; they tell one another this
+and that; if one finds honey or good pasturage, she tells her sisters,
+and so on. This is all wide of the mark. There is nothing analogous to
+verbal communication among the insects. The unity of the swarm, or the
+Spirit of the Hive, does it all. Bees communicate and cooeperate with one
+another as the cells of the body communicate and cooeperate in building
+up the various organs. The spirit of the body cooerdinates all the
+different organs and tissues, making a unit of the body.
+
+If some outside creature, such as a mouse or a snail, penetrates into
+the hive, and dies there, the bees encase it in wax, or bury it where it
+lies, so that it cannot contaminate the hive, and a foreign object in
+the body, such as a bullet in the lungs, or in the muscles, becomes
+encysted in an analogous manner, and is thus rendered harmless.
+
+Kill a bee in or near the hive and the smell of its crushed body will
+infuriate the other bees. But crush a bee in the fields or by the
+bee-hunter's box which is swarming with bees, and the units from the
+same hive heed it not.
+
+Bees have no fear. They have no love or attachment for one another as
+animals have. If one of their number is wounded or disabled, they
+ruthlessly expel it from the hive. In fact, they belong to another world
+of beings that is absolutely oblivious of the world of which we form a
+part. They murder or expel the drones, after they have done their work
+of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their
+apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not
+personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the
+cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers,
+sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers,
+working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the
+kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These
+little people have no red blood, no organs of sense, as we have; they
+breathe and hear through their legs, their antennae.
+
+The drones do not know the queen as such in the hive. Their instincts
+lead them to search for her in the air during her nuptial flight, and
+they know her only there. The drones have thirteen thousand eyes, while
+the workers have only six thousand. This double measure of the power of
+vision is evidently to make sure that the males discover the queen in
+her course through the air.
+
+The guards that take their stand at the gate, the bees that become fans
+at the entrance to ventilate the hive, the nurses, the bees that bring
+the bee-bread, the bees that pack it into the cells, the bees that go
+forth to find a home for the new swarm, the sweepers and cleaners of the
+hive, the workers that bring propolis to seal up the cracks and
+crevices--all act in obedience to the voiceless Spirit of the Hive.
+
+After we have discounted Maeterlinck so far as the facts will bear us
+out in doing, it remains to be said that he is the philosopher of the
+insect world. If Fabre is the Homer, as he himself has said, Maeterlinck
+is the Plato of that realm. How wisely he speaks of the insect world in
+his latest volume, "Mountain Paths":
+
+  The insect does not belong to our world. The other
+  animals, the plants even, notwithstanding their dumb life
+  and the great secrets which they cherish, do not seem
+  wholly foreign to us. In spite of all, we feel a certain
+  earthly brotherhood with them. They often surprise and
+  amaze our intelligence, but do not utterly upset it. There
+  is something, on the other hand, about the insect that
+  does not belong to the habits, the ethics, the psychology
+  of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect
+  comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic,
+  more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own.
+  One would think that it was born of some comet that had
+  lost its course and died demented in space.
+
+Speaking of the intelligence of bees reminds me of a well-known woodsman
+and camp-fire man who recently extolled in print the intelligence of
+hornets, saying that they have the ability to differentiate friends from
+foes. "They know us and we talk to them and they are made to feel as
+welcome as any of our guests." "When a stranger visits the camp, they
+attract the attention of one they know _who recognizes their signal by
+thought or gesture and leaves immediately, returning only when the
+stranger has departed_." (The italics are mine.) He says the same
+hornets apparently come to them year after year, greeting them on their
+arrival, and, should they be accompanied by strangers, they treat them
+with the same deference as "when they visit us after we have been in
+camp some time."
+
+Did one ever hear before of such well-bred and well-mannered bees? What
+would Maeterlinck say to all that? Its absurdity becomes apparent when
+we remember that hornets live but a single season, that none of them
+lives over the winter, save the queen, and that she never leaves the
+nest in summer after she has got her family of workers around her.
+
+
+III. ODD OR EVEN
+
+One of our seven wise men once said to me, "Have you observed that in
+the inorganic world things go by even numbers, and in the organic world
+by odd?" I immediately went down to the edge of a bushy and swampy
+meadow below our camp and brought him a four-petaled flower of galium,
+and a plant-stalk with four leaves in a whorl. In another locality I
+might have brought him dwarf cornel, or the houstonia, or wood-sorrel,
+or the evening-primrose. Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive
+of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the
+freedom and irregularity of growing things.
+
+One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things.
+Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some
+eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the
+number six rules them. In the world of living things we cannot be so
+sure of ourselves. Life introduces something indeterminate and
+incommensurable. It makes use of both odd and even, though undoubtedly
+odd numbers generally prevail. Leaves that are in lobes usually have
+three or five lobes. But the stems of the mints are four-square, and the
+cells of the honey bee are six-sided. We have five fingers and five
+toes, though only four limbs. Locomotion is mechanical and even numbers
+serve better than odd. Hence the six-legged insects. In the inorganic
+world things attain a stable equilibrium, but in the living world the
+equilibrium is never stable. Things are not stereotyped, hence the
+danger of dogmatizing about living things. Growing Nature will not be
+driven into a corner.
+
+Well may Emerson ask--
+
+  Why Nature loves the number five,
+  And why the star form she repeats?
+
+The number five rules in all the largest floral families, as in the
+crowfoot family, the rose family (which embraces all our fruit trees),
+the geranium family, the flax family, the campanula family, the
+convolvulus family, the nightshade family. Then there is a large number
+of flowers the parts of which go in threes, one of the best known of
+which is the trillium. In animal life the starfish is the only form I
+recall based on the number five.
+
+
+IV. WHY AND HOW
+
+One may always expect in living nature variations and modifications. It
+is useless to ask why. Nature is silent when interrogated in this way.
+Ask her how, and you get some results. If we ask, for instance, why the
+sting of the honey bee is barbed, and those of the hornet and wasp and
+bumble-bee, and of other wild bees, are smooth like a needle, so that
+they can sting and sting again, and live to sting another day, while the
+honey bee stings once at the cost of its life; or why only one species
+of fish can fly; or why one kind of eel has a powerful electric
+battery; or why the porcupine has an armor of quills while his brother
+rodent the woodchuck has only fur and hair, and so on--we make no
+addition to our knowledge.
+
+But if we ask, for instance, how so timid and defenseless an animal as
+the rabbit manages to survive and multiply, we extend our knowledge of
+natural history. The rabbit prospers by reason of its wakefulness--by
+never closing its eyes--and by its speed; also by making its home where
+it can command all approaches, and so flee in any direction. Or if we
+ask how our ruffed grouse survives and prospers in a climate where its
+cousin the quail perishes, we learn that it eats the buds of certain
+trees, while the quail is a ground-feeder and is often cut off by a deep
+fall of snow.
+
+If we ask why the chipmunk hibernates, we get no answer; but if we ask
+how he does it, we find out that he stores up food in his den, hence
+must take a lunch between his naps. The woodchuck hibernates, also, but
+he stores up fuel in the shape of fat in his own body. The porcupine is
+above ground and active all winter. He survives by gnawing the bark of
+certain trees, probably the hemlock. We have two species of native mice
+that look much alike, the white-footed mouse and the jumping, or
+kangaroo, mouse. The white-foot is active the season through, over and
+under the snow; the jumper hibernates all winter, and apparently
+accomplishes the feat by the power he has of barely keeping the spark of
+life burning. His fires are banked, so to speak; his temperature is very
+low, and he breathes only at long intervals.
+
+If, then, we ask with Emerson, "_why_ Nature loves the number five," and
+"_why_ the star form she repeats," we shall be put to it for an answer.
+We can only say that with living things odd numbers are more likely to
+prevail, and with non-living, even numbers.
+
+Some seeds have wings and some have not. To ask why, is a blind
+question, but if we ask _how_ the wingless seeds get sown, we may add to
+our knowledge.
+
+In our own practical lives, in which experimentation plays such a part,
+we are often compelled to ask why this result and not that, why this
+thing behaves this way and that thing that way. We are looking for
+reasons or causes. The farmer asks why his planting in this field was a
+failure, while it was a success in the next field, and so on. An
+analysis of his soil or of his fertilizer and culture will give him the
+answer.
+
+
+V. AN INSOLUBLE PROBLEM
+
+That Darwin was a great natural philosopher and a good and wise man
+admits of no question, but to us, at this distance, it seems strange
+enough that he should have thought that he had hit upon the key to the
+origin of species in the slow and insensible changes which he fancied
+species underwent during the course of the geologic ages, and should
+thus have used the phrase as the title of his book. Had he called his
+work the "Variability of Species," or the "Modification of Species," it
+would not have been such a misnomer. Sudden mutations give us new
+varieties, but not new species. In fact, of the origin of species we
+know absolutely nothing, no more than we do about the origin of life
+itself.
+
+Of the development of species we know some of the factors that play a
+part, as the influence of environment, the struggle for existence, and
+the competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherent
+tendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution?
+Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originate
+species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening a
+species, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. The record of the
+rocks reveals to us the relation of species, and their succession in
+geologic time, but gives no hint of their origin.
+
+Agassiz believed that every species of animal and plant was the result
+of a direct and separate act of the Creator. But the naturalist sees the
+creative energy immanent in matter. Does not one have to believe in
+something like this to account for the world as we see it? And to
+account for us also?--a universal mind or intelligence
+
+  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
+  And the round ocean and the living air,
+  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
+
+Agassiz was too direct and literal; he referred to the Infinite Mystery
+in terms of our own wills and acts. When we think of a Creator and the
+thing created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fire
+and light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could not
+look upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of the
+origin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said,
+speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they
+"have all been produced by laws acting around us," he spoke as a great
+philosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind
+grouping of irrational forces.
+
+
+VI. A LIVE WORLD
+
+It was "the divine Kepler," as Professor Shaler calls him, who looked
+upon the earth as animated in the fashion of an animal. "To him this
+world is so endowed with activities that it is to be accounted alive."
+But his critics looked upon this fancy of Kepler's as proof of a
+disordered mind.
+
+Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on
+the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living
+organism than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and
+palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms
+do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as
+Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held
+in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast
+sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no
+doubt as dead as matter can be. It is hard to fancy its surface yielding
+to our tread as does that of the earth. Then we know that the absence of
+air and water on it is proof that it cannot be endowed with what we call
+life. George Darwin tells us that when we walk on the ground we warp and
+bend the surface very much as we might bend or dent the epidermis of a
+colossal pachyderm. He and his brother devised an instrument by which
+the slight fluctuations of the ground, as we move over it, could be
+measured. The instrument was so delicate that it revealed the difference
+of effect produced by the same pressure at seven feet and at six feet
+from the instrument! More than that, the instrument revealed the
+throbbing and agitations which the ground is undergoing at all times.
+They found that minute earthquakes, or microseisms, as the Italians call
+them, are occurring constantly.
+
+Another instrument has been invented called the microphone, which
+translates this earth's movements into sound--its tremors and
+agitations become audible. This microphone, when placed in a cave twenty
+feet below the surface, and carefully protected by means of a carpet
+from any accidental disturbance in its immediate vicinity, revealed what
+is called "natural telluric phenomena; such as roarings, explosions,
+occurring isolated or in volleys, and metallic or bell-like sounds."
+"The noises sometimes become intolerably loud," especially on one
+occasion in the middle of the night, half an hour before a sensible
+earthquake.
+
+Our apparently impassive and slumbering old planet evidently has dreams
+we know little of.
+
+From Professor Shaler's "Nature and Man in America" I get an impression
+which again deepens my feeling of something half human about our lucky
+planet, at least something progressive and unequal, like life itself.
+Shaler finds that organic development in the Northern Hemisphere is more
+advanced, by a whole geologic period, than in the Southern, with Europe
+at the head and Australia the greatest laggard. The animal life of
+Australia is much like that of Europe in the Jurassic period, while both
+Asia and Africa possess forms, such as elephants, and tigers, and lions,
+which abounded in Europe in Tertiary times. Hence the Northern
+Hemisphere is more like the head of the beast, and the Southern more
+like the viscera. The Northern races easily dominate the Southern. The
+flowering of civilization is in the North. It is very certain that man
+originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that
+the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival
+the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.
+
+
+VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR
+
+That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems
+to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has
+more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of
+the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the
+fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories
+fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and
+greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly
+made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when
+they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the
+jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the
+strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their
+political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the
+divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact
+that the organic world had reached its present stage of development
+through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these
+ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to
+development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that
+power comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them.
+
+The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of our
+higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous.
+Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the
+Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind,
+in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his
+plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his
+mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his
+simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore
+fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.
+The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code.
+Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of the
+territory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in the
+fields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had the
+sanction of natural law, that was enough; they were quite oblivious to
+the fact that with man's moral nature had come in a new biological law
+which Darwin was not called upon to reckon with, but which has
+tremendous authority and survival value--the law of right, justice,
+mercy, honor, love.
+
+We do not look for the Golden Rule among swine and cattle, or among
+wolves and sharks; we look for it among men; we look for honor, for
+heroism, for self-sacrifice, among men. None of these things are
+involved in the Darwinian hypothesis. There is no such thing as right or
+wrong in the orders below man. These are purely human distinctions. It
+is not wrong for the wolf to eat the lamb, or the lamb to eat the grass,
+but an aggressive war is wrong to the depths of the farthest star.
+Germany's assault upon the peace and prosperity of the world was a crime
+against the very heavens.
+
+Darwin occupied himself only with the natural evolution of organic
+forms, and not with the evolution of human communities. He treated man
+as an animal, and fitted him into the zooelogical scheme. He removed him
+from the realm of the miraculous into the plane of the natural. For all
+purposes of biological discussion, man is an animal, but that is not
+saying he is only an animal, and still under the law of animal
+evolution. The European man is supposed to have passed the stage of
+savagery, in which the only rule of right is the rule of might. To have
+made Darwinism an excuse for a war of aggression is to have debased a
+sound natural philosophy to a selfish and ignoble end.
+
+Germany lifted the law to the human realm and staked her all upon it,
+and failed. The moral sense of the world--the sense of justice, of fair
+play--was against her, and inevitably she went down. Her leaders were
+morally blind. When the rest of the world talked of moral standards, the
+German leaders said, "We think you are fools." But these standards
+brought England into the war--the sacredness of treaties. They brought
+the United States in. We saw a common enemy in Germany, an enemy of
+mankind. We sent millions of men to France for an ideal--for justice and
+fair play. To see our standards of right and justice ignored and
+trampled upon in this way was intolerable. The thought of the world
+being swayed by Prussianism was unbearable. I said to myself from the
+first, "The Allies have got to win; there is no alternative." And what
+astonishes me is that certain prominent Englishmen, such as Lord Morley,
+and others, did not see it. Would they have sat still and watched
+Germany destroy France and plant herself upon the Channel and make ready
+to destroy England? The very framework of our moral civilization would
+have been destroyed. Darwin little dreamed to what his natural selection
+theory was to lead.
+
+
+VIII. THE ROBIN
+
+Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or best
+stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility,
+adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous
+feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From
+cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the
+only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks
+upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most
+diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on a
+horizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your
+porch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or under
+the shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground
+above a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on a
+projecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said
+he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days.
+
+He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a
+dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in
+September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word--a typical
+American in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first I
+hear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there are
+twenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The song
+sparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is far
+behind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows or
+bluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as well
+as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins.
+Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is
+near at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or New
+England. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a
+plebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one would
+not like to miss.
+
+The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be a
+runner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"--it starts "in
+high" and stops "in high."
+
+
+IX. THE WEASEL
+
+In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the
+strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red
+squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red
+squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel
+would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave
+him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both.
+Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at
+work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them.
+Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it
+released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by
+stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The
+bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many
+yards and then had pulled it down.
+
+Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a
+weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and
+round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and
+looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the
+squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the
+squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would
+not have followed him, and thus make his escape--who knows? One of my
+neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and
+took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then
+dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such
+terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy
+prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form,
+that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell
+upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a
+hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my
+foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its
+methods are a kind of _Schrecklichkeit_ in the animal world. It is the
+incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.
+
+
+X. MISINTERPRETING NATURE
+
+We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption that
+her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among
+plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool
+from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we
+want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk,
+irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want
+butter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains
+and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object
+with as little waste and delay as possible.
+
+Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her
+fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she
+subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her
+one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will
+be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize
+fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.
+
+Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are
+necessary for the survival of the species--strength, speed, sharpness of
+eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.
+
+Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the
+crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and
+can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey
+wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing
+that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons
+that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and
+cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and
+unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's
+hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?
+
+Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no
+concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly
+to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow
+sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the
+obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume that
+Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle
+of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He
+wants some particular good--a race-horse, a draft-horse--better quality
+or greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with
+her progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts with
+her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The
+stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She
+pits one species of plant or animal against another--heads I win, tails
+you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles
+their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are
+unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of
+mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage,
+but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass because
+it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.
+
+
+XI. NATURAL SCULPTURE
+
+We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or
+by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical
+or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the
+earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling
+up and pulling down--aggregating and accumulating, and separating and
+disintegrating.
+
+It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in
+inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process,
+but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an
+obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and
+monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Canon and in the
+Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other
+aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and
+structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking
+forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to
+liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were
+not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the
+leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the
+earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and
+suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of
+them in the Grand Canon! It looks as though titanic architects and
+sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand
+and a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologic
+ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the
+river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the
+material it took out of this chasm! But it could not--poetry at one end
+of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form
+of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains--material for a new series
+of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Canons may be
+carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders of
+the mountains are only ordinary workmen.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+RUMINATIONS
+
+
+I. MAN A PART OF NATURE
+
+This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of
+as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its
+own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature
+external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call
+nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its
+crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little
+way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very
+limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are
+things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.
+
+It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as
+distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the
+world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals
+are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization
+is the separating of one thing from another and classifying and
+organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are
+absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be
+savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We
+improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own
+purposes. All the forces we use--wind, water, gravity, electricity--are
+still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to
+the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane
+soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty
+miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter
+projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the
+hammer because he greatly outweighs it.
+
+
+II. MARCUS AURELIUS ON DEATH
+
+Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of
+the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is
+like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is
+unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of
+the body the component elements--water, lime, iron, phosphorus,
+magnesia, and so on--remain the same, but their organization is changed.
+Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page,
+the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist
+independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then
+not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter
+in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it
+is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the
+brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds
+of our neighbor or friend--his character, his personality--exists after
+he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?
+
+We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or
+even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its
+ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the
+same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character,
+personality, mentality--do not these escape your analysis? and are they
+not also real?
+
+
+III. THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE
+
+Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter
+of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that
+same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His
+interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself
+also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his
+literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase
+of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic
+orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so
+that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well
+interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because
+the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew
+into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new
+enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and
+the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and
+our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting
+Nature, he is really interpreting himself--reading his own heart and
+mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and
+his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives
+the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the
+perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical
+order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night
+prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there
+is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows
+and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they
+are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature
+interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her
+terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her
+presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the
+emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him
+his susceptibility to beauty.
+
+It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in
+the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall
+into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the
+flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in
+the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor,
+and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot
+of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn,
+the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no
+resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it.
+We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the
+laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of
+brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.
+
+The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul
+through the medium of the marble--the picture is not in the painter's
+color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is
+in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and
+the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of
+physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the
+perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that
+apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret
+the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in
+the heavens is accidental--the chair, the dipper, the harp, the
+huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or
+Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the
+mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's
+mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.
+
+All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an
+unfailing sequence of events we frame laws--the law of gravity, of
+chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity--and refer to them as if
+they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own
+minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we
+habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be
+annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though
+theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's
+mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.
+
+The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine
+and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines
+of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered--the spirit which
+the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt
+prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the
+attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official
+prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no
+avail--and how absurd to expect them to be--but who shall say that the
+prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and
+clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for
+the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to
+reach one's hands for the moon.
+
+
+IV. ORIGINAL SOURCES
+
+The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are,
+in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the
+libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to
+the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the
+fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those
+forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence
+cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the
+air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at
+first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the
+vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in
+direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life
+possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its
+chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant,
+or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.
+
+The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for their
+religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to
+Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth
+inspires them.
+
+
+V. THE COSMIC HARMONY
+
+The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man
+produces or aims to produce in his work--the order and harmony that will
+give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic
+order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and
+circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are
+the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the
+spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles
+round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one
+law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends;
+and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently
+celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make
+their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, which
+undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as
+they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star
+suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a
+star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly
+grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic
+accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough,
+would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it
+even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the
+world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are
+the exception--else there would be no living world. Organic evolution
+reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious
+course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its
+course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels
+ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable
+life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a
+living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that
+disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we
+call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the
+orderly development of life.
+
+The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds
+tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she
+diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures,
+she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on the
+other hand, tends to multiply the mouths.
+
+Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work in
+deforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions of
+drought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations.
+
+
+VI. COSMIC RHYTHMS
+
+The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean are not merely the
+result of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is in
+them. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic
+than terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment which
+the sun and moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to side. Only
+the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The great
+inland bodies of water are unresponsive to them--they are too small for
+the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that only
+great souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What a
+puzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford of
+the cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in their
+net! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tied
+to the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters--how they follow the sun
+and moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round the world"! The
+land feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobile
+clouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of the
+sun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious of
+it. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.
+
+
+VII. THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE
+
+It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and
+Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or
+unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the
+Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I
+saw in the Grand Canon of the Colorado where they were laid down
+horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a
+mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series
+of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living
+bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms.
+Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure
+silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many
+exquisite forms, _Foraminiferae_. The Pyramids are said to be built of
+rocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animal
+kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at present
+contributing, so largely as has the _Foraminiferae_ to the formation of
+the earth's crust." In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem
+Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the
+continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh
+waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the
+"bordering primordial seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the mark.
+There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living
+organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them,
+but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring
+another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists
+usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter
+begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with
+myriads of animal forms.
+
+
+VIII. SPENDTHRIFT NATURE
+
+Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to
+her ends." She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written
+large--written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of
+that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so
+of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal
+parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many
+trees yield fruit only every other year.
+
+I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most.
+Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses
+in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as
+of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts--butternuts,
+hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the
+agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the
+wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than
+they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she
+offers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find the
+service its own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and woods
+hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery
+arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries,
+and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels
+doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds
+have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with
+strychnine.
+
+We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few,
+extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western
+farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own account
+in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are
+stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+NEW GLEANINGS IN FIELD AND WOOD
+
+
+As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in
+Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again,
+which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the
+rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more
+familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I
+detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect
+to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in
+the whole performance.
+
+
+I. SUNRISE
+
+The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the
+rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his
+coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the
+forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes
+very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become
+conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly
+increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten
+minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge--the gold turns to silver.
+After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to
+appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a
+minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon
+line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me
+blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One
+realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its
+axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day.
+The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil"
+to describe this moment?--"Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks
+of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I
+watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It
+is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning.
+Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the
+heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually
+enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest
+veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down.
+His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the
+morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or
+storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
+are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as
+if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and
+yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this
+mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it
+could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God
+to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and
+particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.
+
+
+II. NATURE'S METHODS
+
+Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his
+inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The
+first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies
+hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed
+steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
+her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models.
+There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case
+of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with
+those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term.
+She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal
+and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is
+like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.
+
+The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the
+secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of
+the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the
+original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one
+another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one
+case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one
+overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and
+no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat
+rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the
+origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that
+of the animal species.
+
+The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is
+analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated
+sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the
+other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of
+high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must
+have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and,
+while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
+approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it
+is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.
+
+We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in
+the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and
+tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned
+instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was
+developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as
+indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in
+the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
+that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or
+are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have
+slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from
+the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes
+and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things.
+The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought
+their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they
+graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for
+us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels;
+they teach us what to shun.
+
+How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for
+instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and
+elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They
+are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their
+horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our
+common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does
+not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.
+
+Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose
+and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.
+
+What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footed
+mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special
+tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use
+his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet
+have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it
+back with his nose.
+
+Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows
+its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition
+it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just
+beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven
+inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its
+conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.
+
+A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner,
+demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly
+distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in
+one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my
+answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural
+law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his
+letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.
+
+There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to
+scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command--to
+increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is
+limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs.
+Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum
+to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the
+fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the
+robin--in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers--may
+and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.
+
+The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is
+mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on
+all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds
+do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be
+"fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail
+as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak
+many advantages.
+
+There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another--the
+fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and
+sharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with the
+blunt of scent--which we call natural competition; but the slow, the
+stupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and
+thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to
+be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and
+sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent
+secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the
+antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have
+speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful
+because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the gray
+squirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunk
+below him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows in
+the ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store of
+nuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates the
+rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels.
+
+The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, the
+cold, the heat--the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment,
+survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life than
+those who fall by the way.
+
+
+III. HEADS AND TAILS
+
+I have heard a story of a young artist who, after painting a picture of
+a horse facing a storm, was not satisfied with it, and, feeling that
+something was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly the great
+artist said to him, "Turn the horse around."
+
+The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse turns his tail. Why this
+difference? Because each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and
+its anatomy. How much better suited is the broad, square head of the
+cow, with its heavy coating of hair and its ridge of bone that supports
+its horns, to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous and
+sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast between their noses and
+their mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the
+grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off and
+loves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile and
+sensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and the
+equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow a
+feeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, the
+cow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. The
+tail of the cow is of less protection to her than is that of the horse
+to him. Her great need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the
+rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then her bony stern,
+with its ridges and depressions and thin flanks, is less fit in any
+encounter with storm or with beast than is her head. On the other hand,
+the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with their huge masses
+of muscles, his smooth flanks, and his tail--an apron of long, straight,
+strong hair--are well designed to resist storm and cold. What animal is
+it in Job whose neck is clothed with thunder? With the horse, it is the
+hips that are so clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.
+
+
+IV. AN UNSAVORY SUBJECT
+
+If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I suppose the breath
+of the obscene fungus by any other name would smell as rank. The
+defensive weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would probably not be
+less offensive if we called him by that name alone, instead of the
+common one by which he is universally known.
+
+While in southern California last winter I heard of one that took up his
+abode in the basement of a house that stood on the side of a hill in the
+edge of the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where all sorts of
+odds and ends had accumulated. On some shelves was a box of
+miscellaneous articles, such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old
+toothbrushes, bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire, chips of wood,
+and the dried foot and leg of a hen. One morning, on opening the door of
+the basement, the mistress of the house was surprised to see the whole
+collection of trash laid out in a line across the floor. The articles
+were placed with some degree of regularity covering a space about
+fifteen inches wide and ten feet in length. There were sixty-one
+articles in the row.
+
+Having such an unsavory creature in the basement of one's house is
+rather ticklish business; not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet
+fraught with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away the exhibit and
+left the door open, hoping their uninvited guest would take his
+departure. But he did not. A few nights later he began another
+collection, finding a lot of new material--among other things a box with
+old atomizer bulbs, four of which bulbs he arranged here and there, in
+the row--a motley array.
+
+What is his object? I confess I do not know. No one has seen him do it,
+as he works at night, but there is little doubt that it is his work.[3]
+The Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger than a gray
+squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.
+
+  [3] Later investigations point to this having been the
+  work of a wood rat instead of a skunk.--C. B.
+
+I wish some one would tell me why this night prowler so often seems to
+spray the midnight air with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He
+never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our Eastern species is
+as free from odor as a squirrel or a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by
+day or night in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground that
+lasts for months. While at a friend's house in the Catskills last August
+a wood pussy came up behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap. We
+saw him from the window in the early evening, and we smelled him. For
+some reason he betrayed his presence. Late that night I was awakened by
+a wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose smart, yet in the
+morning no odor could be detected anywhere about the place. Of course
+the smell is much more pronounced in the damp night air than by day, yet
+this does not seem an adequate explanation. Does he signal at night to
+his fellows by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I have never
+heard him make a vocal sound. When caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs
+in a stone wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping his feet. He
+is the one American who does not hurry through life. I have no proof
+that he ever moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he ever
+experiences the feeling of fear, so common to nearly all our smaller
+animals. His track upon the snow is that of a creature at peace with all
+the world.
+
+
+V. CHANCE IN ANIMAL LIFE
+
+Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of some animals than of
+others. The frog and the toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn
+thousands, but most birds lay only five or six eggs.
+
+A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a miser with the other. She
+lets loose an army of worms upon the forests, and then sends an
+ichneumon-fly to check them. She wastes no perfume or color upon the
+flowers which depend upon the wind to scatter their pollen.
+Cross-fertilization is dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways
+to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will rob the bones of the
+fowl of their lime to perfect the shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or
+cunning on the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has already
+endowed each of them with a perfect means of defense.
+
+Two things Nature is not chary of--fear and pain. She heaps the measure
+here because fear puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them
+from many real dangers. What dangers have lurked for man and for most
+wild things in the dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a
+fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic. Pain, too,
+safeguards us; it shields us against real dangers. The pains of
+childbirth are probably no check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of
+procreation, especially on the part of the male, overcomes all other
+considerations.
+
+
+VI. MOSQUITOES AND FLEAS
+
+Mosquitoes for the North and mainly fleas and ticks for the South--this
+seems to be Nature's decree, at least in this country. The mosquitoes of
+the Far North pounce upon one suddenly and ferociously, while our Jersey
+mosquitoes hesitate and parley and make exasperating feints and passes.
+On the tundra of Alaska, if I stopped for a moment a swarm of these
+insects rose out of the grass as if they had been waiting for me all the
+years (as they had) and were so hungry that they could not stand upon
+the order of their proceeding, but came headlong.
+
+In Jamaica the dogs were persecuted almost to death by the fleas. They
+were the most sorry, forlorn, and emaciated dogs I ever saw. Life was
+evidently a burden to them. I remember that Lewis and Clark, in their
+journey across the continent, were greatly pestered by fleas. I have
+found that our woodchucks, when they "hole up" in the fall, are full of
+fleas.
+
+
+VII. THE CHANGE OF CLIMATE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
+
+I have just been reading, for the third time, Dana's "Two Years Before
+the Mast," my sojourn near San Diego for a few months, where so many of
+the scenes and events he describes took place, having given me a renewed
+interest in the book.
+
+It is very evident that the climate of southern California has greatly
+changed since Dana was here in the trading ships Pilgrim and Alert, in
+1832 and 1833. The change has been from wet to dry. At that time his
+ship collected, and others engaged in the same trade collected, hundreds
+of thousands of hides and great quantities of tallow, all from cattle
+grown by the missions between San Diego and Santa Barbara. This fact
+implies good pasturage. The cattle grazed on the hills and plains that
+are now, during a large part of the year, as dry as a bone. At present
+cattle left to their own devices on this coast would soon starve to
+death.
+
+Dana describes violent storms of wind and rain, mainly from the
+southeast, which the ship, anchored a few miles off the coast, or
+cruising up and down, experienced at all times of year--one or more
+storms each week, often lasting for days. One December he describes it
+as raining every hour for the whole month. The dread of the southeasters
+was ever present with the sailors. One of these, lasting three days,
+which came out of a cloudless sky, blew the sails to tatters. Nowadays a
+southeast storm of half a day is, according to my experience, an
+uncommon occurrence. To-day scarcely a drop of rain falls here from
+April till November, yet Dana describes many heavy rains in August. At
+present, in some of the interior valleys, where they grow alfalfa by
+means of irrigation, I see herds of well-kept dairy cows. In the season
+of rains the grass springs up and for a time cattle do well, but during
+the long dry season there is no pasturage save dry pasturage.
+
+Although winter is supposed to be the rainy season here, I have been
+here during three seasons and have so far seen only light rains. To-day
+(December 16th) the earth is like powder as deep down as you care to
+dig. Yesterday I saw a man dragging in grain, and a great cloud of dust
+streamed out behind him. Ten or more years ago there was a very heavy
+rainfall in this locality that inundated large sections of the country
+and destroyed much property, the dry San Diego River getting out of
+bounds and carrying away bridges and floating houses on its banks. But
+it has been as dry as a highway ever since. It is clear that when the
+big rains do come they are more sporadic and uncertain than formerly.
+
+
+VIII. ALL-SEEING NATURE
+
+Sitting by a flat rock one summer morning, on my home acres in the
+Catskills, I noticed that the wild strawberry-vines sent out their
+runners over the rock, the surface of which is on a level with the turf,
+just as over the ground. Of course they could not take root, but they
+went through all the motions of taking root; the little clusters of
+leaves developed at intervals, the rootlets showed their points or stood
+at "attention," and the runners pushed out two or three feet over the
+barren surface and then seemed to hesitate like a traveler in the desert
+whose strength begins to fail. The first knot, or, one might say, the
+first encampment, was about one foot from the last one upon the turf,
+the next one about eight inches farther in; then the distance dropped to
+six inches, then to four. I think the runner finally gave it up and
+stopped reaching out. Each group of leaves apparently draws its main
+sustenance from the one next behind it, and when this one fails to reach
+the soil it loses heart and can give little succor to the next in front.
+The result is that the stools become smaller and smaller, and the
+distances between them less and less, down the whole line.
+
+Nature's methods are seen in the little as well as in the big, and these
+little purple runners of the vine pushing out in all directions show the
+all-round-the-circle efforts of Nature as clearly as do the revolving
+orbs in sidereal space. Her living impulses go out in all directions.
+She scatters her seeds upon the barren as well as upon fertile spots.
+She sends rains and dews upon the sea as well as upon the land. She
+knows not our parsimony nor our prudence. We say she is blind, but
+without eyes she is all-seeing; only her creatures who live to
+particular ends, and are limited to particular spheres, have need of
+eyes. Nature has all time and all space and all ends. Delays and failure
+she knows not. If the runners of her strawberries do not reach their
+goal, the trouble corrects itself; they finally stop searching for it in
+that direction, and the impulse of the plant goes out stronger and
+fuller on other sides.
+
+If the rains were especially designed to replenish our springs and
+supply our growing crops, the clouds might reasonably be expected to
+limit their benefactions, as do our sprinkling carts; but the rains are
+older than are we and our crops, and it is we who must adjust ourselves
+to them, not they to us.
+
+The All-Seeing, then, has no need of our specialized vision. Does the
+blood need eyes to find its way to the heart and lungs? Does the wind
+need eyes to find the fertile spots upon which to drop its winged seeds?
+It drops them upon all spots, and each kind in due time finds its proper
+habitat, the highly specialized, such as those of the marsh plants,
+hitting their marks as surely as do others.
+
+Our two eyes serve us well because our footsteps are numbered and must
+go in a particular direction, but the goal of all-seeing Nature is
+everywhere, and she arrives before she starts. She has no plan and no
+method, and she is not governed.
+
+These conceptions express too little, not too much. Nature's movements
+are circular; her definite ends are enclosed in universal ends. The
+rains fall because the vapors rise. The rain is no more an end than is
+the rising vapor. Each is a part of the great circuit of beneficent and
+malevolent forces upon which our life (and all life) depends, upon which
+the making of the soil of the earth and the shaping of the landscape
+depend; all vegetable and animal life, all the bloom and perfume of the
+world, all the glory of cloud and sky, all the hazards of flood and
+storm, all the terror of torrents and inundations, are in this circuit
+of the waters from the sea to the sky, and back again through the rivers
+to the sea. In our geologic time there is, in this circuit of the
+waters, more that favors life than hinders it, else, as I so often say,
+we should not be here. The enormous destruction of human life, of all
+life, which has taken place and will continue to take place, in this
+beneficent circuit, is only an incident in the history of the globe; the
+physical forces are neither for nor against it; they are neutral; life
+to be here at all has to run these risks; has to run the gantlet of
+these forces, and to get many a lash and gash in the running. Against
+the suffering and death incident thereto there is no insurance save in
+the wit of man himself. All this wit has been developed and sharpened by
+much waste and suffering. We learn to deal with difficulties through the
+discipline of the difficulties themselves. If man were finally to learn
+to control the rains and the floods, it would be through the experience
+which they themselves bring him. The demons that destroy him are on his
+side when he strikes with the strength which they give him. Gravity,
+which so often crushes and overthrows him, is yet the source of all his
+might. The fire that consumes his towns and cities is yet the same fire
+that warms him and drives his engines across the continent.
+
+There is no god that pities us or weeps over our sufferings, save the
+god in our own breasts. We have life on heroic terms. Nature does not
+baby us nor withhold from us the bitter cup. We take our chances with
+all other forms of life. Our special good fortune is that we are capable
+of a higher development, capable of profiting to a greater extent by
+experience, than are the lower forms of life. And here is the mystery
+that has no solution: we came out of the burning nebulae just as our
+horse and dog, but why we are men and they are still horse and dog we
+owe to some Power, or, shall I say, to the chance working of a multitude
+of powers, that are beyond our ken. That some Being willed it, designed
+it, no; yet it was in some way provided for in the constitution of the
+world.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Agassiz, Louis, 168, 169.
+
+  Air, light and heavy, 72, 73.
+
+  Albatross, 38.
+
+  Animal life, abundance, 11, 12.
+
+  Antlers, 201.
+
+  Ants, 11.
+
+  Army trucks, 110, 111.
+
+  Arum, 196.
+
+  Automobile trip, 109-26.
+
+
+  Bacon, Francis, 186.
+
+  Barton, W. Va., 119.
+
+  Bee, honey, spirit of the hive, 152, 158-62;
+    intelligence, 156, 157;
+    communication, 159, 160;
+    their world, 161;
+    sting, 165.
+
+  Bee, leaf-cutter, 14, 15.
+
+  Beech, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Birds, living with, 31;
+    flight, 32-38;
+    and cats, 56;
+    nesting near houses, 54-59;
+    home sense, 59;
+    nests of most species built by the females, 64, 65;
+    and dead trees, 84, 85;
+    song, 86;
+    at Pine Knot, Va., 102-05;
+    of southern California, 129-32;
+    community of mind in flocks, 153, 154.
+
+  Birds' nests, finding, 79-81.
+
+  Bluebird, endearing qualities, 43;
+    nesting, 43, 44, 54;
+    experience with a pair, 44-48.
+
+  Bobolink, song flight, 38, 85.
+
+  Bolar Springs, 117.
+
+  Brain, as organ of the mind, 22, 23.
+
+  Buffon, Georges Louis Le Clerc, 157.
+
+  Bumble-bee, carpenter, 36.
+
+  Bunting, indigo, nesting, 90, 91.
+
+  Bunting, painted, 114.
+
+  Butterflies, flight, 34;
+    flocking, 155.
+
+  Butterfly, monarch, 34, 35, 155.
+
+  Buzzard, turkey, 32-34.
+
+
+  Cacti, 143-48.
+
+  California, southern, observations in, 127-51;
+    coast, 127;
+    mountains, 127, 128;
+    climate and soil, 128;
+    bird-song, 128, 129;
+    birds, 129-32;
+    change of climate in, 210-12.
+
+  Cambium layer, 5, 6.
+
+  Carpenter, W. B., quoted, 194.
+
+  Catbird, 30;
+    stealthiness, 60, 67, 68;
+    experience with a pair, 60-66;
+    fondness for butter, 66;
+    theatrical, 68;
+    notes, 87.
+
+  Caterpillars, 91-94.
+
+  Causes, 165-67.
+
+  Cedar-bird, 65.
+
+  Chance, in animal life, 208, 209.
+
+  Cheat River, W. Va., 116.
+
+  Chipmunks, two in a den, 11;
+    storing currants, 17;
+    carrying provender, 96, 97.
+
+  Chippie. _See_ Sparrow, chipping.
+
+  Chlorophyll, 190, 191.
+
+  Chrysalis, 12.
+
+  Condor, 33, 34.
+
+  Connellsville, Pa., 113.
+
+  Cormorant, 132.
+
+  Cosmos, the, order and harmony of, 191-93.
+
+  Cow, 205.
+
+  Crow, flight, 37;
+    needs no great wing-power, 180.
+
+  Crow, fish, 55, 56, 68.
+
+  Cuckoo, 71, 72, 87;
+    solemnity, 88;
+    nesting, 88, 89;
+    young, 89;
+    nest, 90;
+    food, 90.
+
+  Cuckoo, black-billed, notes, 87, 88;
+    nesting-habits, 88.
+
+  Cuckoo, yellow-billed, 87.
+
+
+  Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., at San Diego, 210, 211.
+
+  Darwin, Charles, quoted, 5,17, 18, 33;
+    his eager study of natural history, 17, 18;
+    observations during the voyage of the Beagle, 18, 19;
+    failure of his theory, 147, 167-69;
+    his mind, 173;
+    treated man as an animal, 174.
+
+  Darwin, George Howard, on the tides, 169, 170.
+
+  Darwinism, a cause of the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Death, an analogy of, 185, 186.
+
+  Desert, vegetation of the, 143-48.
+
+  Dove, mourning, _or_ turtle-dove, 86.
+
+
+  Earth, the, quiverings of the surface, 169-71;
+    the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Edison, Thomas A., 114, 119;
+    contrasted with Mr. Ford, 122-25.
+
+  Elm, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted, 69, 165, 186.
+
+  Erosion, as sculpture, 181-83.
+
+
+  Fabre, Jean Henri, 162;
+    quoted, 139.
+
+  Far-away, the, 39.
+
+  Fear in animals, 58, 59, 154, 155, 209.
+
+  Fireflies, 19.
+
+  Firestone, H. S., 119, 125.
+
+  Fish, schools of, 154.
+
+  Fleas, 210.
+
+  Flies, intelligence, 156, 157.
+
+  Foraminiferae, 194.
+
+  Ford, Henry, 113, 114, 119, 120;
+    contrasted with Mr. Edison, 122-24.
+
+  Foxes, 180.
+
+  Frog, wood, 94, 95.
+
+
+  Germans, Darwinism, and the World War, 172-75.
+
+  Giraffe, 200.
+
+  Girls, two West Virginia, 115.
+
+  Gnatcatcher, blue-gray, 103.
+
+  God, man appropriating, 199.
+
+  Goldfinch, flight, 37, 42;
+    chorus singing, 40-42;
+    notes, 42;
+    notes of young, 43;
+    nesting, 43.
+
+  Grand Canon, 182, 194.
+
+  Grass, the wonder of, 74, 75.
+
+  Grasshoppers, 155.
+
+  Great Smoky Mts., 109.
+
+  Greensborough, Pa., 112.
+
+  Grosbeak, rose-breasted, nesting, 65.
+
+  Grouse, ruffed, 166.
+
+  Gull, herring, 131.
+
+  Gulls, flight, 38.
+
+
+  Hawk, red-tailed, 32.
+
+  Hawks, flight, 35.
+
+  Haymaking, 69-76.
+
+  Hen-hawk, flight, 35.
+
+  Hornets, 163.
+
+  Horns, 201, 202.
+
+  Horse, 205, 206.
+
+  Horseshoe Run, W. Va., 114.
+
+  Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 64;
+    bathing in dew, 13;
+    nest, 79;
+    a fairy bird, 94.
+
+  Hurley, Edward N., 113.
+
+  Huxley, Thomas Henry, 27;
+    quoted, 8, 25.
+
+
+  Ibis, white, 32, 153, 154.
+
+  Insects, their world, 23-25, 162;
+    senses, 24;
+    reaction to heat,
+    cold, and vibrations, 25;
+    antennae, 25;
+    the ruling sex among, 140, 141.
+
+  Interpretation, 186-90.
+
+  Ironweed, 116.
+
+
+  James, William, 22.
+
+  Jay, blue, notes, 87.
+
+  Joe-Pye-weed, 116.
+
+  Junco, young, 19, 20;
+    nesting, 81;
+    abundance, 82.
+
+
+  Kepler, Johann, 169.
+
+  Killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Kingbird, flight, 37;
+    and bees, 156.
+
+
+  Leaves, autumn, 1-3.
+
+  Lemmings, 152, 153.
+
+  Life, origin of, 194, 195.
+
+  Life, human, analogies, 25-27.
+
+  Lightning-bugs. _See_ Fireflies.
+
+  Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 5.
+
+  Lubbock, Sir John, quoted, 156.
+
+
+  McCarthy, Denis Aloysius, quoted, 157.
+
+  Maeterlinck, Maurice, quoted, 23, 162;
+    on the bee, 156-63.
+
+  Man, and Darwinism, 174;
+    a part of nature, 184-86;
+    interpretation of nature and of himself, 186-90;
+    mystery of his evolution, 216.
+
+  Maple, sugar, susceptibility to atmospheric changes, 72, 73.
+
+  Maples, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Marcus Aurelius, quoted, 185.
+
+  Meadowlark, song flight, 37.
+
+  Measuring-worm, 91, 92.
+
+  Mice, wild, 16;
+    barking trees, 27, 28.
+
+  Microphone, 170, 171.
+
+  Microseisms, 170.
+
+  Mind, community of, 152-55.
+
+  Mockingbird, 68.
+
+  Moose, 200.
+
+  Mosquitoes, 210.
+
+  Moth, luna, 97.
+
+  Mouse, jumping, 166, 167.
+
+  Mouse, white-footed, 166.
+
+  Mullets, 154.
+
+
+  Natural history about home, 39, 40.
+
+  Nature, her methods unlike ours, 179-81, 199;
+    interpreting, 186-90;
+    lavishness and parsimony, 195, 196, 209;
+    puzzling and contradictory, 201, 202;
+    all-seeing, 212-14;
+    her movements circular, 214-16.
+
+  Nighthawk, 104.
+
+  Nonpareil, _or_ painted bunting, 114.
+
+  North Carolina, a countryman of, 121.
+
+  Northern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+
+  Oak, autumn color, 3.
+
+  Odd and even numbers, 163-65.
+
+  Oriole, Baltimore, 30, 56;
+    nest, 48-52, 64.
+
+  Oriole, Bullock's, nest, 52.
+
+  Oriole, orchard, nest, 52.
+
+  Osborn, Henry Fairfield, on the origin of life, 194, 195.
+
+  Ostrich, 200.
+
+  Owl, screech, 45-47.
+
+
+  Pacific Ocean, 127.
+
+  Pain, 209.
+
+  Pear-trees, autumn color, 1.
+
+  Pelican, California brown, 131, 132.
+
+  Pennsylvania, motor trip through, 109-13.
+
+  Pewee, wood, nest, 52, 64;
+    its plaint, 87.
+
+  Phoebe, flight, 37;
+    nest, 52-54, 56, 59, 60, 64, 79, 80.
+
+  Pigeon, wild, 103, 104.
+
+  Pine Knot, Va., visit to, 101-08.
+
+  Pipit, American, 129;
+    nest, 129, 130.
+
+  Pittsburgh, 111.
+
+  Plover, killdeer, 130, 131.
+
+  Porcupine, 166.
+
+
+  Rabbit, its protection, 166;
+    caught by a weasel, 177, 178.
+
+  Rainbow tints, in dew, etc., 13, 14.
+
+  Rat, wood, 207 _note_.
+
+  Reasons, 165-67.
+
+  Redstart, 29.
+
+  Road-mending, 11.
+
+  Robin, young, 19;
+    nest, 53-55, 64, 176;
+    fear of man, 57, 58;
+    fittest to survive, 175, 176;
+    versatility, 176;
+    a hustler, 176;
+    danger of a plague of robins, 177;
+    a runner, 177.
+
+  Rocks, origin of the secondary, 200.
+
+  Roosevelt, Theodore, visit to Pine Knot, Va., with, 101-08;
+    knowledge of India, 101;
+    opinion of Taft, 105;
+    killing a mosquito, 105, 106;
+    protection of the President, 106;
+    bird-gazing, 107;
+    letter from, 107, 108.
+
+
+  Salamander, orange-colored, 95, 96.
+
+  San Diego, Cal., 210-12.
+
+  Sandstone, in the Catskills, 20.
+
+  Sap, 6-8.
+
+  Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Scorpion, 23.
+
+  Seals, hair, in California, 148-51.
+
+  Sex, the ruling, 140, 141.
+
+  Shaler, Nathaniel S., quoted, 169;
+    on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, 171, 172.
+
+  Shrew, 16.
+
+  Skunk, 206-08.
+
+  Snakes, 11.
+
+  Sources, original, 190, 191.
+
+  South, characteristics of the, 120, 121.
+
+  Southern Hemisphere, 171, 172.
+
+  Sparrow, story of a nest, 98, 99.
+
+  Sparrow, chipping _or_ social, nest, 53, 54.
+
+  Sparrow, song, song flight, 37;
+    nesting, 54;
+    singing, 85, 86.
+
+  Sparrow, vesper, nesting, 80-84;
+    its names, 82;
+    appearance and habits, 82, 83;
+    courted by a skylark, 83.
+
+  Species, origin of, an insoluble problem, 167-69, 199.
+
+  Spider, trap-door, 132-43.
+
+  Spiders, 12, 23;
+    genius of, 136.
+
+  Spider-webs, rainbows in, 13, 14.
+
+  Squirrel, gray, caught by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Squirrel, red, chased by a weasel, 178.
+
+  Strawberry-vines, wild, 212-14.
+
+  Struggle, 203, 204.
+
+  Sunrise, 197, 198.
+
+  Survival of the fit, 201, 203.
+
+  Swallow, bank, 78.
+
+  Swallow, barn, 71;
+    parental anxiety, 76, 77;
+    notes, 76, 77;
+    pleasing qualities, 77, 78.
+
+  Swallow, cliff, 77.
+
+  Swallow, tree, 78.
+
+  Swallows, feeding, 15, 16;
+    hibernation, 78.
+
+  Swift, chimney, 36.
+
+  Sycamore, autumn color, 3.
+
+
+  Taft, William Howard, 105.
+
+  Telepathy, 155.
+
+  Thistle, Canada, 202.
+
+  Thorns, the use of, 143-48.
+
+  Thrasher, brown, 67, 68.
+
+  Thrush, Alaska hermit, 129.
+
+  Thrush, hermit, song, 87.
+
+  Thrush, olive-backed, 30.
+
+  Thrush, Wilson's. _See_ Veery.
+
+  Thrush, wood, 30, 64;
+    manners, 67, 68.
+
+  Tides, the, 169, 170, 193, 194.
+
+  Titlark. _See_ Pipit.
+
+  Trees, leaves, 1-3;
+    mechanism of growth, 4-8;
+    roots and rootlets, 4-6;
+    what man has in common with, 9, 10.
+
+  Tree-toad, 71.
+
+  Turnip, Indian, 196.
+
+  Turtle-dove. _See_ Dove, mourning.
+
+
+  Uniontown, Pa., 113.
+
+  Universe. _See_ Cosmos.
+
+
+  Van Dyke, John C., on desert plants, 145, 146.
+
+  Veery, nesting, 97, 98.
+
+  Vireo, nest, young, and mother, 99, 100.
+
+  Vireo, red-eyed, 86, 100.
+
+  Vireo, yellow-throated, 30.
+
+  Vital principle, 8, 9.
+
+
+  Warbler, Audubon's, 129.
+
+  Warbler, Canada, 29.
+
+  Warbler, mourning, 29, 31.
+
+  Wasp, a solitary, 12, 13.
+
+  Water-thrush, _or_ water accentor, 79.
+
+  Waxwing, Bohemian, 21.
+
+  Weasel, catching rabbits and squirrels, 177, 178;
+    an inspirer of terror, 178, 179.
+
+  Weather, prophesying the, 20-22.
+
+  West Virginia, motor trip through, 114-19.
+
+  Whitman, Walt, quoted, 9, 193.
+
+  Wolf Creek, 117.
+
+  Woodcock, flight song, 32, 37.
+
+  Woodpecker, yellow-bellied, 6.
+
+  Woodpeckers, flight, 37.
+
+  World War, Darwinism a cause of the, 172-75.
+
+  Wren, Bewick's, 103.
+
+  Wren, house, 86;
+    and nesting-box, 29.
+
+  Wren, winter, nest, 79.
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+  CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+  U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Under the Maples, by John  Burroughs
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