ee
Seen oe ee

Qe

CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME
OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT
FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY

HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE

FIELD AND STUDY

DATE DUE

GAYLORD PRINTEDINU.S.A.

The Old Corner Book

Books by John Burroughs

WORKS. 19 vols., uniform, 16mo, with frontispiece, gilt
top.

Waxg-Rosin.

Winter SUNSHINE.

Locusts AnD WiLp Honey.

Fresu Frecps.

Inpoor Srruprgs.

Birps AND Poets, with Other Papers.

Pepacron, and Other Sketches.

SIGNS AND SEASONS.

Riversy.

Wuitman: A Stupy.

Tue Licut oF Day.

Lirzrary VALugs.

Far anp NEAR.

Ways or Nature.

Lear AND TENDRIL.

TIME AND CHANGE.

Tue SuMMIT OF THE YEARS.

‘THe Breatu oF Lirs.

UNDER THE APPLE-TREES.

Frz_p anp Srupy.
FIELD AND STUDY. Riverside Edition.
UNDER THE APPLE-TREES. Riverside Edition.
THE BREATH OF LIFE. Riverside Edition.
THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS. Riverside Edition.
TIME AND CHANGE. Riverside Edition.
LEAF AND TENDRIL. Riverside Edition.
WAYS OF NATURE. Riverside Edition,
FAR AND NEAR. Riverside Edition.
LITERARY VALUES. Riverside Edition.
THE LIGHT OF DAY. Riverside Edition.
WHITMAN: A Study. Riverside Edition,

A YEAR IN THE FIELDS. Selections appropriate
to each season of the year, from the writings of John
Burroughs. Illustrated from Photographs by Cutr-
TON JOHNSON. *+

IN THE CATSKILLS. Illustrated from Photographs
by Ciirton JouNnson.

CAMPING AND TRAMPING WITH ROOSEVELT.
Illustrated from Photographs.

BIRD AND BOUGH. Poems,
WINTER SUNSHINE. Casmbridge Classics Series.
WAKE-ROBIN. Riverside Aldine Series.

SQUIRRELS AND OTHER FUR-BEARERS. Iilus-
trated.

BIRD STORIES FROM BURROUGHS. Illustrated.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Boston anD New York

“with

FIELD AND STUDY

“SUIRIUNOPY [[ESFBD oy} Ul emMoP{ JourMINS gs sqsnoing “JIL

YP] ayy YB uaas oq Avur ApNyG v Jo} pesn Ueg OL,
a@DGO'T HONHOGOOA,

Cornell University

Library

The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.

There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.

http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024735486

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY JOHN BURROUGHS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FIELD AND STUDY

BY

JOHN BURROUGHS

(

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Che Hiversive Press Cambridge
1919

CONTENTS

III. Science .
IV. Evo.urion o «
V. Nature anp Naturay History
VI. MiscetLanreous Nores
INDEX

. 252
. 213
. 289
. 320
. 831

XU

I.
II.

CONTENTS

Part I: AFIELD

. Tae Sprinc Brrp Procession .
. Nature Lore . . . .

. Tue Famitiar Birps

. Foss anp FratHers

. THe Sones or Birps

. OncHARD SECRETS . ...

. NaturEINLivtnE . |.
VIII.
. A CLEvER BEASTIE

. Puases oF ANIMAL LIFE

. Eacu Arter Its Kino .

. THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

Tue Insect Minp . . .

New Guranines In OLp Frecps
I. Live Natura History
II. Toe Barn SwaLtow
TI. Insects
IV. Tur Doce
V. Woop Wairs
VI. An Intersstine Puant
VII. Nature Near Home

Part II: Srupy Norss

LivERATURE . . .. .
RELIGION

. 102
. 112
. 129
. 140
- 152
. 158
- 174
. 193
- 193

198

- 201
- 205
. 206
. 210
. 213

. 221
. 241

FIELD AND STUDY
Part I
AFIELD

FIELD AND STUDY

them, and vocal with their soft, childlike calls; or
all day the sky would be streaked with the long
lines or dense masses of the moving armies. The last
great flight of them that I ever beheld was on the
10th of April, 1875, when, for the greater part of the
day, one could not at any moment look skyward
above the Hudson River Valley without seeing
several flocks, great and small, of the migrating
birds. But that spectacle was never repeated as it
had been for generations before. The pigeons never
came back. Death and destruction, in the shape of
the greed and cupidity of man, were on their trail.
The hosts were pursued from State to State by pro-
fessional pot-hunters and netters, and the numbers
so reduced, and their flocking instinct so disorgan-
ized, that their vast migrating bands disappeared,
and they were seen only in loosely scattered and
diminishing flocks in different parts of the West
during the remainder of the century. A friend of
mine shot a few in Indiana in the early eighties, and
scattered bands of them have occasionally been re-
ported, here and there, up to within a few years. The
last time that my eyes beheld a passenger pigeon
was in the fall of 1876 when I was out for grouse.
I saw a solitary cock sitting in a tree. I killed it,
little dreaming that, so far as I was concerned, I was
killing the last pigeon.

What man now in his old age who witnessed in
youth that spring or fall festival and migration of

4

FIELD AND STUDY
Part I: AFIELD.
I
THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

r

Ox of the new pleasures of country life when
one has made the acquaintance of the birds is
to witness the northward bird procession as it passes
or tarries with us in the spring — a procession which
lasts from April till June and has some new feature
daily.

The migrating wild creatures, whether birds or
beasts, always arrest the attention. They seem to link
up animal life with the great currents of the globe.
It is moving day on a continental scale. It is the
call of the primal instinct to increase and multiply,
suddenly setting in motion whole tribes and races.
The first phoebe-bird, the first song sparrow, the first
robin or bluebird in March or early April, is like the
first ripple of the rising tide on the shore.

In my boyhood the vast armies of the passenger
pigeons were one of the most notable spring tokens.
Often late in March, or early in April, the naked
beechwoods would suddenly become blue with

8

FIELD AND STUDY

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?”
Bryant, by the way, handled natural subjects in a
large, free, simple way, which our younger poets
never attained.

When one is fortunate enough to see a line of
swans etched upon the sky near sunset, a mile or
more high, as has been my luck but twice in my life,
one has seen something he will not soon forget.

The northward movement of the smaller bodies
— the warblers and finches and thrushes — gives
one pleasure of a different kind, the pleasure of
rare and distinguished visitors who tarry for a few
hours or a few days, enlivening the groves and or-
chards and garden borders, and then pass on. Deli-
cacy of color, grace of form, animation of move-
ment, and often snatches of song, and elusive notes
and calls, advise the bird-lover that the fairy
procession is arriving. Tiny guests from Central
and South America drop out of the sky like flowers
borne by the night winds, and give unwonted inter-
est to our tree-tops and roadside hedges. The ruby-
crowned kinglet heralds the approach of the pro-
cession, morning after morning, by sounding his
elfin bugle in the evergreens.

The migrating thrushes in passing are much more
chary of their songs, although the hermit, the veery,
and the olive-backed may occasionally be heard.
I have even heard the northern water-thrush sing

6

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

the passenger pigeons would not hail it as one of the
gladdest hours of his life if he could be permitted to
witness it once more? It was such a spectacle of
bounty, of joyous, copious animal life, of fertility in
the air and in the wilderness, as to make the heart
glad. I have seen the fields and woods fairly inun-
dated for a day or two with these fluttering, piping,
blue-and-white hosts. The very air at times seemed
suddenly to turn to pigeons.

One May evening recently, near sundown, as I
sat in my summer-house here in the Hudson Valley,
I saw a long, curved line of migrating fowl high in
the air, moving with great speed northward, and for
a moment I felt the old thrill that I used to experi-
ence on beholding the pigeons. Fifty years ago I
should have felt sure that they were pigeons; but
they were only ducks. A more intense scrutiny
failed to reveal the sharp, arrow-like effect of a
swiftly moving flock of pigeons. The rounder,
bottle-shaped bodies of the ducks also became ap-
parent. But migrating ducks are a pleasing spec-
tacle, and when, a little later, a line of geese came
into my field of vision, and re-formed and trimmed
their ranks there against the rosy sky above me,
and drove northward with their masterly flight,
there was no suggestion of the barnyard or farm
pond up there.

“Whither, midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
5

FIELD AND STUDY

is true of several, probably of most, other species.
A friend of mine has a summer home in one of the
more secluded valleys of the Catskills, and every
June for three years a pair of catbirds have nested
near the house; and every day, many times, one or
both birds come to the dining-room window, for
sweet butter. Very soon after their arrival they ap-
pear at the window, shy at first, but soon becoming
so tame that they approach within a few feet of the
mistress of the house. They light on the chairbacks
and sometimes even hop on the table, taking the
butter from the fork held by the mistress. Their
behavior now is very convincing that one or both
have been at the window for butter in previous
years.

Let me quote a page or two from my notebook,
under date of May 25: —

Walked down through the fields and woods to the river,
and then along the wooded banks toward home.

Redstarts here and there in the woods, going through
their pretty gymnastics. None of our insect-feeders known
to me so engage the eye. The flashes of color, and the
acrobatic feats — how they set each other off! It is all
so much like a premeditated display, or a circus, or an
operatic performance, that one is surprised to find a
solitary bird in the woods so intent upon it. Every move-
ment is accompanied by its own feathered display, The
tail, with its bands of black and orange, is as active in
opening and shutting as a lady’s fan at the opera signal-
ing to her lover; the wings unfold, or droop, and second

8

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

briefly in my currant-patch. The bobolink begins to
burst out in sudden snatches of song, high in air, as
he nears his northern haunts. I have often in May
heard the black-poll warbler deliver his fine strain,
like that of some ticking insect, but have never
heard the bay-breasted nor the speckled Canada
during migration. None of these birds sing or nest
in the tropical countries where they pass more than
half the year. They are like exiles there; the joy
and color fade out of their lives in the land of color
and luxuriance. The brilliant tints come to their plu-
mage, and the songs to their hearts, only when the
breeding impulse sends them to. their brief north-
ern homes. Tennyson makes his swallow say, —

“1 do but wanton in the South,
While in the North long since my nest is made.”

It is highly probable, if not certain, that the
matches made in the North endure but for a season,
and that new mates are chosen each spring. The
males of most species come a few days in advance
of the females, being, I suppose, es with
the breeding impulse.

That birds have a sense of home and return in
most cases to their old haunts, is quite certain. But
whether both sexes do this, or only the males, I
have no proof. But I have proof which I consider
positive that the male song sparrow returns, and
there is pretty good evidence that the same thing

7

FIELD AND STUDY

larder to another kind. I saw a pretty illustration of
this fact yesterday. On the wide, smooth space,
graded with sharp gravel in front of my neighbor’s
boathouse, there were three Blackburnian war-
blers, one male and two females, very much ab-
sorbed in hurrying about over the gray surface,
picking up some tiny insects which were invisible
to my eye. How intent and eager they were! A nut-
hatch came down the trunk of the elm and eyed
them closely; then took to the ground and followed
them about for a moment. But evidently he could
not make out what the table was spread with, as,
after a few seconds, he flew back to the tree and
went on with his own quest of food. But the nut-
hatches will follow the downy woodpeckers through
the trees, and the chickadees follow the nuthatches,
and the brown creepers follow the chickadees, and
each kind appears to find the food it is looking for.
Every man to his taste, and every bird to the food
that its beak indicates.

I have no idea as to the kind of food that inva-
riably draws the male scarlet tanager to the ground
in the ploughed fields at this season; but there they
are in pairs or triplets, slowly looking over the brown
soil and visible from afar. Yesterday I came upon
two on the ground at a wettish place in the woods,
demurely looking about them. How they fairly
warmed the eye amid their dull and neutral sur-
roundings!
. 10

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

the sensitive tail, and the whole behavior of the bird
makes him about the prettiest actor in the little fly-
catching drama of the season. This behavior would sug-
gest that the bird feeds upon a particular kind of insect;
at all times and places it is engaged.in the same striking
acrobatic feats; just as the black and white creeping war-
vler is always busy in the hunt for some minute insect on
the trunks of trees.

I recall several of our insect-feeders each of
which seems to have its own insect province. The
Kentucky warbler, where I have known it on the
Potomac, fed for the most part on insects which it
gathered from the under side of the leaves of certain
plants near the ground. Hence it is classed among
the ground warblers, like the Maryland yellow-
throat. The red-eyed vireo feeds largely on the in-
sects which hide on the under side of leaves in the
tree-tops.

When the oriole first comes in May, he is very
busy searching into the heart of the apple-tree
bloom for some small insect. I have seen Wilson’s
black-capped warbler doing the same thing. I have
seen a score or more of myrtle warblers very active
amid the bushes and trees along a stream, snapping
up some slow-moving gauzy insect drifting about
there. They often festoon the stream with their
curving and looping lines of blue and black and
yellow.

. The feeding-ground of one bird is often an empty
9

FIELD AND STUDY

terday, out of the kitchen window, I saw three
speckled Canada warblers on the ground in the
garden. How choice and rare they looked on the
dull surface! In my neighbor’s garden or dooryard
I should probably have seen more of them, and
in his trees and shrubbery as many magnolia and
bay-breasted and black-throated blue warblers as
in my own; and about his neighbor’s place, and
his, and his, throughout the township, and on west
throughout the county, and throughout the State,
and the adjoining State, on west to the Missis-
sippi and beyond, I should have found in every
bushy tangle and roadside and orchard and grove
and wood and brookside, the same advancing line
of migrating birds — warblers, flycatchers, finches,
thrushes, sparrows, and so on — that I found here.
I should have found high-holes calling and drum-
ming, robins and pheebes nesting, swallows skim-
ming, orioles piping, oven-birds demurely tripping
over the leaves in the woods, tanagers and gros-
beaks in the ploughed fields, purple finches in the
cherry-trees, and white-throats and white-crowned
sparrows in the hedges.

~ One sees the passing bird procession in his own
grounds and neighborhood without pausing to think
that in every man’s grounds and in every neigh-
borhood throughout the State, and throughout a
long, broad belt of States, about several millions
of homes, and over several millions of farms, the

12

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

Season after season, all over the country, the
spectacle of scarlet tanagers inspecting the ground
in ploughed fields recurs.

This season an unusual number of male rose-
breasted grosbeaks have frequented the ground in
my vineyards at the same time: Their black-and-
white plumage, with an occasional glimpse of their
rose-colored breasts, makes them very noticeable,
but not so conspicuous as the tanagers. But their
rich, mellow warblings from the tree-tops more than
make up to the ear what the eye. misses. Strange to
say, in my boyhood I never saw or recognized this
bird, and few country or farm people, I think, ever
discriminate it. Its song is like that of the robin
much softened and rounded and more finely modu-
lated, contrasting in this respect with the harder
and more midsummery strain of the tanager. The
heavy beak of the bird gives him a somewhat
Hebraic look.

Ir

That birds of a feather flock together, even in
migration, is evident enough every spring. When
in the morning you see one of a kind, you may con-
fidently look for many more. When, in early May,
I see one myrtle warbler, I presently see dozens of
them in the trees and bushes all about me; or, if I
see one yellow redpoll on the ground, with its sharp
chirp and nervous behavior, I look for more. Yes-

11

FIELD AND STUDY

old cedar lane, I found a mourning dove’s nest on
the top of an old stone wall, — the only one I ever
found in such a position, — I wondered how many
mourning doves throughout the breadth and length
of the land had built or were then building their
nests on stone walls or on rocks.

Considering the enormous number of birds of all
species that flood the continent at this season, as if
some dike or barrier south of us had suddenly given
way, one wonders where they could all have been
pent up during the winter. Mexico and Central and
South America have their own bird populations
the seasons through; and with the addition of the
hosts from this country, it seems as if those lands
must have literally swarmed with birds, and that
the food question (as with us) must have been
pressing, Of course, a great many of our birds —
such as sparrows, robins, blackbirds, meadowlarks,
jays, and chewinks— spend the winter in the
Southern States, but many more — warblers,
swallows, swifts, hummers, orioles, tanagers,
cuckoos, flycatchers, vireos, and others — seek out
the equatorial region.

III

The ever-memorable war spring of 1917 was very
backward, — about two weeks later than the aver-
age, — very cold, and very wet. Few fruit-trees
bloomed before the 20th of May; then they all

14

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

same flood-tide of bird-life is creeping and eddying
or sweeping over the land. When the mating or
nesting high-holes are awakening you in the early
morning by their insistent calling and drumming on
your metal roof or gutters or ridge-boards, they are
doing the same to your neighbors near by, and to
your fellow countrymen fifty, a hundred, a thou-
sand miles away. Think of the myriads of door-
yards where the “chippies” are just arriving; of
the blooming orchards where the passing many-
colored warblers are eagerly inspecting the buds
and leaves; of the woods and woody streams where
the oven-birds and water-thrushes are searching out
their old haunts; of the secluded bushy fields and
tangles where the chewinks, the brown thrashers,
the chats, the catbirds, are once more preparing
to begin life anew — think of all this and more, and
you may get some idea of the extent and importance
of our bird-life.

I fancy that on almost any day in mid-May the
flickers are drilling their holes into a million or more
decayed trees between the Hudson and the Mis-
sissippi; that any day a month earlier the phcebes
are starting their nests under a million or more
woodsheds or bridges or overhanging rocks; that
several millions of robins are carrying mud and
straws to sheltered projections about buildings, or
to the big forked branches in the orchards.

When in my walk one day in April, through an

13

FIELD AND STUDY

of myrtle warblers snapping up the gauzy-winged
insects that hovered above the water in the fitful
sunshine. What loops and lines of color they made,
now perched on the stones, now on the twigs of the
overhanging trees, now hovering, now swooping!
What an animated scene they presented! They had
struck a rare find and were making the most of it.

On other occasions I saw the magnolia and Cape
May and chestnut-sided warblers under the same
stress of food-shortage searching in unwonted places.
One bedraggled and half-starved female magnolia
warbler lingered eight or ten days in a row of Jap-
anese barberry-bushes under my window, where
she seemed to find some minute and, to me, invisible
insect on the leaves and in the blossoms that seemed
worth her while.

This row of barberry-bushes was the haunt for
a week or more of two or three male ruby-throated
hummingbirds. Not one female did we see, but two
males were often there at the same time, and some-
times three. They came at all hours and probed the
clusters of small greenish-yellow blossoms, and
perched on the twigs of intermingled lilacs, often
remaining at rest five or six minutes at a time.
They chased away the big queen bumble-bees
which also reaped a harvest there, and occasionally
darted spitefully at each other. The first day I saw
them, they appeared to be greatly fatigued, as if
they had just made the long journey from Central

16

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

bloomed together: cherry, pear, peach, apple, all
held back till they could stand it no longer. Pink
peach-orchards and white apple-orchards at the
same time and place made an unusual spectacle.

The cold, wet weather, of course, held up the bird
procession also. The warblers and other migrants
lingered and accumulated. The question of food be-
came a very serious one with all the insect-eaters.
The insects did not hatch, or, if they did, they
kept very close to cover. The warblers, driven from
the trees, took to the ground. It was an unusual
spectacle to see these delicate and many-colored
spirits of the air and of the tree-tops hopping
about amid the clods and the rubbish, searching for
something they could eat. They were like jewels
in the gutter, or flowers on the sidewalk.

For several days in succession I saw several
speckled Canada warblers hopping about my newly
planted garden, evidently with poor results; then it
was two or more Blackburnian warblers looking
over the same ground, their new black-and-white
and vivid orange plumage fairly illuminating the
dull surface. The redstarts flashed along the ground
and about the low bushes and around the outbuild-
ings, delighting the eye in the same way. Bay-
breasted warblers tarried and tarried, now on the
ground, now in the lower branches of the trees or in
bushes. I sat by a rapid rocky stream one after-
noon and watched for half an hour a score or more

15

FIELD AND STUDY

There is one bird, however, that keeps pretty close
to the calendar. I refer to the white-crowned spar-
row, the most distinguished-looking of all our spar-
rows. Year after year, be the season early or late,
I am on the lookout for him between the 12th and
the 16th of May. This year, on the 13th, I looked
out of my kitchen window and saw two males hop-
ping along side by side in the garden. Unhurriedly
they moved about, unconscious of their shapely
forms and fine bearing. Their black-and-white
crowns, their finely penciled backs, their pure ashen-
gray breasts, and their pretty carriage, give them a
decided look of distinction. Such a contrast to our
nervous and fidgety song sparrow, bless her little
heart! And how different from the more chunky
and plebeian-looking white-throats — bless their
hearts also for their longer tarrying and their sweet,
quavering ribbon of song! The fox sparrow, the
most brilliant singer of all our sparrows, is an un-
certain visitor in the Hudson River Valley, and sea-
sons pass without one glimpse of him.

The spring of 1917 was remarkable for the num-
ber of migrating blue jays. For many days in May
I beheld the unusual spectacle of processions of jays
streaming northward. Considering the numbers I
saw during the short time in the morning that I was
in the open, if the numbers I did not see were in like
proportion, many thousands of them must have
passed my outlook northward. The jay is evidently

18

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

America. Never before had I seen this bird-jewel
of omnipotent wing take so kindly and so habituat-
edly to the perch.

The unseasonable season, no doubt, caused the
death of vast numbers of warblers. We picked up
two about the paths on my place, and the neighbors
found dead birds about their grounds. Often live
birds were so reduced in vitality that they allowed
the passer-by to pick them up. Where one dead bird
was seen, no doubt hundreds escaped notice in the
fields and groves. A bird lives so intensely — rapid
breathing and high temperature — that its need for
food is always pressing. These adventurous little
aviators had come all the way from South and Cen-
tral America; the fuel-supply of their tmy engines
was very low, and they suffered accordingly.

A friend writing me from Maine at this time had
the same story of famishing warblers to tell. Certain
of our more robust birds suffered. A male oriole
came under my window one morning and pecked a
long time at a dry crust of bread—a food, I dare say,
it had never tasted before. The robins alone were
in high feather. The crop of angleworms was one
hundred per cent, and one could see the robins
“snaking” them out of the ground at all hours.

Emerson is happy in his epithet “the punctual
birds.”’ They are nearly always here on time — al-
ways, considering the stage of the season; but the
inflexible calendar often finds them late or early.

17

FIELD AND STUDY

that he had a steel punch for a bill, and that it
never got dull.

But the high-hole’s bill is a wonderful instrument
and serves him in many ways. In the spring bird-
orchestra he plays an important part, more so than
that of any other of the woodpeckers. He is never
a disturber of the country quiet except on such
occasions as above referred to. His insistent call
coming up from the April and May meadows or
pastures or groves is pleasing to the nature-lover
to a high degree. It does seem to quicken the sea-
son’s coming, though my pair were slow in getting
down to business, doubtless on account of the back-
ward spring and the consequent scarcity of ants,
which are their favorite food.

When on the Ist of June I looked into the cavity
in one of my maples, and saw only one egg, I thought
it a meagre result for all that month and a half of
beating of drum and clashing of cymbals; but on
the 20th of June the results were more ample, and
four open mouths greeted me as I again looked into |
the little dark chamber in the maple. The drumming
and trumpeting had ceased, and the festive and
holiday air of the birds had given place to an air of
silent solicitude. As the cavity is.a natural one, the
result of a decayed limb, it does not have the car-
peting of soft pulverized “dozy” wood that it
would have had it been excavated by the birds.
Hence, for days before the full complement of eggs

20

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

more or less a migrant. I saw not one here during
the winter, which is unusual. As one goes south in
winter the number of jays greatly increases, till in
Georgia they are nearly as abundant as robins are
here in summer.

In late April a friend wrote me from a town in
northern New York that the high-holes disturbed
his sleep in the early morning by incessant drum-
ming on the metal roofs and gutters and ridge-
boards. They were making the same racket around
us at the same hour. Early in the month a pair of
them seem to have been attracted to a cavity in the
mid-top of a maple-tree near the house, and the
male began to warm up under the fever of the nest-

ing-impulse, till he made himself quite a nuisance
to sleepers who did not like to. be drummed out
before five o’clock in the morning. How loudly he
did publish and proclaim his joy in the old com-
mand which spring always reaffirms in all creatures!
With call and drum, repeated to the weariness of
his less responsive neighbors, he made known the
glad tidings from his perch on the verge of the tin
roof; he would send forth the loud, rapid call, which,
as Thoreau aptly says, has the effect as of some one
suddenly opening a window and calling in breathless
haste, “Quick, quick, quick, quick!” Then he
would bow his head and pour a volley of raps upon
the wood or metal, which became a continuous
stream of ringing blows. One would have thought

19

FIELD AND STUDY

The robins cover a very wide area, as do the
song sparrows, the kingbirds, the vireos, the flickers,
the orioles, the catbirds, and others. The area cov-
ered by the bobolinks is fast becoming less and less,
or at least it is moving farther and farther north.
Bobolinks in New York State meadows are becom-
ing rare birds, but in Canadian meadows they ap-
pear to be on the increase. The mowing-machine
and the earlier gathering of the hay-crop by ten or
fourteen days than fifty years ago probably ac-
count for it.

As the birds begin to arrive from the South in
the spring, the birds that have come down from the
North to spend the winter with us — the crossbills,
the pine grosbeaks, the pine linnets, the red-breasted
nuthatches, the juncos, and the snow buntings —
begin to withdraw. The ebb of one species follows
the flow of another. One winter, in December, a
solitary red-breasted nuthatch took up his abode
with me, attracted by the suet and nuts I had
placed on a maple-tree-trunk in front of my study
window for the downy woodpecker, the chickadees,
and the native nuthatches. Red-breast evidently
said to himself, “Needless to look farther.” He
took lodgings in a wren-box on a post near by, and
at night and during windy, stormy days was securely
housed there. He tarried till April, and his constancy,
his pretty form, and his engaging ways greatly en-
deared him to us. The pair of white-breasted nut-

22

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

was laid, and after the young had hatched, I used to
see and hear, as I passed by, one of the parent birds
pecking on the sides of the cavity, evidently to
loosen material to supply this deficiency.

The high-hole is our most abundant species of
woodpecker, and as he gets most of his living from
the ground instead of from the trees, he is a mi-
gracit in the Northern States. Our other members
of the family are mostly black, white, and red, but
the high-hole is colored very much like the meadow-
lark, in mottled browns and whites and yellows,
with a dash of red on the nape of his neck. To his
enemies in the air he is not a conspicuous object on
the ground, as the other species would be.

Iv

The waves of bird migrants roll on through the
States into Canada and beyond, breaking like waves
on the shore, and spreading their contents over
large areas. The warbler wave spends itself largely
in the forests and mountains of the northern tier of
States and of Canada; its utmost range, in the shape
of the pileolated warbler (the Western form of
Wilson’s black-cap) and a few others, reaching
beyond the Arctic Circle, while its content of
ground warblers, in the shape of the Maryland
yellow-throat and the Kentucky and the hooded
warblers, begins to drop out south of the Potomac
and in Ohio.

21

FIELD AND STUDY

ferently in all directions. Its soft nasal call in the
spring woods is one of the most welcome of sounds.
It is like the voice of children, plaintive but con-
tented, a soft interrogation in the ear of the sylvan
gods. What a contrast to the sharp, steely note of
the woodpeckers — the hairy’s like the metallic
sounds of the tinsmith and Downy’s a minor key
of the same!

But the woodpeckers have their drums which
make the dry limbs vocal, and hint the universal
spring awakening in a very agreeable manner. The
two sounds together, the childish “Yank, yank,”
of the nuthatch, and the resonant “Rat-tat-tat”
of Downy, are coincident with the stirring sap in
the maple trees. The robin, the bluebird, the song
sparrow, and the phcebe have already loosened the
fetters of winter in the open. It is interesting to note
how differently the woodpeckers and the nuthatches
use their beaks in procuring their food. Downy’s
head is a trip-hammer, and he drives his beak into
the wood by short, sharp blows, making the chips
fly, while the nuthatch strikes more softly, using his
whole body in the movement. He delivers a kind of
feathered blow on the fragment of nut which he has
placed in the vise of the tree’s bark. My little red-
breast, previously referred to, came down on a nut
in the same way, with a pretty extra touch of the
flash of his wings at each stroke, as the wood-
chopper says “Hah!” when sending his axe home.

24

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

hatches that fed at the same table looked coarse
and common beside this little delicate waif from the
far North. He could not stand to see lying about
a superabundance of cracked hickory-nuts, any
more than his larger relatives could, and would
work industriously, carrying them away and hiding
them in the woodpile and summer-house near by.
The other nuthatches bossed him, as they in turn
were bossed by Downy, and as he in turn bossed
the brown creeper and the chickadees. In early
April my little red-breast disappeared, and I fan-
cied him turning his face northward, urged by a
stronger impulse than that for food and shelter
merely. He was my tiny guest from unknown lands,
my baby bird, and he left a vacancy that none of
the others could fill.

The nuthatches are much more pleasing than the
woodpeckers. Soft-voiced, soft-colored, gentle-man-
nered, they glide over the rough branches and the
tree-trunks with their boat-shaped bodies, going up
and down and around, with apparently an extra
joint in their necks that enables them, head-down-
ward, to look straight out from the tree-trunk; their
motions seem far less mechanical and angular than
those of the woodpeckers and the creepers. Downy
can back down a tree by short hitches, but he never
ventures to do it headfirst, nor does the creeper;
but the universal joint in the nuthatch’s body and
its rounded keel enable it to move head on indif-

23

FIELD AND STUDY

beneath the trees. I grew alarmed for the safety of
my crop of Windsors, and tried to “‘shoo”’ the birds
away. They looked down upon me as if they con-
sidered it a good joke. Even when we shot one, to
make sure of the identity of the bird, the flock only
flew to the next tree and went on with the snipping.
Beneath two cherry-trees that stood beside the high-
way the blossoms drifted into the wagon tracks like
snowflakes. I concluded that the birds had taken
very heavy toll of my cherries, but it turned out
that they had only done a little of the much-needed
thinning. Out of a cluster of six or eight blossoms.
they seldom took more than two or three, as if they
knew precisely what they were about, and were in-
tent on rendering me a service. When the robins
and the cedar-birds come for the cherries they are
not so considerate, but make a clean sweep. The
finches could teach them manners — and morals.

THE SPRING BIRD PROCESSION

If this does not add force to his blows, it certainly
emphasizes them in a very pretty manner.

Each species of wild creature has its own indi-
vidual ways and idiosyncrasies which one likes to
note. As I write these lines a male kingbird flies by
the apple-tree in which his mate is building a nest,
with that peculiar mincing and affected flight which
none other of the flycatchers, so far as I know, ever
assumes. The olive-sided flycatcher has his own
little trick, too, which the others do not have: I
have seen his whole appearance suddenly change
while sitting on a limb, by the exhibition of a band
of white feathers like a broad chalk-mark outlining
his body. Apparently the white feathers under the
wings could be projected at will, completely trans-
forming the appearance of the bird. He would
change in a twinkling from a dark, motionless object
to one surrounded by a broad band of white..

It occasionally happens that a familiar bird de-
velops an unfamiliar trait. The purple finch is one
of our sweetest songsters and best-behaved birds,
but one that escapes the attention of most country
people. But the past season he made himself con-
spicuous with us by covering the ground beneath
the cherry-trees with cherry-blossoms. Being hard
put to it for food, a flock of the birds must have dis-
covered that every cherry-blossom held a tidbit in
the shape of its ovary. At once the birds began to
cut out these ovaries, soon making the ground white

25

FIELD AND STUDY

nature?” I reply: “Do not try to teach them at all.
Just turn them loose in the country and trust to
luck.” It is time enough to answer children’s ques-
tions when they are interested enough to ask them.
Knowledge without love does not stick; but if love
comes first, knowledge is pretty sure to follow. I do
not know how I first got my own love for nature,
but I suppose it was because I was born and passed
my youth on the farm, and reacted spontaneously
to the natural objects about me: I felt a certain
privacy and kinship with the woods and fields and
streams long before the naturalist awoke to self-
consciousness within me. A feeling of companion-
ship with Nature came long prior to any conscious
desire for accurate and specific knowledge about her
works. I loved the flowers and the wild creatures,
as most healthy children do, long before I knew
there was such a study as botany or natural history.
And when I take a walk now, thoughts of natural
history play only a secondary part; I suspect it is
more to bathe the spirit in natural influences than
to store the mind with natural facts. I think I know
what Emerson means when he says elsewhere in his
Journal that a walk in the woods is one of the secrets
for dodging old age. I understand what the poet
meant when he sang: —

“Sweet is the lore which Nature brings.”

Nature lore — that is it. Not so much a notebook
28

II
NATURE LORE

MERSON in his Journal says, “All facts in
nature interest us because they are deep and

not accidental.” Facts of nature are undoubtedly
of interest to most persons, though whether or not
Emerson gives the true reason may be questioned.
I would sooner venture the explanation that it is
because nature is a sort of outlying province of
ourselves. We feel a kinship with her works, and in
bird and beast, in tree and flower, we behold the
workings of the same life principle that has brought
us where we are and relates us to all living things.
Explain the matter as we may, the facts and do-
ings of nature interest us, and our interest is bound
to grow as we enlarge our acquaintance with them,
—which is about like saying that our interest keeps
pace with our interest. But so it is. Water does not
taste good to us until we are thirsty. Before we ask
questions we must have questions to ask, and be-
fore we have questions to ask we must feel an awak-
ened interest or curiosity. Action and reaction go
hand in hand; interest begets interest; knowledge
breeds knowledge. Once started in pursuit of nature
lore, we are pretty sure to keep on. When people
ask me, “How shall we teach our children to love

27

FIELD AND STUDY

of the eye and mind to read her signals, to penetrate
her screens, to disentangle her-skeins, to catch her
significant facts, add greatly to the pleasure of a
walk and to life in the country. Natural history is
on the wing, and all about us on the foot. It hides
in holes, it perches on trees, it runs to cover under
the stones and into the stone walls; it soars, it sings,
it drums, it calls by day, it barks and prowls and
hoots by night. It eats your fruit, it plunders your
garden, it raids your henroost, and maybe disturbs
your midnight slumbers.

At Woodchuck Lodge the woodchucks eat up my
peas and melons and dig under the foundations of
my house; the coons come down off the mountain
for sweet apples in my orchard. I surprise the foxes
among the cows on my early morning walks, or am
awakened in the dawn by the hue and cry of the
crows over a fox passing near, a little late in getting
back to the cover of the woods.

All such things add interest to country life. No
wild creature comes amiss, even though it rob your
henroost. I sometimes grow tender toward the wood-
chuck, even though he raids my garden; he is such
a characteristic bit of wild nature, creeping about
the fields, or sitting upon his haunches to see if
danger is near. He is of the earth, earthy, its true
offspring, steeped in its savors, hugging it close,
harmonizing with its soil and rocks, almost as liquid
as its fountains and as perennial as its grass.

30

NATURE LORE

full of notes of birds and trees and flowers as a heart
warmed and refreshed by sympathetic intercourse
and contact with these primal forces. When “the
press of one’s foot to the earth springs a hundred
affections,” as Whitman says, then one gets some-
thing more precious than exact science. Nature lore
is a mixture of love and knowledge, and it comes
more by way of the heart than of the head. We
absorb it with the air we breathe; it awaits us at
the side of the spring when we stoop to drink; it
drops upon us from the trees beneath which we
fondly linger; it is written large on the rocks and
ledges where as boys we prowled about on Sundays,
putting our hands in the niches or on the rocky
shelves older than Thebes or Karnak, touching care-
fully the phoebe’s mossy nest, with its pearl-white
eggs, or noting the spoor of coon or fox, or coming
face to face with the oldest inhabitant of the region,
who saw the foundations of the hills laid and the
valleys scooped out — Geologic Time, whose tent
is the gray, overhanging rocks.
_ Many a walk I take in the fields and woods when
I gather no new facts and make no new observa-
tions; and yet I feel enriched. I have been for an
hour or more on intimate terms with trees and rocks
and grass and birds and with “Nature’s primal
sanities”; the fragrance of the wild things lingers
about my mind for days.

Yet the close observation of nature, the training

29

FIELD AND STUDY

prise him in your morning walk, or he surprises you
in his. He, too, is a night prowler, but often he does
not get home till after sun-up. Early one October
morning, as I stood in the road looking out over the
landscape, a belated fox jumped over the wall a
few yards from me and loped unconcernedly along
parallel with the road, then turned and scaled the
fence, and crossed the road, and went bounding up
the hill toward the woods with a grace and ease im-
possible to describe. I suppose it was his massive
tail held level with his body that helped give the
idea of buoyancy. There was no apparent effort, as
when the farm dog climbs the hill, but the ease and
lightness that goes with floating and winged things.
It was indeed a pleasing spectacle, such as I had
not seen for many years, This winter the fox-hunter
with his hound will be trailing him from mountain
to mountain or from valley to valley, and he will
drift along over the snow, pausing now and then
to harken back along his trail, and reluctantly
expose himself to the eye of day in the broad open
spaces. Unless the day is wet and his tail and fur
get draggled, he will run from sun to sun without
much apparent fatigue. But if his burden gets too
great, he knows of holes in the rocks where he can
take refuge.

Any device that a plant or an animal has for get-
ting on in the world interests us; it brings the lower
orders nearer to us. We have our own devices and

32

NATURE LORE

T even get reconciled to the unsavory but gentle-
mannered skunk. He does not disturb me if I do
not disturb him, and if he chances to get into a trap
which I have set for some other animal, his compo-
sure is great, and he looks the injured innocent that
he is. Only I must keep my eye upon that tail when
it starts to rise over his back. There is a masked
battery there the noiseless shot of which is usually
well aimed, and is pretty sure to rout the foe whether
it hit the mark or not. Last summer the morning
light revealed one held by the leg in a steel trap
which I had set for rats that were helping them-
selves too freely to my roasting-ears. How sorry and
deprecatory he looked as I approached, slowly
straining to pull away from the cruel trap, and
turning upon me a half-appealing, half-reproachful
look! By imitating his slow, gentle manners, I lifted
him and the trap to the mouth of a woodchuck hole,

‘into which he quickly crept, leaving his trap-held
foot outside. To release him then was an easy
matter.

The skunk is a night prowler, and subsists mainly
upon insects and small rodents; but I would not
insure the birds’ eggs or the young birds that hap-
pen to be in his path, though Mr. Seton says his
tame skunks do not know how to deal with hen’s
eggs.

There is no prettier bit of natural history upon
four legs than the red fox, especially when you sur-

31

FIELD AND STUDY

worse than useless plant! So far as I know, nothing
wants it or profits by it, though I have heard that
the petioles when cooked suggest salsify. It is
an Ishmaelite among plants. Every man’s hand
is against it, and nearly every animal has reason
to detest it. Against their wills. they are engaged
in sowing its seeds. The other day I found some
burrs matted on the tail of a woodchuck. Birds
have been found trapped by its hooks. Apparently
the only domestic animal that it does not seize hold
of is the pig; the stiff, smooth bristles of the pig
afford it a scant hold. It possesses more original sin
than any other plant I know. How it drives its roots
into the ground, defying your spading-fork! How it
seems to drive its burrs into your garments, or into
the hair of animals, refusing to let go till it is fairly
torn in pieces! See the dog biting them out of his
hair with a kind of contemptuous fury. If you try
to help him, you must proceed very carefully and
deliberately or he will confound you with the bur-
dock and threaten the hand that seeks to aid him.
The burdock is vicious to the last, the old burr
clings with the same dogged determination as the
new. As a noxious weed it is a great success. Dis-
courage it by cutting it down you cannot. By hook
or by crook it is bound to persist. Its juice is bitter
and its fibre coarse. What a pity. that so much na-
tive grit and enterprise cannot be turned to some
good account! The burrs are detached from the
34

NATURE LORE

makeshifts, and we like to know how it is with our
near or distant kin among the humbler orders. They
are ourselves not yet come to consciousness and to
the elective franchise. When the burr of the bur-
dock, reaching forth its arms for such a chance,
seizes on to your coat-tail, take your pocket-glass
and examine the minute hooks that tip the ends of
the seed-scales. They fish for you and your dog and
sheep and cow, and they catch you, not with one
hook, but with twenty or fifty, all at the same time.
But in this case it is not the fish that is caught, but
the fisherman. The plan of this fisherman is to go
right along with his captor, the farther the better,
and plant his progeny in a new territory. He lets go
his hold upon the parent plant at a mere touch, but
the touch gives him all the hold he wants. The
hooks are fine and hard, like minute, sharp horns,
not too much bent, — that would defeat the end, —
and perfectly smooth and finished. Instead of hooks,
the weed called “‘bidens” has the teeth or prongs
armed with barbs like a fish-hook, many of them on
each prong. They are quite as sure a trap as the
hooks of the burdock. Nature never fails to perfect
her device. Natural selection attends to that. Her
traps, her wings, her springs, her balloons, always
work. The wings of the maple keys, the ash, and the
linden are all different, but they all work.

Nature seems partial to the burdock. What extra
pains she seems to have taken to perpetuate this

33

FIELD AND STUDY

I can discover for scattering its seed, and yet it
appears to compete successfully with its more lusty
neighbor. One is about as abundant and trouble-
some to the gardener as the other. The seeds of the
yellow dock are like small, brown, polished buck-
wheat. I have never seen birds or squirrels eat them,
and what secret way they have of keeping up with
the burdocks I do not know. The burdock plants it-
self deeper in the ground, and defies your spading-
fork the more successfully.

I have always been curious to know why the birch
is the only one among our many forest-trees that
seems to have an ambition to plant itself upon a
rock. Other trees do so occasionally, but in the woods
I am familiar with I see ten birches upon rocks to
one of any other tree. They sit down upon the rock
as if it were a chair, and run their big roots off into
the ground, apparently entirely at home. How in
the first place they get enough foothold in the thin
coat of leaf mould that covers the rocks to develop
their roots and send them across the barren places
and down into the soil is a puzzle. I have seen a
small birch sapling that had obtained a foothold in
a niche on the side of a cliff send one large root
diagonally down across the face of the bare rock two
or more yards to the ground, where it took hold and
saved the situation. It was like a party going out
from a starving camp for relief. To equip and pro-

36

NATURE LORE

parent stem almost as easily as are the quills frcm
the porcupine. Even while it is yet in bloom the
hooks will seize your coat-tails and the burr let go
its hold upon the stalk. The hooks are not attached
to the separate seeds, but are for the burrs as a
whole.

I know of no plant so difficult to prevent seeding.
Cut it down in July, and in August it has new shoots
loaded with burrs; cut these off, and in late Sep-
tember, or early October, it will evolve burrs di-
rectly from the stub of the old stalk, often in clusters
and bunches, without a leaf to mother them.

The plant if unhindered grows three or four feet
high and bears about five hundred burrs, which usu-
ally have twelve seeds each, or six thousand seeds
to the plant. Before the seeds are ripe they are
nearly the size and color of rye or peeled oats. Later
they shrink and turn dark. So far as I know, nothing
feeds upon them, save the larvee of some insect. I
have examined many burrs in October and found a
small white grub in a single seed in each of them.
Those good people who fancy that.everything was
made for some special service to man, would have
trouble, I think, to find the uses of the burdock.

' The advantage of that array of eager hooks to

the burdock (there are more than two hundred of

them on each burr) seems obvious, and yet here is

the yellow dock alongside of it, a relative of our

buckwheat, that has no hooks or other devices that
35

FIELD AND STUDY

The watchful broom routs them; but the next day
or the next week there they are again, and now and
then one actually gets into the kitchen, slipping in
between your feet as you open the door. They bring
word from over the hills, and the word is: “Sooner
or later Nature hits her mark, hits all marks, be-
cause her aim is broadcast and her efforts ceaseless.
The wind finds every crack and corner. We started
on our journey not for your door, but for any door,
all doors, any shelter where we could be at rest; and
here we are!”

The purple loosestrife travels from marsh to
marsh in the Hudson River Valley, and as its seeds
are not winged, one may wonder how it gets about
so easily. It travels by the aid of wings, but not of
its own. Darwin discovered that the seeds of marsh
plants are often carried in the mud on the feet of
marsh birds. Years ago the loosestrife was in a large
marsh six miles south of me. A few years later a few
plants appeared in a pond near me, and now this
and near-by ponds and marshes are lakes of royal
purple in August. The loosestrife in late summer
makes such a grand showing with its vast armies of
- tall, stately plants that one welcomes it to our un-
sightly marshes.

Only the present season did I observe a peculiar
feature of our wild clematis that a little close atten-
tion might have shown me at any time: its conspic-
uous appearance in September, after its flowers

38

NATURE LORE

vision the party required some resources. “Yes,”
you may say, “and to know where to send it re-
quired some wit.” But the roots of a tree always
tend downward, as the branches go upward. We are
at the end of our tether when we say that such is
the rule of nature.

The winged seeds always find their proper habi-
tat, as if they had eyes to see the way. The seeds of
the cat-tail flag find the ditches and marshes as un-
erringly as if they were convoyed. But this intelli-
gence, or self-direction, is only apparent. The wind
carries the seeds in all directions, and they fall every-
where, just as it happens, on the hills as well as in
the ditches, but only in the latter do they take root
and flourish. Nature often resorts to this wholesale
method. In scattering pollen and germs by the
aid of the wind, this is her method: cover all the
ground, and you will be sure to hit your mark
night or day.

After one or more windy days in November I am
sure to find huddled in the recess of my kitchen
door the branching heads of a certain species of wild
grass that grows somewhere on the hills west of me.
These heads find their ways across fields and high-
ways, over fences, past tree and bushy barriers,
down my steps, into the storm-house, and lie there,
waiting on the doorsill like things of life, waiting to
get into the house. Not one season alone, but every
season, they come as punctually as the assessor.

37

FIELD AND STUDY

struggle is a long and hard one, are sure to win in
the end; after many years one central shoot gets a
start from the top of the thorny mound of cropped
twigs, makes rapid strides upward, and in due sea-
son stands there the perfected tree. It will now bear
fruit for the short-sighted grazers that sought to
destroy it.

Our belief in the uniformity of nature, or in the
unchangeableness of natural law, is fundamental.
We act upon it every hour of our lives; our bodies
and minds are built upon that plan. Yet in detail,
and within narrow limits, nature is unequal, capri-
cious, incalculable. Can the farmer always foretell
his crops or forecast a wet season or a dry? The
problem is too complex, or our wits are too shallow.

Last season the hay-crop over a large part of the
country broke the record. The meadows everywhere,
and without any very obvious reason, doubled their
yield; the farmers’ barns from Pennsylvania to
Maine were bursting with plenty, and at the end of
haying a row of stacks encompassed or flanked most
of them. The trees all seem to have had a super-
abundance of leaves. On my own grounds we raked
up and put under cover for stable use nearly double
the usual quantity from the same number of trees.
One important factor in this meadow and pasture
and tree fertility was probably the continued deep
snows of last winter. About one hundred inches fell
in the Hudson Valley, and two feet at one fall in

40

NATURE LORE

have faded, which has earned for it the name of
“old-man’s-beard,”’ is owing to the fact that its
seeds have long, feathered tails to aid in their dis-
semination. It is the only seed I know of that the
wind carries by the tail. For some obscure reason
it does not carry it very far, or at least does not
plant it very successfully, as the clematis is rare
with me. Instead of being sown broadcast over the
hills and along the fences, it appears sparsely, at
wide intervals. It is such a beautiful vine both in
flowering-time and seeding-time that one wishes it
were more common.

The plants that travel by runners above or below
ground are many; the plants that travel by walking
are few. I recall only the ‘walking fern,” which
now seems to have walked away from my neighbor-
hood, and the black raspberry. Both are slow travel-
ers, but they do reach out and take steps.

Some trees can fight a much more successful
battle against browsing animals than can others.
The apple and the red thorn are notable examples.
Trees like the linden, which the cattle freely crop,
are easy victims; they put up no kind of fight. They —
sprout freely, but they make no headway; their new
shoots are swept off every summer, and there the
low stool of the tree remains. The beech does better
amid grazing cattle, but I doubt if it ever wins the
fight. But the apple and the thorn, though the

39

FIELD AND STUDY

In her subtler physical forces, Nature often seems
capricious and lawless, probably on account of our
limited vision. We see the lightning cleave the air
in one blinding flash from the clouds to the earth,
often shattering a tree or a house on its way down.
Hence it is always a surprise to see the evidence
that the thunderbolt strikes upward as well as
downward. During an electric storm one summer
night an enormous charge of electricity came up
out of the earth under a maple-tree at the foot of
the hill below my study, scattering the sod, the
roots, and some small bushes like an explosion of
powder or dynamite; then it rooted around on the
ground like a pig, devouring or annihilating the
turf, making a wide, ragged, zigzag trench seven or
eight feet long down the hill in the ground, when it
dived beneath the wagon track, five or six feet wide,
bursting out here and there on the surface, then
escaped out of the bank made by the plough on the
edge of the vineyard. Here it seems to have leaped
to the wire trellis of the grapevines, running along it
northward, scorching the leaves here and there,
and finally vented its fury on a bird-box that was
fastened to a post at the end of the row. It com-
pletely demolished the box, going a foot or more
out of its way to do so. The box was not occupied,
so there was not the anticlimax of a bolt of Jove
slaughtering house wrens or bluebirds. Maybe it
was the nails that drew the charge to the box. But

42

NATURE LORE

December. Snow warms and fertilizes. How it
warmed up and quickened the mice beneath it! The
meadows yielded double their usual number of
meadow mice. Never have I seen in the spring evi-
dence of such a crop. Over a wide area, wherever I
looked in meadow bottoms or grassy hillsides or
shaven lawns, there were the runways, the grassy
nests, the camping-grounds of this vast army of
meadow mice. They had evidently had a long
picnic. They had had the world under there all to
themselves. There had been nothing there to molest
or to make them afraid, — no fox, no cat, no owl,
no weasel, no mink, — and they had reveled in their
freedom and security. One could read it all in the
record upon the ground: their straw villages, their
round tunnels and sunken runways through the
grass, and the marks and refuse:everywhere, as of
temporary social and holiday gatherings. Vast num-
bers of bushes and small trees, especially of the
apple order, were stripped of their bark to a height
of two or more feet from the ground. I even saw a
thicket of small young locusts with stems as white
as bleached cornstalks. Spring quickly put an end
to these winter festivities of the mice and compelled
them to take to their old retreats and darkened lives
under the ground. Evidently the old mother, in this
part of the country at least, took good care of her
children last winter, from grass and tree-roots to
mice and insects.
41

FIELD AND STUDY

ceive its attention. An oak on my father’s farm was
struck twice in the course of many years, the last
bolt proving fatal. The hard, or sugar, maple, is
frequently struck, but only in one instance have I
known the tree to be injured. In this case a huge
tree was simply demolished. Usually the bolt comes
down on the outside of the tree, making a mark as
if a knife had clipped off the outer surfaces of the
bark, revealing the reddish-yellow interior. In sey-
eral cases I have seen this effect. But a few summers
ago an unusually large and solid sugar maple in
my neighbor’s woods received a charge that simply
reduced it to stovewood. Such a scene of utter de-
struction I have never before witnessed in the woods.
The tree was blown to pieces as if it had been filled
with dynamite. Over a radius of fifty or more feet
the fragments of the huge trunk lay scattered. It
was as if the bolt, baffled so long by the rough coat
of mail of the maple, had at last penetrated it and
had taken full satisfaction. The explosive force prob-
ably came from the instantaneous vaporization of
the sap of the tree by the bolt.

Some friends of mine were inoculated with curi-
osity about insects by watching the transformation
of the larvee of one of the swallow-tailed butterflies,
probably the Papilio asterias. As I was walking on
their porch one morning in early October I chanced
to see a black-and-green caterpillar about two inches
long posed in a meditative attitude upon the side

44,

NATURE LORE

why it was rooting around down the hill when it
came out of the ground, instead of leaping upward,
is a puzzle. It acted like some blind, crazy material
hody that did not know where to go. A cannon-shot
would have made a much smoother trench. Its
course on the ground was about twelve or fourteen
feet, half above and half below ground, and its leap
in the air about six feet. Strange that a thing of
such incredible speed and power should yet have
time to loiter about and do such “fool stunts”!
This space-annihilator left a trail like a slow,
plodding thing. It burrowed like a mole, it delved
like a plough, it leaped and ran like a squirrel, and
it. struck like a hammer. A spectator would have
been aware only of a blinding blaze of fire there
on the edge of the vineyard, and heard a crash that
would have stunned him; but probably could not
have told whether the bolt came upward or down-
ward. Lightning is much quicker than our special
senses.

On another occasion, beside my path through the
woods to Slabsides, I saw where a bolt had come up
out of a chipmunk’s hole at the root of a tree, scat-
tered the leaves and leaf mould about, and appar-
ently disappeared in the air.

The lightning seems to have its favorite victims
among the trees. I have never known it to strike a
beech-tree. Hemlocks and pines are its favorites in
my woods. In other regions the oak and the ash re-

43

FIELD AND STUDY

a worm into a creature of a much higher and more
attractive order; the worm mask 'was being stripped
off, and an embryo butterfly revealed to view. In a
few minutes the head and forward part of the body
were free, and the latter half was fast becoming so.

The fine silken cord over the back served its pur-
pose well, holding the creature in place while it lit-
erally wriggled out of its skin, and when this feat
was accomplished, holding it in position for its long
winter sleep. The skin behaved as if it were an in-
terested party in the enterprise; much better, I am
sure, than one’s garments would if one were to try
to wriggle out of them without using one’s limbs.
It folded back, it drew together, it finally became a
little pellet or pack of cast-off linen that clung to
the tail end of the chrysalis. To effect the final
detachment, and not lose the grip which this end
seemed to have on the board beneath it, required a
good deal of struggling, probably a full minute of
convulsive effort before the little bundle of cast-off
habiliments let go and dropped, a dark pellet the
size of a small pea. Then our insect was at rest, and
seemed slowly to contract and stiffen. It had woven
itself the silken loop to hold it to its support, and
it had struggled out of its old skin on its own initia-
tive or without being mothered or helped, as so
many newborn creatures are.

I did not have the pleasure of seeing it spin the
cord over the back which plays an important part

46

NATURE LORE

of the house a foot or more above the floor. The lat-
ter half of its body was attached:to the board wall,
and the fore part curved up from it with bowed head.
The creature was motionless, and apparently ab-
sorbed in deep meditation. I stooped down and
examined it more closely. I saw that it was on the
eve of a great change. The surface of the board
immediately under the forward part of the body
had been silvered over with a very fine silken web
that was almost like a wash, rather than something
woven. Anchored to this on both sides, as if grown
out of the web, ran a very fine thread or cord up
over the caterpillar’s back, which served to hold it
in place; it could lean against the thread as a sailor
Jeans against a rope thrown around him and tied to
the mast. With bowed head the future butterfly
hung there, and with bowed head I waited and
watched. Presently convulsive movements began
to traverse its body; through segment after seg-
ment a wave of effort seemed to.pass. It was a be-
ginning of the travail pains of transformation. Then
in a twinkling a slight rent appeared in the skin on
the curve of the back, revealing the new light-green
surface underneath, the first glimpse of the chrys-
alis. The butterfly was being born. Slowly, as labor
continued, the split in the skin extended down the
back and over toward the head till the outlines
of the chrysalis became plainly visible. I was wit-
nessing that marvelous transformation in nature of
45

FIELD AND STUDY

up to the same spot, all the time leaving the white silk
thread. It kept climbing up and up till I had to get on a
chair to see it, and once I lost my balance and jumped
down, jarring it so that I knocked it to the floor. But up
it got, and climbed up, and spent the rest of the afternoon
alternately wriggling about to find just the right place
and making a silken background in one spot. The next
day it was still on the window-ledge. About eleven o’clock
it disappeared, and I hunted and hunted before I found
it on the under side of the porch railing! It was busily
making its network, but it made far less than either of the
others, and most of the time it was staying quite still.
The following day, about noon, it made its cord, anchor-
ing that at one end, then at the other, and going back
and forth to strengthen it. When the cord was ready, it
put its head through (the cord was made ahead of it) and
wriggled itself into the cord; it wriggled fully as hard as
when yours got itself out of its striped cover. So slowly
and carefully it made its way into place, being most
careful not to strain the cord. We watched breathlessly.
It pushed itself so far through that it was about half and
half, and then it had to wriggle backward till its head
and a third of its body was through, and two thirds not
through; and wriggling back took far greater care than
forward. It stayed just that way, all huddled up for
nearly four days, when about eight o’clock in the morn-
ing it split and divested itself of its robe. It is matching
the brown woodwork like yours, and there all three
are!

The incomparable French natural-historian and
felicitous writer Henri Fabre has witnessed what I
never have: he has seen the caterpillar build its case
or cocoon. In the instance which he describes it was

48

NATURE LORE

in the process of transformation, mechanical part
though it be; but a few days later, through the
patient and clear-seeing eyes of my friend Miss
Grace Humphrey, I witnessed this operation also.
She wrote: —

The day after you left we found another caterpillar,
a few feet away from yours. It had already made its
saddle-cord and shed its silken robe when we found it,
but we watched it change from gray-green to, not green-
ish-brown at all, but a grayness matching the concrete of
the house; for it was higher up than yours, on the ledge
below the window, hanging from the ledge against the
plaster wall. Its cord, too, apparently grew thicker just
at the ends, showing up more plainly for a bit; then like
yours it dried up and more perfectly. matched its back-
ground. In neither of them did the cord continue to look
thicker.

The same day I found a third caterpillar under the
pear-tree, the very same kind, black with a wide green
stripe marking off each segment, and the rows of yellow
buttons. I carried it on a leaf up to the porch, where we
put it under a glass bowl. But of course it thought that
an unfavorable place for housing itself for the winter, and
it would n’t start, though we kept it there two days. At
noon, when freed, it climbed up the wall of the house
rather near yours (so they were photographed together),
and we held our breaths to see if it would start building
operations there. But no. Up the window-ledge it wormed
its way, and thence up and up, by the side of the window,
leaving all the way along a silky thread, and constantly
going back and forth with its head.

Mr. R—— knocked it down once to keep it in the sun-
light in order to photograph it, and it immediately climbed

47

FIELD AND STUDY

of hand it attaches its cocoon to the end of a branch,
I suppose one would need to witness the process.

In October these preparations and transforma-
tions in the insect world are taking place all about
us, and we regard them not. The caterpillars are
getting ready for a sleep out of which they awaken
in the spring totally different creatures. They tuck
themselves away under stones or into crevices, they
hang themselves on bushes, they roll themselves up
in dry leaves, and brave the cold of winter in tough
garments, woolly or silky, of their own weaving.
Some of them, as certain of the large moths, do
what seems like an impossible stunt: they shut
themselves up inside a tough case, or receptacle,
and attach it by a long, strong bit of home-made
tape to the end of a twig, so that it swings freely in
the wind. I have seen the downy woodpecker trying
to break into one of these sealed-up, living tombs
without avail. Its free, pendent position allows it to
yield to the strokes of the bird, and all efforts to
penetrate the case are in vain.

How the big, clumsy worm, without help or hands,
wove itself into this bird-proof case, and hung itself
up at the end of a limb, would be a problem worth
solving. Of course it had its material all within its
own body, so is not encumbered with outside tools
or refractory matter. It was the result of a mechan-
ical and a vital process combined. The creature
knew how to use the means which Nature had given

50

NATURE LORE

the small grub of one of the Psyches. The first thing
the creature did was to collect bits of felt or pith
from the cast-off garment of its mother. These it
tied together with a thread of its own silk, forming
a band, or girdle, which it put around its own body,
uniting the ends. This ring was the start and founda-
tion of the sack in which it was to incase itself.
The band was placed well forward, so that the in-
sect could reach its edge by bending its head up and
down and around in all directions. Then it proceeded
to widen the girdle by attaching particles of down
to its edges. As the garment grew toward its head,
the weaver crept forward in it, thus causing it to
cover more and more of its body till in a few hours
it covered all of it, and the sack was complete, a
very simple process, and, it would seem, the only
possible one. The head, with the flexible neck,
which allowed it to swing through the circle, was
the loom that did the weaving, the thread issuing
from the spinneret on the lip. Did the silk issue from
the other end of the body, as we are likely to think
it does, the feat would be impossible. I suppose a
woman might knit herself into her sweater in the
same way by holding the ball of yarn in her bosom
and turning the web around and pulling it down
instead of turning her body — all but her arms;
here she would be balked. To understand how a
grub weaves itself a close-fitting garment, closed
at both ends, from its own hair, or by what sleight
49

FIELD AND STUDY

and hatch out in the spring. The under side of a
stone on the top of a stone wall seems like a very
cold cradle and nursery, but the caterpillars in their
shrouds survive here, and may not the spiders’ eggs?

In October you will find the caterpillars in all
stages of making ready for winter. They first cover
a small space on the stone upon which they rest
with a very fine silken web; it looks like a delicate
silver wash. This is the foundation of the coming
cocoon, but I could never catch any of them in the
act of weaving their cocoons. I brought one to the
house and kept it under observation for several
days, but it was always passive whenever I glimpsed
it through the crack between the stones. The nights
were frosty and the days chilly, but some time dur-
ing the twenty-four hours the creature’s loom was
at work. One morning a thin veil of delicate silver
threads, through which I could dimly see the worm,
united the two stones. It seemed to be in the midst
of a little thicket of vertical, shining silken threads.
It was like some enchantment. A little later the
thicket, or veil, had developed into a thin cradle in
which lay the chrysalis and the cast-off skin of the
worm. This caterpillar had been disturbed a good
deal and made to waste some of its precious silk,
so that its cocoon was finally a thin, poor one. “ Life
under a stone” forms a chapter in Nature’s infinite
book of secrecy which most persons skip, but which
is well worth perusal.

NATURE LORE

it for the purpose. Some of the caterpillars weave the
chrysalis-case out of the hairs and wool of their sum-
mer coats, others out of silk developed from within.

On October mornings I have had great. pleasure
in turning over the stones by the roadside and
lifting up those on the tops of the stone walls and
noting the insect-life preparing its winter quarters
under them. The caterpillars and spiders are busy.
One could gather enough of the white fine silk from
spider tents and cocoons to make:a rope big enough
to hang himself with. The jumping spider may be
found in his closely woven tent. Look at his head
through a pocket-glass, and he looks like a minia-
ture woodchuck. His smooth, dark-gray, hairy pate
and two beadlike eyes are very like; but his broad,
blunt nose is unlike. It seems studded with a row of
five or six jewels; but these jewels are eyes. What
extra bounty Nature seems to have bestowed upon
some of these humble creatures! We find our one
pair of eyes precious; think what three or four pairs
would be if they added to our powers of vision pro-
portionately! But probably the many-eyed, spiders
and the flies with their compound eyes see less
than we do. This multitude of eyes seems only an
awkward device of Nature’s to make up for the
movable eye like our own.

In some of the spiders’ cocoons under the stones
on the tops of the walls you will find masses of small
pink eggs, expected to survive the winter, I suppose,

51

FIELD AND STUDY

and hatch out in the spring. The under side of a
stone on the top of a stone wall seems like a very
cold cradle and nursery, but the caterpillars in their
shrouds survive here, and may not the spiders’ eggs?

In October you will find the caterpillars in all
stages of making ready for winter. They first cover
a small space on the stone upon which they rest
with a very fine silken web; it looks like a delicate
silver wash. This is the foundation of the coming
cocoon, but I could never catch any of them in the
act of weaving their cocoons. I brought one to the
house and kept it under observation for several
days, but it was always passive whenever I glimpsed
it through the crack between the stones. The nights
were frosty and the days chilly; but some time dur-
ing the twenty-four hours the creature’s loom was
at work. One morning a thin veil of delicate silver
threads, through which I could dimly see the worm,
united the two stones. It seemed to be in the midst
of a little thicket of vertical, shining silken threads.
It was like some enchantment. A little later the
thicket, or veil, had developed into a thin cradle in
which lay the chrysalis and the cast-off skin of the
worm. This caterpillar had been disturbed a good
deal and made to waste some of its precious silk,
so that its cocoon was finally a thin, poor one. “ Life
under a stone” forms a chapter in Nature’s infinite
book of secrecy which most persons skip, but which
is well worth perusal.

TT
THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

CALL the birds familiar in the sense that they

make themselves very much at home with us,
and not in the sense that their lives become an
old story and fail to arouse our interest. It is a
story perpetually retold, with endless variations.
After you have named them all and have made
yourself acquainted with their various characters
and habits, your next walk to the fields and woods
or along the highway or about your own dooryard
may reveal some new trait in finch or thrush, or
some significant incident in their lives that kindles
your interest afresh.

The birds are pioneers that begin the world anew
about us each season, and their lives touch and cross
ours at new points at all times. They are always the
same familiar birds, the birds of our youth, but
they are new as the flowers are new, as the spring
and summer are new, as each morning is new. Like
Nature herself they are endowed with immortal
youth, and always present to us an endless field for
fresh observation.

The first robin, the first bluebird, the first song
sparrow, the first phcebe, the first swallow, is an
event which we mention to our neighbor, or write

53

FIELD AND STUDY

in our letters to our friends. It is an old story with
a new interest. The birds have lived, and we have
lived to meet again the old scenes. They bring us
once more the assurance of the unfailing return of
spring, and the never-ending joy and fecundity of
life. Many of them are very likely the identical
robins or song sparrows that charmed us last sea-
son, but they come back to us with a new story to
tell, and new service to render. They have passed
the winter in strange lands, and we may have done
so, too; but now, on the home acres, our lives meet
and mingle once more.

Does that brief visitation in May of the rarer
warblers ever become an old story? We do-not see
them when they come, nor when they depart; they
are here eagerly feeding in the trees in the morning
as if they dropped down out of heaven with the
rising sun, as doubtless they did; and they are gone
in a day or two, as if they had vanished again in
the heavens at the going-down of the sun, as is
very surely the case. All night they travel through
the trackless upper air above the sleeping earth,
their pole-star the breeding-impulse. Unfavorable
weather conditions will cause them to tarry longer
with us some seasons than others. This season
(1916) the bay-breasted, the Blackburnian, and
the Canada warblers lingered nearly a week with
us, and the veery, or Wilson’s thrush, lingered and
sang in unwonted places.

54

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

Yesterday I walked in my neighbor’s woods and
orchards and saw many of these passing warblers —
the bay-breasted, the black-capped, the magnolia,
the black-throated blue, and others. How fresh they
looked! They seemed just to have stepped out of
Audubon. They conferred a new dignity upon the
trees — those old, commonplace scenes, and then
this touch of art and science and literature, how
novel it was! The male scarlet tanager down in the
ploughed field — a vivid bit of color upon the brown
earth, how it delighted the eye! A cuckoo called and
called in a maple, and then launched out in the air
and flew down the hill, its long tail, its slender
body, its thin wings, and its characteristic move-
ments how strange when contrasted with the other
birds, so different from them all! A robin made
a drive at it in the tree, which is a hint that the
cuckoo is a criminal among the birds, probably at
times destroying their eggs, as has been alleged of it.

Do we ever outgrow the charm and the wonder
of the first song sparrow’s nest on the ground,
tucked away under the grass, or hidden under a
mossy bank — a bit of the waste and litter of the
great crude out-of-doors taking such neat and
pretty shape, and holding such delicate, pearl-like
bodies? Can we behold it without a fresh thrill of
pleasure? The rough, unkempt field or roadside, and
in its midst this delicate, living treasure which a
passing foot may crush, or some prowling enemy

55

FIELD AND STUDY

destroy. What trust, what peril, what artless art
it all suggests! The April or May day when I find
a song sparrow’s nest has a touch that the other
days do not have; and if a spring goes by without
my finding one or more, I miss something from my
life. It is not usually by searching that we find a
sparrow’s nest; it is by accident, or by watchful
waiting.
The past season I found my first treasure by
watchful waiting. I have found scores of the nests
of this familiar dooryard songster, but none that
ever gave me more pleasure than this one. The
cautious little ground-builder betrayed the secret
of her nest to me when, humanly speaking, she
thought she was securely keeping it. I knew there
was a nest near my study by the song of the male
on the trees and bushes around me, and had made
‘some search for it, but without avail. One must first
have some sort of a clue to a nest. As I sat here in
the summer-house one afternoon with only the
most vague thoughts about birds, I chanced to see
a song sparrow flit out of the grass near the border
of the just-ploughed vineyard, alight upon the
freshly turned earth, and in a fussy, nervous way
go hunting about for food. Have you ever seen a
setting hen come off the nest to feed, and noted how
she fluffs out her feathers, flirts her tail, and hurries
about as if in ill-humor? My little hen sparrow acted
in the same way, and I instantly inferred that she
56

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

had just left her nest in the grass a few yards below
me. She fussed about on the ground for a few min-
utes, and then flew away, and disappeared in the
vineyard. In ten minutes or so she returned to the
bit of ploughed ground where I first saw her, and
went through the same fussy, nervous manceuvres
as at first. Then she came up to. a rosebush quite
near me and occupied herself there for a few seconds,
hopping about amid the branches, and going down
to the ground as if in quest of food, mindful all the
time, I could see, of my presence. Then she flew
back to the ploughed land again, and hopped about,
very watchful and suspicious, it seemed to me. She
then came a few feet up into the grass and alighted
on a small, dry maple-branch that had fallen from
the trees above. Here she flirted and attitudinized
a moment or two, and then came to the rosebush
again and repeated her former movements; then
back to the ploughed ground, then to the dry branch,
where she sat still and considered a moment, and
then hopped down in the grass and disappeared
from -my view. As she did not again appear, I knew
she had gone to her nest. Presently I moved down
there very carefully, and, scanning the ground
closely, lest I step on the nest, I began the search.
When I was within a yard of the nest, which proved
to be completely hidden, I heard a rustle in some
dry leaves, and saw a rapidly moving line of shaking
grass-stems as the bird ran from her nest. Then I
57

FIELD AND STUDY

concentrated my gaze upon the ground and searched
it inch by inch, but no nest could I see. Orchard
grass grew there in tussocks or. stools, and on the
lower side of these stools the dry grass of last year
sloped down, forming a little thatched roof about
their bases; beneath one of these there seemed to be
a slight opening; I thrust in my finger and felt the
nest, and touched the warm eggs. Never have I seen
a more cozy, or cunningly constructed sparrow’s
nest. No rain could touch it, and no eye penetrate
its secret.

Last season my sparrow neighbors built in the
heart of currant-bushes and rosebushes, but this
spring one of them at least has’ trusted her secret
to the keeping of the grass, and, as it has turned
out, has had no occasion to regret it. In due time
she brought off her brood, and later in the season
succeeded again farther down the hill.

A week or two later, in walking along a secluded,
bushy lane leading to the woods, which has been a
favorite walk of mine for more than forty years, I
chanced upon another secret treasure open to the
eye of heaven, which gave me a degree of pleasure
greater than any other single incident which my
forty years’ acquaintance with the old lane had
brought me. Encircled by the stalks of a tall-grow-
ing weed, I chanced to see upon the ground a deep,
bulky, beautifully formed nest. It was a mass of

58

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

dry leaves and grasses, with an unusually deep and
smooth cavity lined with very fine vegetable fibre
that looked like gold thread. Evidently a finished
nest, I thought, but it was empty, and there were
no birds about. It did not have the appearance of
a nest that had been “harried,” as the Scotch boys
say, but of one just that moment finished and wait-
ing for its first egg. A week later I returned to the
place and was delighted to find that it was really a
live nest. The setting bird had slipped off on my
approach so slyly that I had not seen her. The nest
contained four small, delicate white eggs marked
with fine black specks on their larger ends; these
were completely dominated by a large, vulgar-
looking cowbird’s egg. Presently two anxious birds,
one of them strikingly marked with yellow, black,
white, and blue-gray, appeared in the branches
above my head, and began peering nervously
down upon me and uttering a faint “sip,” “sip.”
“Warblers,” I said; and, as they flitted excitedly
about me, I soon recognized the golden-winged
warbler — a rare bird in my locality, and one whose
nest I had never before seen. “What a pretty co-
incidence,’ I said— “the nest of the golden-
winged warbler at the foot of a clump of goldenrod,
and lined with gold thread!” The old, neglected
farm lane had never before yielded me such a
treasure. Presently a male chestnut-sided warbler,
whose song I had been hearing near by — “This,
59

FIELD AND STUDY

this, this, is me, sir” — came and joined the golden-
wings, and appeared to share their solicitude, but,
after he had inspected me from all sides, moved off
in the higher trees and resumed his singing.

“Your nest is not far off,” I said, “and maybe in
some lucky moment I shall find that also.”

What a touch these delicate and striking war-
blers gave to the old lane! It was like a page from
Audubon or Wilson.

The golden-wings, much agitated, kept up their
flitting about me till I withdrew. A week later I
returned and found the eggs all hatched, probably
a day or two before my return; and the big, pot-
bellied cowbird fairly ingulfed the frail little war-
blers. Up came its head with its wide-open mouth
quivering with eagerness. I saw at a glance what
would soon be the fate of those delicate baby
warblers; they would be overridden and starved or
smothered in less than three days. So I took the
naked, ungainly interloper in my hand and resumed
my walk through the bushy fields, hoping to find
the nest of some larger bird with young in it, in
which I might place it, and watch the result. I
considered myself lucky when I found what I took
to be a Savannah sparrow’s nest with the young
nearly half grown. How closely they pressed them-
selves down in the nest and made no sign! When
I put the little beggar of a cowbird down in their
midst, they remained as silent and motionless

60

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

as ever. It proceeded to creep about over them,
every moment or two thrusting up its mouth for
food. Will the mother sparrow adopt this bantling,
I wonder, and feed it? I had my doubts. The next
day I returned and found it still crawling and
sprawling about on the backs of its bedfellows, and
evidently very hungry. It thrust up its appealing
mouth regularly twice each minute during the six
minutes I watched it. Evidently it had had no share
in the bounty of the nest. Its body had a throbbing
movement, like a child with hiccough. I regret now
that I did not feed it myself, and continue each
day to do so, in order to study further the out-
come. I returned the next morning and found the
poor thing beneath the heap this time, and quite
dead.

As I proceeded to remove its limp and shrunken
body, the young sparrows suddenly took alarm
and, with their wing-quills only mere stubs,
scrambled out of the nest and struggled off in the
grass and weeds. I gathered them together and put
them back in the nest, but they would not stay.
Out they floundered again as soon as my hand was
withdrawn. It is always so; when young birds once
leave the nest, the movement is final]. It is the word
of Fate; they will not be put back. They defile the
nest as they leave, and that act is a contemptuous
farewell.

Haste to leave the nest is characteristic of all

61

FIELD AND STUDY

birds. Their enemies are so many, and the young
are so defenseless, that the sooner they get out and
scatter and hide, the better it is for them. My spar-
rows would doubtless have remained several days
yet had not my blundering experiment hastened
matters. I had set in action the force of a natural
instinct before the conditions were quite ripe for it.

Less than one hundred yards from the sparrow’s
nest I had the good fortune to find the nest of a
yellow-breasted chat, one of the shyest and most
elusive of our birds. The catbird, the chewink, and
the brown thrasher, all skulkers and hiders, do
not approach the chat in this respect. It haunts
low, bushy fields and tangled, swampy retreats,
whence, in May and June, issue the strange, inter-
rupted, polyglot cat-calls of the male. But to see
him or his mate, you have got to out-skulk him, and
that is no easy task. He is a fine, strong-looking
bird, with his deep olive-green coat and yellow
breast and black, curved bill, and black feet and
legs. He is one of the hide-and-seek birds. His weird
calls have a tantalizing air of secrecy and elusive-
ness, as if to challenge your curiosity, changing from
the quack of a duck to the mew of a cat or the caw
of a crow or the bark of a fox or the rattle of the
kingfisher.

When you penetrate his retreat he suddenly
ceases and begins manceuvring to see you without
being seen, In the present case I knew a pair had

62

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

a nest in the corner of the bushy lot that held the
sparrow’s nest, because I had heard the male send-
ing forth his polyglot challenge from that vicinity
on several occasions, and twice had I ransacked that
part of the field and the bushy border of the adjoin-
ing field pretty thoroughly. On this day, which was
a wet one, I renewed the search, beating through the
low growths of sumac and witch-hazel and scrub
oak very carefully. As I reached the corner of the
field, where my course was barred by an old stone
fence, I paused and was about turning back, saying
to myself regretfully and half audibly, “I should
like to find that nest,”’ when, turning around, I spied
the nest in a hazel-bush not five feet from me. The
setting bird slipped off as my eye caught her nest,
and silently disappeared in the bushes. In a mo-
ment more, and while I was inspecting the nest, she
appeared fifteen feet away and uttered a sharp,
harsh, feline mew. But her mate did not show him-
self, nor did he during any of my subsequent visits.
I often heard him sending forth his unbirdlike calls
from the bushes, but never once did I lay eyes
upon him, though I tried hard to do so.

The nest was quite a massive structure in the forks
of a hazel-bush, about four feet from the ground;
it held four handsome, speckled eggs. I should like
to have put my young cowbird in such a nest, could
I have found it at the right moment, and watched
the result.

63

FIELD AND STUDY

This nest prospered; the young were out in due
time, but not once did I see or hear young or old
after the nest was empty.

The shyness of the chat is instinctive. There is no
more reason, in the conditions of its life, why it
should be so secretive than there is in those of scores
of other birds. Its enemies are those common to its
neighbors; but its reluctance to reveal itself to the
human eye is phenomenal, though I dare say that
men have never yet done it or its forbears any harm.
There is reason for the shyness of game-birds, and
for the care with which most birds try to conceal
their nests, but I can see none for:this curious obses-
sion of the chat’s. A friend of mine, a psychiatrist,
to whom I mentioned this suspicious conduct of the
chat’s, suggested that he is the paranoiac among
the birds, with systematized delusions of harm and
persecution, his warped egotism making him be-
lieve that every man’s hand is raised against him,
when there is no ground for such a fear.

The chat has the wisdom common to many other
birds of not building its nest in the densest and most
secluded part of its haunts, but of selecting a place
along their more open edges, where it can the better
command the approaches. It seems to be a hardy,
prolific bird, yet its numbers are very limited. One
pair in a neighborhood is probably above the aver-
age. To most country people the bird is an entire
stranger. :

64

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

In the woods beyond the chat’s nest one of my
boy friends conducted me to a nest on the ground
beside the path, which he had recently found. He
did not know the bird’s name, but from his descrip-
tion, and especially from his statement that the
bird walked, I was sure he had found the nest of an
oven-bird, or the wood accentor. And when I saw it
tucked under the dry grass and leaves so that they
made a canopy over it, the half-fledged young
barely visible in the dim recess, I was as pleased as
if I were seeing the oven-bird’s nest for the first
time. In a moment the mother bird appeared, not
blustering about with distressed cries, but silently
dragging herself over the ground with spread wings
and tail and an utterly decrepit and despairing
look. I have rarely seen a mother bird present so
pitiful a sight. It was a silent pantomime that was
more eloquent than cries. Round and round she
went, appearing and disappearing, only a few feet
from us, now on this side, now on that, and be-
seeching and abjuring us to content ourselves with
coming and picking her up and leaving her precious
young alone. Never did a mother offer to sacrifice
herself for her offspring more freely than did this
little brown-backed, speckle-breasted bird. Her
silent agony soon had its effect on us and we
withdrew. A few days more and her young will find
their wings.

65

FIELD AND STUDY

_ Bird-life is the fullest and most intense during
the mating and nesting season. Love or war, court-
ing or “scrapping,” rule their activities. What jeal-
ousies and rivalries, what warring and winning, go
on all about us! The birds are all glad and mad at
the same moment.

One morning in April I heard the excited voices
of bluebirds and robins in the vineyard below me;
going down there, I saw a pair of bluebirds and a
pair of robins flitting about and perching on the
wires and posts in an angry and excited frame of
mind, Some of their movements and gestures sug-
gested that they were “‘scrapping.”’ “But why should
bluebirds and robins ‘scrap’?”? IT asked myself. I had
never seen them do such a thing, so I began looking
about for a common enemy, and expected to find a
cat skulking in a ditch there, or maybe a snake.
But I could find neither; still the excited and accus-
ing voices kept it up. Then I chanced to see some
dry grass and weed-stalks hanging down from a
grape-post which was splintered and broken at the
top. I found that the robins were building a nest
there in a ragged depression on the top of the post,
and that a foot and a half lower down the bluebirds
had preémpted a downy woodpecker’s old hole, and
were making a nest there. The fracas was explained;
neither pair of birds wanted the other such near
neighbors. Each looked upon the post as its own, I
saw that the robins had made a bad choice; no cover

66

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

or screen of any kind. The first fish crow that flew
over in egging time would see the nest and rifle it
promptly. I would I could have told the mother
robin of the dangerous site of her nest. A week or
ten days later I saw her brooding her eggs in appar-
ent security, but not long afterward I found her
gone and her nest empty and torn; but as I put my
hand in the post, out went the mother bluebird.
The crows and jays could not reach her, and she was
right in claiming the post as alone suited to her
needs. Birds have their troubles as well as we
featherless bipeds.

In May the jays are out on their egging expedi-
tions in the groves and orchards. I see two or three
together sneaking about — not graceful flyers, or
very pleasing birds in summer, but in winter it is a.
pleasure to see them. Most other birds seem to
know them as thieves and robbers. Yesterday one
alighted on a post in the vineyard below me and
sat quietly taking his bearings. Suddenly a robin
came from ambush somewhere and made a vicious
pass at him. The jay squatted to avoid the blow,
and uttered his ugly “Scat!’? The robin took his
stand near by and watched him. The jay flew to a
near-by apple-tree, and the robin shot in after him
very savagely. The jay soon flew down toward the
river. I think that the robin does not quite hit the
jay on such occasions, but her angry tone and threat-
ening manner make the thief know that she is aware

67

‘FIELD AND STUDY

of his purpose. Cry “Thief!”’ loud enough, and the
thief is very apt to take to his heels.

Most of the birds are in a more or less explosive
mood in the nesting-season. They alternate between
love and anger many times a day. Each bird in
nesting-time has its little domain, and is jealous of
all trespassers. A male wood thrush quite early in
May seemed to lay claim to an old apple-tree near
the house where a brood of thrushes were reared
last year. He made his headquarters in that tree,
waiting, I fancied, for his mate to arrive, and be-
having in a decidedly unfriendly way to every robin
that invaded his precinct. For days I saw him
“scrapping” with robins in and around that tree.
The robins, innocent intruders, were taken by
surprise.

“What is that speckle-breasted dandy so red-
hot about?” their manners seemed to say. The
thrush would charge the robins spitefully, and fol-
low them into the garden with his threatening ges-
tures and sharp “Quit, quit, quit!”” He would al-
ways give way when the robin turned upon him,
feeling apparently that in a trial of rude strength a
poct like himself was no match fora plebeian mud-
dauber like the robin. But he would return to the
charge, and keep up his pretty, graceful protests
whenever his tree was invaded. Finally his mate, or
another female, came, and the two now have a nest
there, and all seems well with them. But the male

68

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

has a rent in his brown coat, and a feather is missing
from his waistcoat, revealing the dark-gray lining,
and giving him just a suspicion of shabbiness. I am
wondering if some indignant robin could not tell
how he came by these blemishes,

This particular male thrush, by the way, has the
most robin-like note I have ever heard come from
a wood thrush. Often his “Fip, fip, fip,” is so like
the robin’s that I have to look to see which bird it is.

When the female had been here a few days I fre-
quently saw the pair inspecting a fork near the end
of a low branch of the apple-tree; they were evi-
dently considering it as a likely place for a nest.
Then one morning I saw the female bring a piece of
white paper and place it in the fork and sit down
upon it. She went through this performance several
times without making any progress. Once I saw a
sheet of note-paper dancing around on the gravel
path in a most extraordinary manner, and presently
caught a glimpse of the thrush beneath it, holding one
edge of it in her beak, and trying hard to get such
control of it as to enable her to carry it to her nest.
But the problem was too much for her. After I had
torn the sheet in strips she took them one by one to
the branch in the apple-tree, determined that her
domicile should have a paper foundation. But she
could not make the paper “stay put”; it quickly
fell to the ground. She would peer down upon the
fallen fragments in a curious, helpless way, but

69

FIELD AND STUDY

made no attempt to recover them from the wet
grass. When white paper is not available, the thrush
usually starts her nest with dry maple leaves; she
rejects newspapers and colored papers of all kinds.
It is probably the printer’s ink, and not the politics
of the newspaper, that causes her to reject its frag-
ments.

The next day my thrushes abandoned the site
where the paper acted so contrarily, and began a nest
higher up in the tree, saddling it on a large, hori-
zontal branch, but still weaving a piece of white
paper in its foundation. Here the pair prospered,
and by the middle of June brought forth their
brood of three young. In a warmer season they
would doubtless have had four.

On the same wet morning, while on my way to
the post-office, in the rain, J saw a wood thrush
flying through the dripping trees and bushes with
a large piece of white paper in her beak. ‘“‘ Another
home being started on a paper foundation,”’ I said,
“and on a wet morning, at that.” I followed the
bird with my eye and saw her fly to the top of a
tall white elder-bush and place the paper in the
forking branches. I tarried while she flew over to-
ward the grocery-store for more material. Presently
she came back with a long, ragged piece of paper
that trailed behind her like a banner. As she flew
through the tops of the bushes with her burden, it
caught on a limb and fell to the ground. She dived

70

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

down to recover it, but failed in her attempt. The
following day I saw quite a mass of white paper in
the tall elder-bush, but the nest made no further
progress, and the pair chose another site. I say the
pair, but in reality I think the female alone selects
the site. Her actions on such occasions seem much
the more purposeful and decided. The male attends
her, but never, to my knowledge, lends a hand in
nest-building. When the young are out, he does his
share in feeding them.

I am at a loss to know why certain birds have
such a penchant for something white woven into, or
placed on the outside of, their nests. A robin will
reject bits of colored paper, but will often use strips
of white paper or white rags. One in the vines of a
near-by shed has made very free use of the cast-off
hair of our old gray horse, nearly white. A robin’s
nest here in the summer-house has a long strip of
white silk paper. On a friend’s house in a Michigan
city I saw more than a yard of candle-wick dangling
from an unfinished nest. Even the sly catbird likes a
bit of white paper in her nest. Nearly all the vireos
have a habit of sticking bits of white material on
the outside of their nests, usually the weavings of
cocoons of spiders.

One day, high in the branches of an elm that
shaded a village street, I saw a yellow-throated
vireo at work on her nest. She was evidently
in want of the white, felty bits of spiders’ co-

71

FIELD AND STUDY

coons to bedeck the outside, and was duped by a
white rosebush that was dropping its petals in a
near-by dooryard. I saw white rose-petals on the
ground under the nest, and wondered where they
came from. Keeping my eye on the bird, I saw her
fly down to the rosebush, seize a-petal and fly up to
her nest, and try to make it stick to the outside.
But it was not fuzzy or woolly like the spider’s ma-
terial, and would not stick; it quickly came sailing
down to the ground. Time after time I saw the bird
carry up rose-petals to her nest, only to see them
fall back to the ground. She seemed to have no judg-
ment in the matter; the size and the color of the
petals were all right, but their texture was not of
the right kind. I think she finally gave up the
attempt to make use of them.

Do these patches on the side of the dark-gray
nest of the vireo help to conceal it-—a kind of
instinctive camouflage? They help give it a mot-
tled appearance, and in the flickering light and
shade of the tree-tops they may help to render it
less noticeable, though only to eyes underneath
it. A crow or a jay, the bird’s arch enemies,
would not be misled by them.

It is always interesting to me to see the young
birds leave their nest. It is, as I have just said, gener-
ally an irrevocable step; they very rarely go back —
young swallows, however, perhaps more frequently

72

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

than other birds do go back. The nest is in no sense a
home, but a nursery for a brief period. Most of our
birds who bring off a second brood build a second
nest, though a robin will occasionally re-line and
otherwise patch up an old nest. Nesting birds leave
the nest one by one, sometimes at intervals of an
hour or two; at others, of a day or more. A brood of
three young bluebirds recently left the nest in a box
on the corner of my porch between seven and ten
o'clock. The day before, they began to appear in the
opening, and to look out upon the bright summer
landscape and chirp; now and then a wing was
thrust out and exercised for a moment — probably
no bird leaves its nest till it has flapped its wings a
little. On the morning of the exodus, the young were
more than usually restless and loud and persistent
in their calls to their parents. The parents in turn
called to them in a new way; it was the plaintive,
far-away call that the birds utter on their arrival in
spring, and that they send forth when apparently
starting on a long flight. The young answered back
in the same tone — “pure, pure,” as if on the eve
of a great adventure. Presently: the bird that sat
in the opening fluttered out and clung to the out-
side of the box, where it remained clinging and
calling for a minute or more. Then, with a sudden
impulse, it let go its hold and flew straight to the
branches of an apple-tree fifty or sixty feet away. It
was a successful flight, and a successful alighting.
13

FIELD AND STUDY

One of the parent birds was on hand instantly,
uttering an approving or an encouraging note, or
maybe only a note of solicitude. In the course of
two or three hours the two othcr birds left the nest
in a similar manner, except that there was no pre-
liminary clinging to the outside — they flew straight
from the opening to the old apple-tree, and the next
day were drifting about the orchard with their
parents. By fall or before, they will probably join
the earlier brood, which I think still lingers in this
vicinity, and the united families in a loose flock will
drift about this part of the country.

In June I saw a brood of young wood thrushes
leave the nest. In all cases there seems to be one
bird a little more forward than the others. In this
case one of the young thrushes perched on the edge
of the nest for a few minutes and chirruped. Then,
in a blundering way, apparently more by accident
than design, it reached the big branch upon which
the nest was saddled. After a while it flew a few
feet to another branch. The two others, after similar
manceuvring, joined it in the course of the day, but
neither of them left the apple-tree on that day. At
night there was a heavy thunder-shower with vio-
lent wind, and in the morning two of the young
thrushes were back in the nest. So, under excep-
tional circumstances, young birds do return to the
nest. If they had left the tree, it is quite certain they
would not have taken refuge in the nest. But the

74

THE FAMILIAR BIRDS

fury of the elements made them turn to the old
cradle; and very human-like they were in so do-
ing. During the day they left its protecting arms,
never to return.

One season a brood of house wrens on the corner
of the veranda all left the nest, amid much cackling
and chattering from both old and young, in a short
time early one June morning. One by one they
scrambled outside the box, then off into the honey-
suckle-vines, where they lingered an hour or more
before they tried their wings in short flights to
near-by bushes.

I have seen young barn swallows cling to the
outside of their nest and beat their wings vigorously
a day or two before taking flight: The young of the
grouse and quail and of the small water and shore
birds run away from the nest the day they are
thatched; they trust to their legs long before their
wing-quills have sprouted. The young humming-
birds that I have seen leave the nest shot up into
the air as if a spring beneath them had been re-
leased.

The current notion that the parent birds teach
the young to fly — that of set purpose they give
them lessons in flying — is entirely erroneous. The
young fly automatically when the time comes, as
truly so as the witch-hazel nut explodes, and the
pod of the jewel-weed goes off when the seeds are
ripe. The parent birds call to their young, and I have

75

FIELD AND STUDY

thought that in some cases they withhold the food
longer than usual, to stimulate the young to make
the great adventure; but in the case of the blue-
birds referred to, the young were fed up to the
moment of flight.

IV
FUSS AND FEATHERS

ROBABLY we have no other familiar bird

keyed up to the same degree of intensity as
the house wren. He seems to be the one bird whose
cup of life is always overflowing. The wren is habit-
ually in an ecstasy either of delight or of rage. He
probably gets on the nerves of more persons than
any other of our birds. He is so shrilly and over-
flowingly joyous, or else so sharply and harshly
angry and pugnacious — a lyrical burst one minute,
and a volley of chiding, staccato notes the next.
More restless than the wind, he is a tiny dynamo of
bird energy. From his appearance in May till his
last brood is out in midsummer, he repeats his shrill,
hurried little strain about ten times a minute for
about ten hours a day, and cackles and chatters
between-times. He expends enough energy in giving
expression to his happiness, or vent to his anger, in
the course of each day to carry him halfway to the
Gulf. He sputters, he chatters, he carols; he excites
the wrath of bluebirds, phcebes, orioles, robins; he
darts into holes; he bobs up in unexpected places;
he nests in old hats, in dinner-pails, in pumps, in
old shoes. Give him a twig and a feather and a hole
in almost anything, and his cup is full. How ab-

17

FIELD AND STUDY

surdly happy he is over a few dry twigs there in that
box, and his little freckled mate sitting upon her
eggs! His throat swells and throbs as if he had all
the winds of olus imprisoned in it, and the little
tempest of joy in there rages all the time. His song
goes off as suddenly as if some one had touched a
spring or switched on a current. If feathers can
have a feathered edge, the wren has it.

“What bird is that?” asked an invalid wife,
seated on the porch near a wren-box. “Is it never
still, and never silent? It gets on my nerves.”

“Neither still nor silent long at a time,” replied
her husband, “except when asleep.”

It repeats its song at least six thousand times a
day for two or three months, at the same time that it
brings many scores of insects to feed its young. But
this activity does not use up all the energy of the
wren. He gets rid of some of the surplus in building
cock, or sham, nests in every unoccupied bird-box
near him. He fills the cavities up with twigs, and
I have even seen him carry food into these sham
nests, playing that he had young there. (I saw him
do it yesterday, July 7th; he held in his beak what
seemed to be a small green worm.) Not even these
activities use up all his energy; it overflows in his
shaking and vibrating wings while in song.

The song of the house wren is rather harsh and
shrill, far inferior as a musical performance to that
of the winter wren. The songs of the two differ as

7

FUSS AND FEATHERS

their nests differ, or as soft green moss and feathers
differ from dry twigs and a little dry grass. A truly
sylvan strain is that of the winter wren, suggesting
deep wildwood solitudes, while that of the house
wren is more in keeping with the noise and clatter
of the farm and dooryard. He begins singing by or
before four o’clock in the morning, and for the first
hour hardly stops to take breath, and all the fore-
noon the pauses between his volleys of notes are of
but a few seconds.

I find that there are good bird-observers who ac-
cuse the wren of destroying the eggs of other birds.
I have no first-hand evidence that such is a fact,
but the hostility of several other species of birds
toward the wren gives color to the charge. Why,
for instance, should the phcebe-bird make a sav-
age drive at him, if she has not:some old score of
that kind to wipe out? or the song sparrow chase
him into a vine or a bush and keep him a prisoner
there for a few moments, as I have seen him do?

As I was sitting on the platform of the fruit-house
one morning, watching the wood thrushes at nest-
building, there was a rustle of wings almost at my
elbow, and the snapping of a phoebe’s beak. I turned
in time to see a brown speck darting under the
floor, and a phoebe-bird close on to its heels. The
speck was a wren, and the pheebe was driving for
it viciously. How spitefully her beak did snap!
As the wren eluded her, phoebe turned quickly and

9

FIELD AND STUDY

disappeared down the hill, where she had a nest on a
rafter in the lower fruit-house.

This season there are four wrens’ nests about my
place, in hollow limbs and boxes which we have put
up, and three bluebirds’ nests. The wrens and the
bluebirds often come into collision; mainly, I think,
because they are rivals for the same nesting-sites.
The bluebird, with all his soft, plaintive notes, has a
marked vein of pugnacity in him, and is at times
a lively “scrapper”; and the wren is no “‘peace-at-
any-price bird, and will stand up for his rights very
bravely against his big blue-coated rival.

Late one afternoon, when I was busy in the gar-
den near the end of the vineyard, where there was a
bird-box, I suddenly heard the loud, emphatic note
of a bluebird mingled with the chiding cackle and
chatter of a house wren. I saw the bluebird dive
savagely at the wren and drive him into a currant-
bush, where he would scold and “‘sass back,” and
then break out into a shrill, brief song. Presently a
female oriole came and joined the bluebird in per-
secuting the wren, which answered hack from its
safe retreat in the bushes with harsh chatter and
snatches of tantalizing song. The bluebird took up
his stand on the grape-post that supported the bird-
box in which the wren had a nest, and from this
outlook he grew eloquent in his denunciation of
wrens. His loud, rapid voice and the answering
cackle of the wren attracted the attention of their

80

FUSS AND FEATHERS

bird neighbors. Four robins came, one after another,
and perched on the tops of surrounding posts, silent
but interested spectators. A male oriole came, a cat-
bird came, two song sparrows came, and then a
male goldfinch perched near by. The birds were evi-
dently curious to know what all this loud alterca-
tion was about — very human in this respect.
After the bluebird had eased his mind a little
about wrens, he dropped down to the box, and,
clinging to the entrance of the nest, looked in.
Instantly the wren was on his back, scolding ex-
citedly. The bluebird turned to seize him, but was
not quick enough, and there was a brown streak,
with a blue streak close behind it, to the nearest
currant-bush, in which the wren again chattered
and sang in derision. The bluebird again resumed
his perch above the nest and was louder and more
emphatic than ever in his protests. It was really very
amusing to see the bluebird stand up so straight
there on the post, like a stump orator, delivering
his philippic against the wren. His whole bearing
and tone expressed indignation and an outraged
sense of justice. I fancied him saying: “My friends
and neighbors, I want to bear witness before you
of the despicable character of this chattering, skulk-
ing, impudent house wren. He is an intolerable
nuisance. He crosses my path daily. Every honest
bird hates him. He fills up the boxes he cannot
occupy with his rubbish, and assaults me if I look
81

FIELD AND STUDY

into them and criticize his conduct. He is sly and
meddlesome, and a disturber of the peace. He has
the manners of a blackguard and the habits of a
thief and a despoiler. His throat and tongue are
brass, and his song is as harsh as the dry twigs he
makes his nest of. I ask you to join me in putting
him down.” His audience listened and looked on
with interest, I will not say with amusement. The
humor of the situation probably appealed to me
alone. The birds were only anxious to find out if a
possible common danger threatened them all. But
to me the situation had an element of comedy in it,
and made me laugh in spite of myself.

Again the bluebird essayed to look into that
hole, and as quick as a flash the wren was on his
back. Whether or not he used his sharp beak, I
could not tell, as the assailed turned upon his assail-
ant so quickly — but not quick enough to get ina
counter-stroke. The vines and bushes were again a
house of safety for the wren. Three or four times the
bluebird asserted his natural right to look into any
hole or cavity he had a mind to, and each time the
wren denied that right in the way I have described.
But such jangles among the birds are usually brief.
One by one the spectators flew away; and finally the
chief actor in the little drama flew away, and the
wren warbled in a strain of triumph.

The next day I discovered that the wren had only
begun building a nest in the box, probably a cock

82

FUSS AND FEATHERS

nest. One thing arrested my attention; the box hada
big crack in it from the entrance nearly to the bot-
tom. This crack the wren had evidently essayed to
stop with twigs. At first sight my impression was
that the twigs had accidentally got caught in the
crack in the bird’s effort to get them into the nest.
But, after carefully considering the matter, I see I
must credit him with a purpose to mend his house.
He had first put two small twigs into the crack and
then finished the job with a much larger twig, eight
inches long, which closed the opening very effectu-
ally. This last twig was larger and longer than wrens
ever use in their nests. It was a very clever stroke.

I think the male wrens have sham battles as well
as sham nests; they must work off their superfluous
animation in some way. For hours one early July
afternoon two males, one of whom had a cock nest
a few yards below me in a box on.a grape-post, and
the other a few yards above me in a box on the
corner of the veranda, amused and delayed me in
my eager reading of the war news (the British had
just begun their great offensive in France) by en-
gaging in what appeared to be a most determined
song contest from their respective perches a few
yards apart. How their throats were convulsed!
Under what pressure of jealousy or rivalry they did
hurl shrill defiance at each other in that, to me,
languid summer afternoon! Back and forth, back
and forth, went the voluble challenges, the birds

83

FIELD AND STUDY

facing each other with drooping wings and throb-
bing breasts. The grape-post wren seemed to be
in the more aggressive mood. When he could stand
it no longer, he would dart up the hill at his opponent
on the low branch of a maple, who never stood to
his guns, and the two would make a brown streak
in a wide circle around the maples and the Study,
and down the hill round the summer-house, keep-
ing just so far apart, and never actually coming to
blows. Then they would take up ‘their old positions
and renew the vocal contest with the same spirit as
before, till one of them was again carried off his feet
and hurled himself at his rival on the maple-branch.
Round and round they would go, squeaking and
chattering, but never ruffling a feather. Hour after
hour, with brief intervals, and at times day after
day, these two little hot but happy spirits played
the comedy of this mimic war. It was not even a
tempest in a teapot; it was tempest in a nutshell,
but there was a vast deal of nature in it for all that.
Both birds simply overflowed with the emotions
proper to the season and the conditions.

The mate of the grape-post bird had a nest in
a box farther down the hill, where the care of her
young occupied her most of her time. She scolded
as only wrens can scold when I went poking about
her box, but my poking about the box of the male
did not agitate the owner at all. I tried to explore
the inside with my finger, but found it apparently

84

FUSS AND FEATHERS

packed full of twigs. I had often seen the bird
enter it and disappear for some moments, but my
finger found no vacant space. Then one day I saw
the female enter it, much to the joy and loud ac-
claim of her mate. I finally saw her carry in fine
spears of dry grass. To clear up the mystery I
took off the top of the box, and found that there
was barely room enough between its top and the
twigs for a body the size of my finger to squeeze
in, and enter a small, deep pocket in one corner
which the cock had cunningly arranged. He had
made sure that no bird larger than a wren — no
usurping bluebird nor meddling English sparrow —
could gain entrance, and as for inquisitive wrens,
he could meet them at an advantage. Then I ex-
amined the lower box, where the young were, which
had an opening large enough for a high-hole, or a
great crested flycatcher, and found that the fore-
sighted little creatures had used the same tactics
here; they had built a barricade of twigs in front
of the nest, which was in one corner, and which
could be entered by the wrens only by a close
squeeze. Artful little people, I said, living joyous
and intensive lives, and as full of character and
spirit as an egg is full of meat.

This little bird loves to be near your house, but
give it a chance and it will come inside of it and nest
in the room you occupy. I knew of a pair that came
through a screen door left ajar, into a room on the

85

FIELD AND STUDY

second floor of a famous inn in the valley of the
Rondout, and built a nest on the sash behind a
heavy green window-curtain — a real nest on one
side of the door where the brood was raised, and a
cock, or dummy, nest on the other side. It was not
an inviting place for a nest, except that the room was
occupied by a well-known woman artist and writer
who seems to have extended a hearty welcome to the
little feathered intruders. She cultivated them, and
they seem to have cultivated her, sitting on the
corner of her table when she was at work, and
chattering and singing to her in the most pointed
manner. The people in the house who knew of the
situation were not slow in coming to the conclusion
that the birds recognized in the artist a kindred
spirit, and were drawn to her as they are not to
other people. The case is at least a suggestive one.

I can relate but one somewhat analogous ex-
perience from my own life — remotely analogous,
I may say, as I was not alone concerned in the case
and the bird involved was not a wren. Some years
ago, while on a visit to friends in one of the large
cities of the western part of New York State, some
members of a bird club and one or two officials of
the city government drove me about through the
various parks. We came to a park where there was
a small aviary, a space thirty or forty feet square,
enclosed by wire netting. In this cage were a num-
ber of our common birds, but the one that made a

86

FUSS AND FEATHERS

lasting impression upon me, and upon all who ac-
companied me, was a fox sparrow. No sooner had
we paused before the big cage than a strange ex-
citement seemed to seize this bird, and it began
flying from one end of the enclosure to the other,
clinging for a moment to the wires at each end,
and singing in the most ecstatic manner, and by
its enthusiasm kindling one or two other birds into
song. I had heard the fox sparrow many times, but
never before one that approached this one in power
and brilliancy. It sang in a strain varied and copi-
ous beyond compare — a kind of musical frenzy.
It was fairly startling. The man in charge said
he had never heard it sing before, nor had any of
my companions. I saw at once that the thought
in all minds, which soon came out in words, was
that the bird was singing to me; that it had re-
cognized me as a bird-lover, and was intoxicated by
the discovery. There were other bird-lovers in the
company. There is, of course, some other explana-
tion of the extraordinary performance, but what it
is no one could suggest. There was nothing striking
or unusual in the appearance of any of us, yet our
presence seemed to act like fire to a fuse, and that
one bird was the rocket that astonished and de-
lighted us all. It darted about the enclosure as if its
joy were uncontrollable, and sang in a spirit to
match. I venture to say that none of those present
will ever forget the incident. The more I thought
87

FIELD AND STUDY

about it afterward, the more it impressed me. I am
not the least bit credulous about such things; I have
never observed that the birds, or other wild crea-
tures, behave in any way exceptionally toward me,
or toward any one else. The legends in the old liter-
ature of the power of certain saintly persons, like
St. Francis of Assisi, over the birds and animals,
I look upon as legends merely. They are probably
greatly exaggerated accounts of the power of gen-
tleness and kindliness over the lower orders. The
movements, the tones of the voice, the expression of
the face, all play a part in the impression we make
upon man or beast. I have always been successful in
handling bees, because I am not afraid of bees, and
go among them as if I had a right there. I am suc-
cessful in making friends with dogs, because I show
no suspicion or hesitancy toward them, and, as it
were, extend to them the hand of fellowship. But
the case of the fox sparrow is the single incident
I can recall that might be interpreted, in the spirit
of the old legends, as showing special sympathy
and understanding between man and birds. The
incident of the woman artist with the wrens nesting
in her room, and their perching on her table and
talking wren-talk to her, is of the same character.
Such things may afford hints of some psychic con-
dition, some community of mind between the
human and the animal, as yet but little understood,
but they are far from convincing.

Vv
THE SONGS OF BIRDS

NE of the most remarkable things in animal

life to me is the singing of the birds. Perhaps

the fiddling of the insects is equally remarkable, but
it falls into the same category of remarkable bio-
logical facts, and doubtless its genesis is the same.
How shall we interpret the singing of birds? Does

it bear any analogy to human singing? Is it directed
to any particular end? Is it expressive of joy, as it
would seem to be? Is it to please and win the female?
It is most assuredly what the biologists call a sec-
ondary sexual characteristic, as: it belongs to the
breeding-season, and is associated with the bright
plumage of the males that comes at this time. But
I am persuaded that the females give little or no
heed to it. Only so far as it helps make up the sum
of other plus qualities which are characteristic of the
males, such as ornate appendages, bright colors, and
general pugnacity, does it count with the females.
The female among the birds is not so much won,
in the human sense, as she is conquered or dom-
inated. She resents courtship, and often meets
would-be caresses with blows. What finally deter-
mines her choice of any particular male would be
hard to decide, though it seems to be the vigor of his

89

FIELD AND STUDY |

address, which, of course, would again be expressive
of his all-round conquering character. The positive
body will always dominate the negative, and that,
in short, is why the male dominates the female.
What country boy has not seen a female sparrow,
or robin, or bluebird, apparently a disinterested
spectator of the battles of her male suitors? If she
secretly wishes for the success of either of the com-
batants, she has the art of completely concealing
it. The victor takes the prize.

That the singing of birds bears no analogy to the
singing of human beings, and is neither to please
themselves nor to please others, is obvious from at
least two facts: one is that birds with defective or
only half-articulate voices will sing just as joy-
ously and persistently as do birds whose instru-
ments are perfect. I have witnessed this in the case
of the hermit thrush, the bobolink, and the cockerel
of the barnyard. The birds of the wood, and of the
meadow, quite ignored their split whistles, and the
cockerel arched his neck and inflated his lungs and
went through with the motions of crowing just as
proudly and repeatedly as did the cock he was chal-
lenging. Then the seasonal and automatic charac-
ter of bird-songs, and their tireless persistence, mark
them off from all human performances. If a man or a
woman were to use his or her voice one thousandth
part as much as the singing bird uses its voice, he or
she would soon be so hoarse that speaking would be

90

THE SONGS OF BIRDS

impossible. Man’s vocal organs, at least those of the
mouth, are made of quite different material — the
palate and soft and flexible lips and tongue —
while the bird has hard and horny tongue and bill.
The singing-organs of the live bird do not differ very
much from those of the artificial bird which you
wind up, and which sings and throbs much-like the
real thing. The music-box of the bird is called the
syrinx, and is composed of hard cartilaginous rings
which do not seem to be much more susceptible of
fatigue and wear than a tin whistle. The bird’s song
repeated a thousand or more times a day for months
does not seem to affect it in the least. All singing
birds, and all birds with loud calls, have this ana-
tomical contrivance in the trachea called the syrinx.

Our turkey buzzard has no voice because it has
no syrinx. Maybe Nature did not dare trust the
uncleanly glutton to speak. The hawks and the
eagles she seems more liberal with because theirs
is a nobler type of savagery. And yet, not to be too
sure about Nature’s motives, there is the European
stork, a rather noble bird, which has no voice.
It is not easy to fathom Nature’s inconsistencies.
See what a voice she has given to the frogs, while
she has given none to the turtles! Behold the noisy
crickets and grasshoppers and.the silent moths and
butterflies, the whistling marmot and the silent
skunks and porcupines!

As I sat on my porch this chilly July morning

91

FIELD AND STUDY

about eight o’clock, while a slow rain was falling, a
song sparrow was singing from the top of a dead
plum-tree across the road in front of me. He was
repeating his song at the rate of five times a minute,
and had been doing so with but very short breaks
since about four o’clock. It is the middle of July,
and this bird has been in song since some time in
April. The season is a very late one (1917), and I
think his mate is yet incubating. As is usual with
the song sparrow, he has five different songs, and
he shifts from one to the other at irregular intervals.
The change is as marked as that of the organ-
grinder when he goes through his repertoire in front
of your window. He repeats each one from eight to
ten times. We call him “Mrs. Durkee,” because in
the last phrase of one of his songs he says, “Mrs.
Durkee,” very distinctly.

The main business of his life seems to be singing.
Four fifths of his time from sunrise to sunset he is
perched on the top of the old plum-tree going through
his musical repertoire. Getting his living appears
to occupy very little of his time, and if he visits his
mate or in any way contributes to her well-being, he
does it on the sly. Each song consists of not more
than six or seven notes, and its delivery takes two
or three seconds. At intervals he shakes off the rain-
drops. In the distance I faintly hear another song
sparrow going through a similar performance, but
with songs of his own. Indeed, I am convinced that

92

THE SONGS OF BIRDS

each sparrow has his own set of songs. In the beech
and maple woods on a knoll above me I hear, day
after day, rain or shine, a scarlet tanager repeating
his song at almost all hours of the day, but without
the variations that the sparrow has. Sometimes he
comes down from his sylvan retreat and sings for a
few moments from the dry branch of an apple-tree
near us, delighting the eye with his scarlet coat more
than he does the ear with the burr in his voice. His
visits are brief. He is soon back to his maple retreat,
where his song is mellowed by distance. But from
the little sparrow on the old plum-tree there is no
escape. His persistent singing, early and late, in this
great country solitude becomes the dominant fact.
You cannot ignore it. It is as insistent as the clock.
He rings the changes of his five songs into your ears
over and over, ten times, a hundred times over, in
the morning before you are up. He reiterates them
tirelessly all the forenoon. They stand out sharply
upon the great silence. They challenge your atten-
tion almost to the verge of irritation. There is a
slight let-up in the afternoon, but ‘Mrs. Durkee”
is the last sound we hear as the twilight settles down.
There are no insect voices or other sounds, and the
little singer has the listening world all to himself.
The question recurs to me, Does the feeling or
impulse which prompts the birds to sing correspond
at all to the feeling that prompts human beings to
sing? Does it give them or their mates pleasure? Is
93

FIELD AND STUDY

it expressive of joy or happiness? Or is it a natural
automatic expression of the male sexual principle —
the overflow or surplusage of the breeding-instinct,
such as the brilliant colors and strange antics of
male birds generally? After the young are hatched
this singing of the male will begin to slacken, until
shortly before September it stops entirely. The tide
of bird-song is usually at its height in June, and it
begins to ebb in early July. The rollicking spirit of
the bobolink is at this time clouded by care and
anxiety about his young, and his song is only heard
fitfully and in snatches. As I pass along a road by a
meadow where a pair has young, the agitation of
both birds is very marked; they publish to the
passer-by in every way possible that they have
hidden in that timothy grass young that they are
very solicitous about. They hover in the air and
utter their alarm notes, and if I pause near, the male
becomes so excited that a snatch of his song comes
out now and then amid his rapidly uttered chiding
notes. His joyous level flight on quivering wing
changes to the hurried, abrupt, jerky flight of the
female. The female bobolink always seems in bad
humor, nervous and hurried and out of sorts with
the male that so dotes upon her. All his ecstatic
singing seems to make no impression upon her; the
singer alone seems to joy in it, and to be proud of
his performance, (“The song is to the singer and
comes back most to him,” says Whitman.) Indeed,
94

THE SONGS OF BIRDS

this is the case among all classes of birds; the females
have unmusical ears and appear to be annoyed
rather than charmed by the songs of the males.
Behold, even the hens in the yard shake their heads
protestingly as if it hurt their ears, as it probably
does, when the cockerel arches his neck and utters
his strident and self-satisfied challenge to all the
world. The females of all species are more averse to
noise than the males, and are less self-assertive un-
less the well-being of their young is at stake, when
they can outdo the males. Female nature is timid
and retiring, even in the vegetable kingdom, while
the male is more showy and aggressive, at least dur-
ing the breeding-season. The singing of birds be-
longs to this phase, and, I think, isno more addressed
to the female than it is addressed to all the world.

It is the peean and celebration of the fecundity of
Nature. These colors, these ornaments, are the
spangles upon her garments; they are an extra
touch, an artistic flourish, an evidence of the festive
spirit that goes with the primal command to “in-
crease and multiply” — the one:end which all na-
ture has most at heart. The bird sings, the cock
crows, the tom turkey gobbles, the prairie chicken
booms, the woodpecker drums, the frog croaks, the
crane trumpets, the stag bugles, the bull roars, the
insects fiddle — all instruments in the great orches-
tral celebration of this aboriginal impulse.

On the same old plum-tree where the song spar-

95

FIELD AND STUDY

row sings, perch every hour in the day two bluebirds
who are busy feeding their young in a cavity exca-
vated by a woodpecker in a maple-stub on the cor-
ner of my porch. They-do no singing, but seem to
converse in soft warbles, and they signal to each
other in gentle wing gestures. They do not heed the
singing sparrow, nor he them, but they often dive
spitefully at the “‘chippie” when she comes about
her own private business in the grass under their
brood.

The bluebird is not a singer like the robin or the
sparrow, but he is one of our soft, sweet-voiced
birds, with many pretty ways that greatly endear
him to all country people. He is clearly an offshoot,
back in biologic time, from the line of thrushes, and
he inherits their soft voices and pleasing manners,
but not their musical talents. Nature has made
amends to him in his extra color.

Here we strike the exceptional fact in bird-life,
the non-singing birds, such as our bluebird, our
cedar waxwing, our nuthatches, our kingbird, and
others, all of which have their calls more or less
musical, but none of which are deliberate songsters.
The cedar-bird has the least voice of any of our
small birds that I now recall, his sole note being a
fine, beadlike sound which he usually utters on tak-
ing flight. Approach his nest or young and, so far
as I have observed, he shows no other sign of agi-
tation than depressing his plumage and assuming

96

_ THE SONGS OF BIRDS

a very stiff, straight attitude, which does, indeed,
give him a wild, startled look. °

Our woodpeckers do not sing, but instead they
beat a drum in the shape of a dry, resonant limb,
which seems to be expressive of the same breeding-
instinct. The flicker has a long, oft-repeated call
which he alternates with his drumming, and that
is one of the most welcome of vernal sounds. The
drumming of the yellow-bellied woodpecker is the
most unusual of them all; the bird delivers five
strokes on his drum, three of them rapidly, and then
two with longer intervals between. This variation
gives it a little touch of art. The drums of the pile-
ated and the ivory-billed woodpeckers I have never
heard.

All our song-birds sing with mechanical regularity
and persistence. It is as if they were instruments
wound up to go off at a certain time, and to con-
tinue for a certain time. I know of no species that
during the breeding-season does not repeat its song
many thousands of times a day or night.

Every morning in my walk I hear a vesper spar-
row on the edge of a pasture repeating his song from
the top of a thorn-tree at the rate of seven times a
minute, without any variations that I can detect.
One morning when I was timing him he suddenly
stopped without changing his position. On looking
up I saw a big hen-hawk just issuing from the woods
two or three hundred yards above. After the hawk

97

Pad

FIELD AND STUDY

had sailed away and disappeared behind the woods,
the bird went on with his singing. The red-eyed
vireo in a wood near by was repeating his song much
more rapidly; there was barely a perceptible interval
between its phrases. This bird sings as he feeds, like
the warblers, and he keeps up a continuous strain
of cheery notes nearly all summer. He comes pretty
near being a perennial songster.

I conclude, then, that the singing of birds bears
little or no anuiogy to human singing. It is confined
to one sex and to a particular season, and is simply
the overflowing of a universal impulse in living
nature.

In the care of their young, birds show something
much nearer to human emotion than in their song.
Their untimely signs of alarm often betray them,
but in the agony of their grief they are very human.

Yesterday, on hearing a great commotion among
the birds in the fruit and shade trees in front of my
house, I looked up and saw a crow making off with
a young, unfledged robin in his beak, pursued by a
mob of birds vociferating loudly. A pair of robins,
one of whose young the black devil had seized,
screamed in agony. It was the ordinary alarm note
uttered under such a pressure of excitement that it
became a shrill scream like that which a human
mother might utter if she saw an eagle or a wolf
carrying away her child. There can be little doubt,
I thought, that the cases are closely parallel: those

98

THE SONGS OF BIRDS

robins clearly experienced what we must call pain,
as would human beings under like circumstances.
The great difference is that with the birds the inci-
dent is soon forgotten. A natural instinct is out-
raged, and for the moment the birds react violently.
But the divided waters soon close, and the loss is
forgotten. In the case of the human mother we know
it is different. Birds quickly forget, and the loss of
the young or of a mate is usually only the incident
of a day. A new mate is quickly found, and a new
brood is soon on the road.

The wild creatures are all under the absolute law
of Nature, and no time is wasted in pity or regret.
The parental affection continues so long as the well-
being of the young demands it, and little longer.
The bluebirds rearing their brood on the corner of
my porch reared an earlier brood which they dis-
missed weeks ago, and which now gives them no
more concern. To keep up your end in the great
adventure of peopling the world, and waste no time
in lamenting over your failures, is the unwritten law
of Nature.

Birds with the flocking-instinct sometimes sing in
concert. The prettiest instance known to me of this
habit among our birds is that of the goldfinches,
which in spring have their musical reunions —a
sort of sdngerfest which often continues for days,
and during which the matches appear to be made.
But with most of our birds the song is a sort of

99

FIELD AND STUDY

battle-flag of the males, and when they unfurl it,
if it is not a challenge, it certainly indicates that
they have the “fighting edge.” It.is a notice to other
males that “this grove, or this corner of the field
is my territory, and I will tolerate no trespassers.”

The scarlet tanager, to which I have already re-
ferred, sings almost continuously. His battle-flag is
unfurled nearly all of the time. This morning I
heard a rival in the woods below, three or four hun-
dred yards away. The two birds seemed to be en-
gaged in a song contest. Presently the one in the
woods came down to a maple-tree in the pasture as
if he had said, “I will meet the braggart halfway.”
The other bird took up the challenge and came over
to the edge of the woods near the pasture. The rival
singers soon found the strain too great, and when I
looked again I saw one pursuing the other in a hur-
ried, looping, swooping flight through the air. It
appeared to have been a “peace without victory,”
and the two birds were soon back, each on his
own domain, celebrating his triumph. Such song
contests and collisions are very common among the
males of all species at this season.

A duet, or a quartet, or a sextet, among the birds
is not to be thought of. Each singer wants at least
a bit of the listening world all to himself. He is jeal-
ous of all other songsters of his kind if they encroach
upon his domain. Birds that sing in concert, like
the goldfinches and the grackles, are the exception.

100

THE SONGS OF BIRDS

I have not observed that the robins have these song
contests, but the robins scrap so much that they
surely find enough other provocations to arouse
their ire.

That caged and unmated birds sing in the season
of song shows that the song impulse is a part of the
great breeding-passion that surges through all ani-
mal life in the vernal season. It is one with the
painted flowers, the drifting perfumes, and the
extra ornaments and appendages that so many
forms of life put on in fulfilling the primal command
to “increase and multiply.”

VI
ORCHARD SECRETS

AFTER I gave up hunting for the bird’s nest
I found it. Day after day I had searched
through my orchard for a kingbird’s nest which I
knew from the action of the birds and their con-
stant presence there was in one of the apple or pear
trees. I looked them all over in vain, time after
time. Then I lay down in the grass under one of
the tall trees and kept my eyes on the birds. It was
a warm, ripe midsummer afternoon and the fra-
grance of the world of grass about me and the re-
pose of nature on all sides fairly drowsed my senses.
I took a languid interest in watching the two birds
and seeing them climb high in the air, now and then,
and overtake some bug or beetle that was venturing
forth for a pleasure flight in the upper regions of the
air, and then pitch down with their prey in their
beaks.

I became so interested in these aerial excursions
of the two birds and the lumbering, slow-moving
insects that they were picking out of the air, that I
quite forgot the nest. After a while, casually turning
my head to one side to rest my eyes, I saw the nest
on a branch not twenty feet away from me. Nests
least concealed are often concealed the most. The

102

ORCHARD SECRETS

thicker foliage and the closer branches of the near-by
pear-trees offered much more concealment, and upon
these I had fixed my scrutiny, and had only run my
eye hurriedly over the more open branches of the
apple-trees. But there was the nest near the end of a
long, low, horizontal branch, with no screen of foli-
age, and likely to escape the attention on this very
account.

The picture of those kingbirds going slowly up
almost straight in the air and seizing those insects
lingered in my eye. I think at times that they rose
nearly one hundred feet, indicating their remarkably
sharp vision. In no instance could I see the bug.
Probably the eyes of all birds are much sharper than
our own. Day after day I see the bluebird fly from
her perch on the telephone-wire in front of me to the
road or the turf forty or fifty feet away, and pick
up some small worm or insect which I myself could
not see. Probably the optical instrument of birds
is no more perfect or powerful than our own, but
the big brain behind it — big relatively — is con-
stantly thinking bug or worm, so to speak. I pre-
sume most men could see a gold dollar farther than
a bird could. The hawk poised on wing high in
the air will see a field mouse in the grass beneath
him that under the same conditions would escape
our vision. Field mice are in its mind, yes, in its
blood. The buzzard, “housing herself in the sky,”
sees with her craving maw her proper food miles and

103

FIELD AND STUDY

miles away. Our vision, under the circumstances,
would not distinguish the carcass of pig or dog
from any other small object on the ground. There
is speculation in the eye of the buzzard. It is a
great help to the eye to know what it is looking for.

But to return. Birds’ nests may be found by
searching. Yesterday four of us— three young
women and myself — went out into the small or-
chard that holds the kingbird’s nest, and by careful
scrutiny of each tree we found five other nests —
a red-eyed vireo’s, a cedar-bird’s, a goldfinch’s,
a chippie’s, and a song sparrow’s. Song sparrows
are habitually ground birds, but they occasion-
ally take advantage of a tree. I had never before
seen one build a nest fifteen feet from the ground.
Evidently the little bird felt that its tree enemies
were less to be feared than its ground enemies. I had
had a glimpse a day or two before of one of its
ground enemies in the grass under the nest, in the
shape of a skunk. His approach was betrayed by
the trembling of the grass. I called “Halt!” to him,
when he stopped and worked his nose in my direc-
tion for a moment, then turned and with tail erect
ready for action, retraced his steps to the wood-
chuck-hole under the wall. Both by night and by
day these prowlers destroy many birds’ nests. The
cedar-bird was the rarest find, and I had great pleas-
ure in observing the manners of the parent birds.
They made-no outcry, but were the personification

104

ORCHARD SECRETS

of silent fear. The male as he sat on a branch near
the nest stood up straight and stiff, still as if frozen,
with crest flattened and plumage closely furled. The
head of the female, visible above the rim of the nest,
showed the same alarm. The silent expression of
both birds was as eloquent as the most demonstra-
tive outcry. The vireos gave themselves away by
their plaintive and agitated cries, the female show-
ing much the more concern. A close scrutiny of the
outer end of the lower branches of the trees soon
revealed the little gray, closely woven basket sus-
pended between two twigs, seven or eight feet from
the ground. A daintier and prettier nest than the
vireo’s cannot be found. We feel sure that there
is the nest of the wood pewee in the old orchard
yet to be discovered. This is a nest of a different
order — a cup and not a basket, but it is so com-
pactly and smoothly modeled, and so harmonizes
with the branch upon which it is placed, by bits of
lichen with which it is covered, that it delights
the eye equally with that of the vireo, and is still
harder to find. The tribe of vireos have doubtless
learned from long experience that the safest places
to build their nests are where we invariably find
them, near the end of long, low branches of trees and
bushes. The crows and jays are almost sure to over-
look them here, and the cowbird in looking for a
nest in which to drop stealthily her egg is equally
baffled. The goldfinch is also a superior bird archi-
105

FIELD AND STUDY

tect. Its nest is massive for so small a body — thick,
compact, smooth, soft, deep, and securely held in
the small forks of an upper branch. Much thistle-
down is ordinarily used in its construction.

The chipping sparrow is a poor nest-builder com-
pared with either of the foregoing birds. Her nest is
loosely woven of small sticks and straws, and is
rarely well-secured to the branches. The sudden
summer gusts of rain and wind wreck more chippies’
nests than those of any other tree-builders.

The kingbird is a harsh-voiced and harsh-man-
nered bird, and its nest of crabbed rootlets and
sticks and straws is in keeping.

A few weeks later in the season I had a curious,
but at first rather painful, experience with the gold-
finch’s nest. The nest was remarkably well hidden,
and the parent birds were so cunning that with all
my watching from my hammock a few yards away
I never once saw either of them near the nest. Fi-
nally in August I concluded that the nest was not
occupied, and I did what I rarely do with a bird’s
nest, I proceeded to “collect” it. With a long pole
I lifted it from out the forked branch that held it,
and after considerable engineering, caused it to
fall to the ground. As it did so, to my dismay, a
young bird fell from the nest and struck the stub-
bled ground heavily. The nest landed bottom side
up. Turning it over, I was shocked to find three
young birds nearly half grown, wedged into the

106

ORCHARD SECRETS

bottom of it and lying so closely and so still that
they seemed a part of the nest. They made no sign,
their eyes were closed, they flattened themselves
down, and clung to the nest with silent tenacity.
I was in a “pickle.” What could I do toward
undoing what I had so rashly done? The mother
bird now appeared, and in the near-by branches
called out in shy, plaintive tones, “Pi-ty, pi-ty,”
but did not come into the tree where her nest had
been.

After some delay, with the aid of a ladder, I
placed the nest in a forked branch four or five feet
below the original position. I had serious doubts
about the success of the experiment as not once
during the two or more hours that I was on the look-
out did either of the parent birds enter the tree. But
next morning I found all four of the young birds
warm and hugging the nest as closely as ever. Not
once during the days that followed did I see the pa-
rent birds approach the nest or show themselves in
near-by trees. Still the young grew and presently
their backs and heads began to show above the rim
of the nest, till finally I found one of them perched
on its rim. It was not many hours after that before
the nest was empty, and later the young were fol-
lowing their parents about the fields from thistle to
thistle, uttering that childlike note which sounds
like “Ba-by, ba-by,” a sound I knew so well in late
summer when I was a boy on the old farm,

107

FIELD AND STUDY

‘The discovery of a bird’s nest is usually so much
a matter of chance that I always consider myself in
luck when I find one. One morning in a little open-
ing which the woodchoppers had made in the beech
woods, I stumbled upon a junco’s nest. It was in a
mossy bank near a pile of cordwood. The mother
bird flew out from the little cavity in which the nest
was placed, when I was about a yard from her.
After that, in my walk, I found my steps very often
taking that course. In some way I felt myself re-
sponsible for that nest. I wanted to see it through.
Then a bit of still wild life in the great unkempt,
haphazard out-of-doors, exposed to so many dan-
gers both by night and by day, so frail and so en-
gaging, one of the most pleasing open secrets in all
the woods and fields, drew me by a magic all its own.
A large herd of dairy cows browsed and trailed
through these woods and I wondered if the little
nest could long escape their hoofs. The night prowl-
ers, too, — the skunks, foxes, coons, cats, — would
they all pass it by? I used to linger about it. I could
see the bird’s white beak and her black, shining
eyes there in the small cavity, partly screened by
vines and wild, woodsy growths. The spot seemed a
little different from all others. I laid some poles and
brush carelessly about to ward off the cows. One
hot morning I sat a long time on a rock near by,
partly to enjoy the cool breeze and partly to be near
the junco. I occasionally saw the male hanging

108

ORCHARD SECRETS

about. It was interesting to speculate as to whether
or not he understood what kept his mate there.
This was doubtless their second brood. A month
earlier I had discovered a junco’s nest under the
roots by the wooded roadside, on the summit of one
of the Catskill ranges. As I paused to wipe my brow,
the mother bird slid out from the bank only a step
from me and went trailing her plumage across the
road. The nest was placed nearly a foot under the
interlacing roots of the trees.

The gentle divinities safeguarded my bird of the
beech woods, and her brood was successfully
launched.

I am interested in birds’ nests which I do not find,
but of which I have only a hint. One July day a
fully fledged rose-breasted grosbeak, evidently a
good deal bewildered by his first trip in the world,
came into our veranda and clung to the rafters
above our heads. The male grosbeak was following
him in an anxious state of mind and alighted in a
near-by tree. I took my cane and, gently insinuat-
ing it under the young bird, induced him to let go
the rafters and cling to it. Then I carried him to the
open and gave him a chance again to try his wings.
The parent bird followed him till both were lost
from sight. I hunted the orchard over in vain for
the nest. It was probably in the woods above or
along some bushy fence-row. The rose-breast is
such a rare and striking bird that the incident makes

109

FIELD AND STUDY

a bright spot in my memory: of that summer
afternoon.

A chickadee had a nest somewhere in the old
orchard, but we failed to find it. Several mornings
in succession she came upon the veranda and filled
her beak with the long woolen nap from my steamer
rug. She was very bold, as chickadees usually are,
and did not mind a bit my standing a few feet away
and upbraiding her.

“You are not a good neighbor,” I said — “‘rob-
bing my bed to furnish your own.”

She only kept her beadlike eyes upon me and went
on with the pilfering. She made a very pretty appear-
ance with her beak filled with the yellow, green, and
black wool — a nest-lining, I venture to say, that
she had never had before. Each time she disap-
peared around the corner of the house into the
orchard so quickly that my eye failed to follow her.
I only hope that her brood throve and that she will
come back next summer to help herself to my supply
of wool.

The hermit thrush that came two mornings in
September and fed upon the berries of the tall
spikenard plant that grows in the rear of the house
under the pantry window, had probably had a nest
in the near-by woods or on the mountain above, as
the hermit was in song there earlier in the season,
but I never chanced upon it in my walks. It was a
pleasure to have this rare songster come to my door

110

ORCHARD SECRETS

for his breakfast. How much he brought with him
of the wild grace and harmony of nature!

J also became interested in a pair of bobolinks
which had a nest in a meadow by the roadside
where I passed daily. A singular thing about it was
that there were two males and only one female.
When I approached, one of the males and the fe-
male showed great agitation. Hovering in the air
above me, they gave away the secret of the cause
of their agitation in vociferous tones, while the
second male remained entirely indifferent. Clearly
it was not a case of plurality of husbands, and it
looked as if the second male was there only to keep
them company.

Bobolinks in our Northern meadows are becom-
ing more and more rare, and this-was unmistakably
a case where there were more males than females.

Although bobolinks always show unusual agita-
tion as you approach the vicinity of their nest, they
are very careful not to give away its precise locality.
Their solicitude embraces the whole meadow. They
will follow you from one end to the other with the
same outcry and protest, but you may linger about
for hours and not get any clue to the particular tuft
of grass where the secret is hidden.

VII
NATURE IN LITTLE

ATURA in minimis existat.’’ This saying of

Aristotle’s is usually translated as if it meant
that Nature is seen only, or more fully, in “Jeasts,”
whereas it is more probable that Aristotle meant to
say that Nature is as complete in the small as the
great, that she is whole in all her parts — as much
in evidence in the minute as in the gigantic, in the
herb as in the oak, in the gnat as in the elephant,
in the pond as in the sea. In the clay-bank washed
by rains you may perceive the same sculpturing and
modeling that you see in vast mountain-chains. In
California I have seen, in a small mound of clay
by the roadside that had been exposed to the
weather for a few years, a reproduction in miniature
of the range of mountains that towered above it, the
Sierra Madre.

A rivulet winding through a plain loops the same
loops and ox-bows that the Mississippi makes trav-
ersing the prairie States. The physical laws at
work are the same in both cases. Has not some poet
said that the same law that shapes a teardrop shapes
a planet? The little whirlwind that dances before
you along the road in summer, and maybe snatches
your hat from your head, is a miniature cyclone,

112

NATURE IN LITTLE

and in our hemisphere it rotates in the same direc-
tion — in opposition to the hands of a clock.

Mere size does not count for much with Nature;
she is all there, in the least as in the greatest. A drop
of dew reveals the rainbow tints as well as the myriad
drops of the summer shower, and the bow hovers
in the spray of a small waterfall as surely as in that
of Niagara. The thunderbolt leaps with no more
speed across the black chasm of the clouded heavens,
than does the electric spark in your laboratory leap
across the tiny spaces from one pole to the other.

But the big-lettered and startling headlines in
Nature’s book occupy the real nature-lover less
than does the smaller print. The big and exceptional
things all can see, but only the loving observers
take note of the minor facts and incidents.

Emerson in his journal thinks it worth while to
notice the jokes of Nature. He cites the Punch faces
in the English violets, the parrots, the monkeys, the
lapwing’s limping, and the like petty stratagems of
other birds. He might have cited the little green
tody of Jamaica, which is a clownish-looking little
bird with its green suit and big golden beak, as if it
might be playing a part in some bird carnival. The
puffins of the Northern seas, with their jewlike pro-
files and short legs, also suggest the comic side of
Nature, as do the big gray pelicans in the Southern
seas. On the wing, or riding on the wave, the peli-
can has a bulky, awkward look. But there are

113,

FIELD AND STUDY

moments in its life every hour when a sudden and
complete transformation in its appearance takes
place; and those are when it dives for a fish. Its
heavy flight is suddenly arrested in the air fifty or
more feet above the water, anda striking change
in its looks and manner takes place; it turns down-
ward, its pouchlike bill becomes a long, straight
dagger, its wings are furled, and its whole form be-
comes like a gigantic arrowhead which shoots down-
ward and smites the water like « thunderbolt. The
spray flies, you hear the concussion, and the huge
form disappears beneath the wave. But only for a
second; in a twinkling it is again riding on the water,
looking as awkward and as commonplace as ever.
But of course Nature does not joke; it is man that
jokes and experiences a sense of humor in certain
of her forms, but all these forms have serious pur-
poses. Inanimate things often behave in a way to
excite one’s risibles, but that end can be no part of
the plan of Nature. When inanimate things act like
human beings we laugh, and when human beings
act like inanimate things we laugh; why we laugh
it would not be easy to say.

Most animals certainly have a keen sense of play,
but it is very doubtful if even so humanized an ani-
mal as the dog has any sense of humor. The gro-
tesque is pretty sure to frighten him instead of
amusing him. The sense of humor implies powers of
ideation, which the lower animals do not possess.

114

NATURE IN LITTLE

The waltzing and saluting and other courtship an-
tics of certain birds are very amusing to the human
spectator, but it is all a very serious business with
the birds. I always have to smile when I see a chip-
munk come up out of his hole into which he has
been hurrying his winter food-supply, stand up
straight on his hind legs, and quickly wash his face.
How rapidly he passes his paws over that delicate
nose and face, looking around the while to see if
any danger is near! He does this at every trip.
When we say on witnessing any act of an animal,
*“How cunning!”’ we feel, I suppose, a sense of its
humanness; it suggests our own behavior under like
conditions.

Last spring the vanishing of the deep snows from
my lawn gave me a glimpse of the life and works of
the meadow mice in their winter freedom under the
snow. At one place standing out very clearly was a
long mouse highway, sunken into the turf and lead-
ing to a large dome-shaped nest of dry grass which
it entered by a round hole on one side, and came
out by a hole on the other, then forking and be-
coming two highways leading off over the turf. It
suggested a tiny railroad station with its converging
lines. ““How cunning!” exclaimed some school-
children and their teacher to whom I pointed it out.
The mice had enjoyed the privacy, freedom, and
safety there under the two feet of snow, as the
record they left clearly showed.

115

FIELD AND STUDY

I smiled one day last April when, walking near
the edge of a small pond, I saw a muskrat on shore
very busy stuffing his mouth with dry leaves, then
taking to the water, holding his bedding well up till
he came opposite to his hole in the bank, when he
dived and swam to its underwater entrance. My
smile was provoked, I suppose, by the discrepancy
between the care the animal took to secure dry
leaves, and the necessity that compelled it to plunge
under the wave in order to reach its chamber. I do
not suppose the muskrat could have interpreted
my smile had he seen it and tried.

I was interested and amused by the behavior of
the big garter snake I met in my field walk one
October day. The day was chilly and I could not stir
the snake into any considerable degree of activity.
He was sluggish and made no effort to escape,
though I teased him with my cane for a quarter of
an hour. He presently woke up enough to scent
danger in my cane. Probably he had a dim sense
that it was another snake. He flattened himself out —
and became a half-round, opened his mouth threat-
eningly, but would not seize or strike my stick. He
coiled beautifully and when I turned him on his
back he righted himself quickly by a movement the
whole length of his body. After:a while I noticed
that his body began to contract at a point about
one third the distance from the end of the tail; then,
as I continued my teasing, he folded the rear part

116

NATURE IN LITTLE

of his body back upon himself and twined it around
the forward, like a vine doubling upon itself. If he
was taking precautions against my stick as another
snake trying to swallow him, it was good tactics; it
. would have made the problem of swallowing him
much more difficult. I do not think it at all probable
that the snake had ever experienced such uncivil
treatment before, and the emergency was met by
the best resources the poor hali-benumbed creature
had. “Swallow me, if you will, but I will stick in
your throat if I can.” I left him unharmed, doubled
and twisted in self-defense.

Jokes in nature, no! but there are curious and
amusing forms and incidents, grotesque shapes,
preposterous color schemes and appendages, from
our point of view, but all a serious part of the com-
plex web of animal life.

The transparent trick of the ground-building
birds to decoy you from their nests or young is very
amusing, but the heart of the poor mother bird is
in her mouth.

The cock, or mock, nests of the house wren and
marsh wren look like jokes; in fact the wrens them-
selves seem like jokes, they are so pert and fussy
and attitudinizing, but whether these extra nests
are sham nests, or whether they are the result of
the overflowing measure of the breeding-instinct,
or are decoy nests, serving a real purpose in con-
cealing or protecting the real nest, is a question.

117

FIELD AND STUDY

There are more tragedies in wild life than come-
dies, and fear is a much more active agent in devel-
opment than joy or peace. The only two of our more
common wild animals that I recall, in which the
instinct or impulse of fear is low, are the porcupine
and the skunk. Both are pretty effectively armed
against their natural enemies and both are very
slow, stupid animals.

When I stop to contemplate the ways of the wild
creatures around me and the part they play in the
all-the-year-round drama, my thoughts are pretty
sure to rest for a while on the crow. From the wide
distribution of the crow over the earth in some form,
it would appear that Nature has him very much at
heart. She has equipped him to make his way in
widely diversified lands and climates. He thrives
upon the shore and he thrives upon the mountains.
He is not strictly a bird of prey, neither is he preyed
upon. What is it in nature that he expresses? True,
he expresses cunning, hardiness, sociability; but he
is not alone in these things. Yet the crow is unique;
he is a character, and at times one is almost per-
suaded that he has a vein of humor in him. Probably
no country boy who has had a tame crow has any
doubt about it. His mischief-making propensities are
certainly evident. His soliloquies, his deliberate cat-
calls and guttural sounds, his petty stealings, his
teasing of other animals, his impudent curiosity, all
stamp him as a bird full of the original Adam.

118

NATURE IN LITTLE

Country people are now much more friendly to
the crow than they were in my boyhood. He is not
so black as he was painted. The farmers have
learned that he is their friend, for all his occasional
corn-pulling and chicken-stealing. His is the one
voice you are pretty sure to hear wherever your walk
leads you. He is at home and about his own business.
It is not his grace as°a flyer that pleases us; he is
heavy and commonplace on the wing — no airiness,
no easy mastery as with the hawks; only when he
walks is he graceful. How much at home he looks
upon the ground — an ebony clod-hopper, but in
his bearing the lord of the soil. He always looks
prosperous; he always looks contented; his voice
is always reassuring. The farmer may be disgruntled
and discouraged, his crows are not. The country is
good enough for them; they can meet their engage-
ments; they do not borrow trouble; they have not
lived on the credit of the future; their acres are not
mortgaged. The crow is a type of the cheerful, suc-
cessful countryman. He is not a bird of leisure; he
is always busy, going somewhere, or policing the
woods, or saluting his friends, or calling together the
clans, or mobbing a hawk, or spying out new feed-
ing-grounds, or taking stock of the old, or just
cawing to keep in touch with his fellows. He is very
sociable; he has many engagements, now to the
woods, now to the fields, now to this valley, now to
the next — a round of pleasure or duty all the day

119

FIELD AND STUDY

long. Not giver to solitude and contemplation like
the proud hawks, not pugnacious, never or rarely
quarreling with his fellows, cheerfully sharing his
last morsel with them, playing sentinel while they
feed, suspicious, inquisitive, cunning, but never hid-
ing; as open as the day in his manners, proclaim-
ing his whereabouts at all hours of the day, looking
upon you as the intruder and himself as the rightful
occupant. The stiller the day the more noise he
makes. He is never a sneaker, never has the air of
a prowler. He is always in the public eye or ear. His
color gives him away, his voice gives him away;
on the earth or in the sky he is seen and heard afar.
No creature wants his flesh, no lady wants his
plume, though a more perfect and brilliant ebony
cannot be found in nature. He is a bit of the night
with the sheen of the stars in it, yet the open day is
his province, publicity his passion. He is a spy, a
policeman, a thief, a good fellow, a loyal friend, an
alarmist, a socialist, all in one. Winter makes him
gregarious, as it does many men; at night he seeks
the populous rookery in the woods, by day he
wanders in bands seeking food. In spring he estab-
lishes a crow network all over the country and is
rarely out of earshot of some of his fellows. How we
should miss him from the day! Among our com-
munity of birds he is the conspicuous, all-the-year-
round feature. We do not love him, there is no
poetry in his soul; but he challenges our attention,
120

NATURE IN LITTLE

he is at home in the landscape, he is never disgrun-
tled. Come rain, come shine, come heat, come snow,
he is on his job and is always reassuring.

The book of nature is always open winter and
summer and is always within reach, and the print is
legible if we have eyes to read it. But most persons
are too preoccupied to have their attention arrested
by it. Think of the amazing number of natural
things and incidents that must come under the ob-
servations of the farmer, the miner, the hunter, that
do not interest him, because they are aside from his
main purpose. I see a farmer getting his cows every
morning in the early dawn while the dew is on the
grass and all nature is just waking up, and think,
during the twenty or more years that he has been
doing this, what interesting and significant inci-
dents he might have witnessed in the lives of the
wild creatures, if his mind had been alert to such
happenings! But it was not. He noticed only his
cows, or where his fences needed mending, or where
a spring needed clearing out. What a harvest
Thoreau would have gathered during that score
or more of years! From ant to bumble-bee, and
from bumble-bee to hawks and eagles, he would
have caught the significant things. Rarely can the
farmer tell the poet or the naturalist anything he
wants to know, because he has not the seeing eye
or the hearing ear. The fox-hunter can tell you of the

121

FIELD AND STUDY

foxes he has killed or pursued, and just what it was
that turned those that escaped him from their run-
way, but he can tell you little about the lesser
game — what the mice and squirrels are doing, or
the chickadees or woodpeckers are saying; his inter-
ests lie elsewhere. Downy might be excavating his
winter retreat in a dry stub or branch over his
head, and he not know it. A chipmunk might be
digging his hole in the field the farmer is ploughing
in September, and he none the wiser. The poet can
say to the farmer: —

“One harvest from the field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield
Which I gather in a song.”

And an Audubon or a Fabre would bring home an
equal and a different harvest.

Our interest in nature is a reflection of our inter-
est in ourselves; nature is ourselves extended and
seen externally. We experience a thrill of interest
when we learn that the plants breathe and sleep as
we do; that they have ingenious devices for dis-
seminating their seed and for securing cross-ferti-
lization; that there is competition among them and
among the trees for the light and air and moisture
and the fertility of the soil; that they protect them-
selves against the sun and the cold, and against
the wet. They have all their struggles and their

122

NATURE IN LITTLE

enemies as we do, their youth, their maturity, their
ripe old age.

How curious it is that the air-plants should be
able to get their mineral elements from the air as if
this all but impalpable fluid were a soil full of lime
and magnesia and silica, and the plant pushed in-
visible roots into it! In Florida how often I used
to pause and regard them when I saw them growing
upon gate-posts or dead tree-trunks and flourishing
so luxuriantly! I burned some of them up to see if
they left any ashes and was surprised at the amount.
Is this semi-tropical air, then, so loaded with all these
mineral elements? How much I wished to see the
mechanical or chemical devices by which the plants
seized it or strained it out of the air! A Russian
chemist says that “‘if a linen surface moistened with
an acid be placed in perfectly pure air, then the
washings are found to contain sodium, calcium,
iron, potassium. Linen moistened with an alkali
absorbs carbonic, sulphuric, phosphoric, and hydro-
chlorie acids.” The presence of organic substances
in the air can be proved by similar experiments.
The cosmic dust in the air from the wear and tear
of the vast sidereal machinery, not detectable by
any of our human senses, may also be a source of
some of the mineral elements in the air-plants. It is
evidently by the aid of the acids in the leaf that
these plants trap and appropriate the iron and
the potassium. The atmosphere, then, seems like

123

FIELD AND STUDY

another and finer earth possessing nearly all the
mineral and gaseous and living organisms, a finer
world superimposed upon the world in which we
live. It is the watery vapor in the air, as it is the
liquid water in the earth that holds in infinite divi-
sion the various earth salts upon. which the plants
feed. An air-plant and an earth-plant, then, do not
differ so fundamentally as would af first seem; the
former has its roots in the air and draws about the
same elements thence that the latter does through
its roots in the earth.

Is not distilled and evaporated water supposed
to be absolutely free from mineral elements? How,
then, do all these minerals get into the air, if not
through the vapors that rise from the sea and the
land? It is curious, if true, as is alleged, that stag-
nant water anywhere near air-plants seems to be
injurious to them. They need the purest air.

Wait long enough and Nature will always have a
fresh surprise for you. I have seen in my life only
one big maple-tree utterly destroyed and reduced to
kindling-wood by a thunderbolt. I have never yet
known lightning to strike a beech-tree, but prob-
ably if I wait long enough I shall see it or hear of it.
I have only once in my life found a plant called the
whorled pogonia, and only once found a plant called
the devil’s-bit, but in time I hope to find another of
each. I have only once seen a wild bird turning over
her eggs in her nest as does a hen. I have never but

124

NATURE IN LITTLE

once seen the golden eagle soaring above my na-
tive hills and that was seventy years ago. No wild
animal of the cat tribe other than the ordinary wild-
cat had been seen or heard in my native town in the
Catskills in my time, till a few years ago, when a
new cry was heard. Let me tell about it.

One still, moonlight October night, as I was sleep-
ing on the porch, a bit of natural history on four
legs which I had never heard before, let out such a
cry and wail, under the hill within a stone’s throw
below me, that I was startled and puzzled beyond
measure. I thought I knew the natural history of the
Catskills pretty well, but here was a cry absolutely
new to me. There was first a loud, strident, murder-
ous scream, such as a boy might utter when be-
side himself with fear or pain, followed by a long,
tapering moan and wail, like the plaint of a lost soul.
It was almost blood-curdling. Five times, with less
than half a minute interval, the creature or lost
spirit rent the midnight silence with this cry, fol-
lowed by the wail of utterly hopeless despair. I
raised myself up on my elbow and listened. Each
scream echoed off in the woods a few hundred yards
away, but the moan faded away in the moonlight
and became a mere wraith of sound. I could not help
visualizing it, and seeing it mount up toward the
moon and become fairly blue and transparent in its
beams. I was partially disabled from the kick of
a horse about whom I had become too coltish in

125

FIELD AND STUDY

the field the day before, and could not get up and
run to the brink of the hill, below which the crea-
ture seemed to be. What could it be?

The next night it came again at about the same
hour, but I was sleeping too soundly to be awakened.
A young couple from Kansas were sleeping in the
chamber above me; they heard it and were so
frightened that they could sleep no more till morn-
ing. The next night we all lay awake listening till
after midnight, but the performance was not re-
peated.

Not long afterward I visited the Zodlogical
Park at the Bronx and described the sound I had
heard to the director. “‘A puma,” he said, “‘prob-
ably one escaped from captivity and calling for
her mate.” The director had heard them cry hun-
dreds of times and he repeated the cry. “Was
it like that?” “Not abit,” said. ‘““No human voice
could give the scream I heard, or imitate the hope-
lessness of that wail.” The only sound that I had
ever heard that was at all like the cry was uttered
by a young man whom I caught one night stealing
my grapes. I suddenly rose up amid the vines,
draped in black, and seized him by the leg as he was
trying, half paralyzed with fear, to get over the wall.
He gave forth a wild, desperate animal scream, as
if he had found himself in the clutches of a veritable
black fiend. Only the wild animal which slumbers in
each of us, and which fear can at times so suddenly

126

NATURE IN LITTLE

awaken, was vocal in that cry. As for the utterly
forlorn and heart-breaking crescendo of the mid-
night wail I heard from my sleeping-porch, I have
never heard anything approaching it from man or
beast,

There were traditions in the neighborhood of
some such mysterious cry having been heard here
and there for the past seven or eight years, frighten-
ing horses at night, causing them to tremble and
snort and stop in the road, and almost paralyzing
with fear a young fellow and his girl crossing from
one valley to another on their way home from a
country dance.

Six years ago, on a warm July night, a woman
friend of mine and her son, of sixteen or eighteen,
were passing the night in hammocks in my orchard,
when near midnight they came hurrying to the
house in a great state of agitation; they had heard
a terrible, blood-curdling cry. I laughed at them, as
city tenderfeet, told them they had probably heard
the squall of a fox, or the cry of an owl, or a coon.
They did not care what it was, but they would not
return to their hammocks, or even try to pass an-
other night there. They have since told me that the
fearful cry they heard was like the one I described.

An old woodsman and hunter has told me that
I heard the cry of the Canada lynx. And he is prob-
ably correct, though I can find no record in the
books that the lynx has such a cry. In the winter of

127

FIELD AND STUDY |

1915 a similar cry was heard late at night on the
hills above the village. It set all the dogs in town
barking and people thrust their heads out of their
doors and windows to see or hear what had caused
the sudden rumpus. The following September, while
a young man whom I know was ploughing in a hill
field near the woods, a large, yellow, catlike animal
came down and lingered near him. His description
of it, including the fact that it had a short tail, con-
vinced me that he had seen a lynx and that this
was our mysterious night screamer. The young
farmer ran to the house to get his gun, but when he
returned he saw the big cat disappearing in the
woods. Yet no one has seen its track upon the snow,
and no poultry or lambs or pigs or calves in the
neighborhood have been killed by it.

One need never expect to exhaust the natural
history of even his own farm. Every year sees a
new and enlarged edition of the book of nature, and
we may never hope to turn the final leaf.

VHT
THE INSECT MIND

HE insect mind is just as obvious as the mind
of the four-footed creatures. Darwin thought
the most marvelous bit of matter in the universe
was the brain of an ant. Fabre’s studies have thrown
more light upon the workings of the insect brain
than those of all other investigators, though George
and Elizabeth Peckham, of Wisconsin, have thrown
the same flood of light upon the lives of our social
and solitary wasps. Their volume upon this subject
can go on the same shelf with the works of “the in-
sect’s Homer,” as Maeterlinck called Fabre.
Fabre is rather the insect’s Sherlock Holmes,
Not a secret of their lives, seemingly, escapes him;
he unravels the most intricate problems of their life-
histories; his patience is tireless, his powers of obser-
vation unequaled, and his scientific method without
a flaw. So many of the secrets of insect lives, espe-
cially of the wasps and beetles, are underground,
yet Fabre knows them all. He is an eavesdropper, a
“Paul Pry,” a skilled detective; he knows even the
hidden crimes and scandals of the insects. If he does
not get the secret he is after this year, or the next,
he follows up the clue five, six, or seven years, at
times sitting so Jong by the roadside, or amid the
vines and bushes, — often all day, — without chang-
129

FIELD AND STUDY

ing his place, that the peasants, as they go to and
fro, from their work, tap their heads significantly
to one another, and exclaim, “ Pécaire !”

Fabre reveals a world at our feet which we rarely
or never see, but which is in many ways a copy in
miniature of the human world in which we live —
its arts, its economies, its thefts, its murders, its
struggles, its competitions, its failures, its provi-
dences, its love of home and of offspring, and its
relations to time and chance. Of the insects he says:

_ They become past-masters in a host of industries for
the sake of a family which their faceted eyes never be-
hold and which, nevertheless, the maternal foresight
knows quite well. One becomes a manufacturer of cotton
goods and mills cotton-wool bottles;:another sets up as a
basket-maker and weaves hampers out of scraps of flow-
ers; a third turns mason and builds rooms of cement and
domes of road-metal; a fourth starts a pottery works, in
which the clay is kneaded into shapely vases and jars and
bulging pots; yet another adopts the calling of a pitman
and digs mysterious warm, moist passages underground.
A thousand trades similar to ours and often even un-
known to our industrial system are employed in the prep-
aration of the abode. Next come the victuals of the ex-
pected nurslings: piles of honey, loaves of pollen, stores
of preserved game, cunningly paralyzed. In such works as
these, having the future of the family for their exclusive
object, the highest manifestations of the instinct are dis-
played under the impulse of maternity.

Fabre convinces himself and his reader that the
insects do not reason, yet he reveals in them some-
130

THE INSECT MIND"

thing like superhuman knowledge. We have no
name for it but instinct, — untaught wisdom, — but
in some cases it is so far beyond anything that man
attains to, except after long research and experi-
mentation, that we marvel at it as we would at the
supernatural. The knowledge that the hunting
wasps possess that the spiders and crickets and
beetles which they bring and store up for their
young, as yet unhatched, must be paralyzed but
not killed, —their animal life, as Fabre calls it,
destroyed, but their vegetative life left intact, —
how far it transcends anything we know until we
call to our aid all the resources of experimental
science!

Fabre shows us one species of wasp striking un-
erringly at the one minute vulnerable point in the
breastplate of its prey, a species of beetle. It seems
to possess an anatomist’s knowledge of the struc-
ture of its game, and of the physiological function
of its nerve ganglia. With one species of beetle it
knows that one thrust of the sting is sufficient; with
a species of cricket whose main. nerve-centres are
three and are more widely distributed, it knows that
three stabs are required, and it knows precisely
where to administer them. How marvelous it all is!
The divinity that so carefully fitted a coat of mail
to the beetle left one vulnerable point, and then
betrayed the secret to its deadly enemy, the wasp.

Fabre has seen the wasp seize the beetle, press

131

FIELD AND STUDY

“her forefeet violently upon the beetle’s back, as
if to force open some ventral joint,” then curve her
body around under the insect’s belly and thrust
her sting into a minute opening between its first
and second pair of legs!

O strange and baffling Nature! Truly thy ways
are not as our ways. But Nature keeps the game
of life going, which seems her main purpose, making
it as various and picturesque as possible. She di-
vides her favors pretty equally, but not quite; she
leaves enough difference up or down to keep the
currents going. She is just as much interested in the
weevil as in the wasp, and though she has armed
the wasp to slay the weevil, she has made the weevil
more prolific, and given it life on easier terms. The
hunted usually has life on easier terms than the
hunter — a wider choice of food and of territory, and
other compensations. It is rarely that a rat or a chip-
munk or a rabbit can escape the weasel when the
latter gets on its trail, and yet there are hundreds
of rats and chipmunks and rabbits to one weasel.
Some unknown factor operates to keep the latter
in check.

Qur prudence, our economy, our selection, our
short cuts, find no parallel in Nature’s works; and
for the reason that her special ends are all inside of
general or universal ends: so careless of the indi-
vidual, as Tennyson says, and so careful of the type.
Behold how Nature equips one animal to prey upon

132

THE INSECT MIND

another, and then equips that other to escape its
enemy. The rabbit has no defense but its speed and
its sleepless eyes, yet these suffice. The animals that
are the prey of the stealthy cat tribe are almost pre-
ternaturally alert and keen of eye and scent.
Nature has told them who is shadowing them.

The intelligence of Nature outside of man con-
sists largely in adapting a means to an end, and the
end is foreshadowed in the organization. Propose to
an animal a new end, not in line with its instinctive
activities, and it is helpless. This is markedly true
in the insect world; their activities are like the
activity of your watch, which ticks off the hours
in orderly sequence, but which cannot tick oH one
second in the opposite direction..

“To know everything and to know nothing,”
says Fabre, “according as it acts under normal or
exceptional conditions: that is the strange antith-
esis presented by the insect race,” and he might
have added, “by nearly all the lower orders of
animal life.” Inside the field of their instinctive
activities their wisdom is truly astonishing; out-
side that field their ignorance and stupidity are
equally astonishing. An animal must know certain
things in order to survive and perpetuate itself, or
rather we should say, it must perform certain acts
in order to survive — whether or-not it knows what
it is doing, as we know, is a question.

The wasp that is such a skilled surgeon hauls its

133

FIELD AND STUDY

prey to its den by laying hold of some appendage of
the head, as the antenne or the palpi. Remove these
after the wasp has brought its game to its door,
and the little automaton is powerless to complete
its job. It could just as easily haul its beetle in the
hole by the leg or the ovipositor, — that is, back-
wards, instead of head first, — but this it has never
done; it is not so written in the tablet of its mind;
the game must go in head foremost. In such a pre-
dicament the wasp hesitates, washes its face and
eyes, seems to reflect a moment, then tries to seize
the game by the head, but her mandibles slip off
the polished skull, and she finally abandons the
task as hopeless and goes away in quest of a new
victim.

Fabre interrupted this same species of wasp when
it had stored its game in its hole and was stopping
up the entrance and preparing to leave it forever.
He opened the hole with his penknife and removed
the beetle while the wasp stood looking on. When he
had finished, the wasp reéntered her den, inspected
it carefully, as in the first instance, and then pro-
ceeded to close it up as before, with great care and
deliberation. That her game, and the egg she had
laid upon it were gone, made no difference; she must
follow out the programme, one act must follow
another in its proper order.

The wasp always explores her hole the last thing
before hauling in her game, and if you interrupt the

134

THE INSECT MIND

order of her activities she will do this over and over;
she cannot omit one of the links in the fatal chain
that binds her deeds together, nor change their
order.

A wasp, so clever in all her natural ways, is fool-
ish when these ways are interfered with. She makes
a, burrow in the soil several inches long, the entrance
to which is always hidden by the sliding down
of the sand in which the tunnel is made. She
finds this entrance unerringly when Fabre himself
cannot detect the slightest clue as to its exact
whereabouts. But unless she can enter this tunnel
at the regular door, she does not know it from any
other hole in the ground, and, stranger still, she
does not know her own grub asleep at the end of it;
she runs over it or pushes it about, looking for the
entrance that should guide her to it. The wasp
knows her young only as the end of a series of acts
that must follow one another in a regular order.
And then she does not know it in our human sense:
she is a stranger in her own house if you admit her
through an opening you have made instead of
through the door which she made.

The intelligence of the insect is the intelligence
of Nature — it is action and not reflection. Nature
lives and grows, and does not pause to cogitate and
ask the reason why, as we do. Her works are a per-
petual revelation. Fabre can give good and suffi-
cient reasons for every procedure of his insects, but

135

FIELD AND STUDY

he knows full well that the insect does the deed
without thought or previous experience.

The Sphex wasp seems to know that the cricket
upon which it preys has three nerve-centres that
control its main movements, and hence requires
three stings in three different parts of its body to
produce complete paralysis, while another species
of wasp, the Cerceris, knows her beetle has only one
nerve-centre, and hence she stings it but once.

The wasp called the Ammophila sometimes
pinches and bruises the brain of the grub she has
stung and is carrying to her nest, in order to in-
crease its torpor, but Fabre says she knows just
where to stop; she “knows quite.well that to inflict
a mortal wound on the cervical ganglia would mean
killing the caterpillar then and there, the very thing
to be avoided.” Of course, the wasp knows nothing
about nerve-ganglia and their functions. This is the
untaught wisdom of her race, of which she is the
unwitting instrument. It is an ancestral knowledge
which Nature infused into her organism before she
was born.

The Sphex wasp needs at times to paralyze the
mouth-parts of the game she is carrying to her den,
so that it cannot impede her progress by seizing
upon blades of grass by the way, and also that she
may lessen the danger of the beetle’s seizing and
wounding her with its mandibles; and, like a trained
surgeon, she knows the precise spot in the beetle’s

136

THE INSECT MIND

head in which to insert her sting to produce the
desired effect. Truly such science as this cannot be
found outside the insect world.

Fabre says that bees have a topographical mem-
ory that grasps the map of the country, but not the
beloved nest, the home itself. The bee will find the
locality of its nest from the verge of the horizon,
yet when the nest itself is laid open, she does not
recognize it; she can find the entrance door unerr-
ingly, and that is enough for her. Exchange the
nest of the mason bee for that of another of the
same species, and she does not know the difference.
If the cell she was working on is half-finished, and
you place a completed one, filled with honey, in its
place, the bee goes on with her masonry on the filled
cell just the same; or, if you reverse this process,
and put a half-finished cell in the place of the fin-
ished one, she goes forward with her honey-storing
in the incomplete cell. She cannot stop her masonry,
or her honey-gathering, till her machinery, wound
up for that special purpose, has:run down. In one
instance Fabre punched a hole in the bottom of a
cell the bee was filling, so that the honey ran out as
fast as she put it in. The bee seemed a little sur-
prised at the behavior of the thing, hesitated a little,
and then went on with her work, and in due course
sealed up the cell, empty though it was, as the pro-
gramme demanded,

Fabre thinks, and apparently proves, that the

137

FIELD AND STUDY

female wasp can at will determine the sex of her
egg at the instant of laying. Here again we see her
superhuman knowledge. She can begin with eggs
that will produce males or females, just as she
chooses, and since she cannot change the order of
their succession in her ovaries, she must determine
their sex by the power of her will at the time of lay-
ing. Since the females require more space and more
food than the males, the mother must know the sex
of the egg which she is going to lay while in the act
of laying it.

The hive bee can change the sex of the egg —
turn a worker bee into a queen bee — by changing
the size and position of the cell, and changing the
food in quantity and in kind. Something like this
may take place in the case of the wasp referred to.

Insects of all kinds possess the knowledge and
skill that it is necessary for them to have. Thus
“the leaf-roller requires for her young a leaf ren-
dered flexible ad hoc, half-alive, paralyzed in a
fashion, a leaf that can be easily shaped into a
scroll,’ and she knows just what to do to attain
this end, as well as the wasp knows how to paralyze
her cricket or spider — she inserts her drill into the
petiole of the leaf, there and nowhere else, and thus
without much trouble she affects the resin of the
aqueduct.

Different species of insects at times display the
most amazing ignorance in regard to their natural

138

THE INSECT MIND

enemies. None of them, save our hive bee, seems to
know the parasites that destroy their brood; ap-
parently they make them welcome in their homes,
thus acting the part of Nature, who is just as much
interested in the success of the parasite as in that
of the host. The Halictus moth seals up the cell in
which her brood has been destroyed as carefully
as she does the others, when she'is only sealing up
emptiness. The spider is wise when all insects are
wise, and stupid when all insects are stupid. She
has eight gleaming eyes, but they do not serve her
to tell her own ball of eggs from that of another of
different shape and structure. She will accept a ball
of cork in lieu of her own, embrace it lovingly,
fondle it with her palpi, fasten it to her spinnerets,
and drag it away. Between her own ball and one of
cork placed side by side on the floor she apparently
has no choice, and will take the one she reaches first.
From amid four or five cork balls she rarely selects
her own, but snaps up a ball at random. A ball she
must have; it is so written in the bond; but as to
which one, what matters it?

“The insects,” Fabre says, “‘have a calendar of
their own. At a given hour suddenly they awaken,
as suddenly afterwards they fall asleep. The in-
genious becomes incompetent when the prescribed
hour is ended.”

IX
A CLEVER BEASTIE

NEVER seem to tire of writing and talking

about the chipmunk. He is a friend of my boy-
hood. When I saw one last winter down in Georgia,
I felt as if we were exiles together, but he was prob-
ably much more at home in that fenceless country
than I was.

The chipmunk is undoubtedly the best-beloved
of all our lesser rodents, and more persons probably
have friendly intimacies with him than with any
other of our four-footed wild creatures. He is such a
pretty little animal, so bright, so: alert, so clean and
well-groomed, not a hair missing or out of place;
and the penciled lines on his back are so distinct and
pleasing — seven lines, two pairs of three each, one
light and two dark, on either side, with a dark line
between them running down the middle of the back.
None other of our little rodents has such a pretty
coat or such pretty ways, and no other is so harm-
less about our homes and farms.

During my youth in the Catskills, when there
were at least ten chipmunks where there is only one
now, he was usually pretty hard put to it for food
in May and early June, and was at times guilty of
digging up the newly planted corn. When the sprouts

140

A CLEVER BEASTIE '

were an inch or so high, he would occasionally raid
the rows of corn near the stone walls. With the de-
predations of the crows in the middle of the field
and of the chipmunks along the borders, some sea-
sons the corn suffered badly.

Many a time when I was a boy of ten or twelve
my father armed me with an old flintlock musket
and sent me forth to “shoot the chipmunks round
the corn.’’ Sometimes the old gun would be loaded
with hard peas or small gravel-stones, and at only
six or seven yards’ range the head of the poor chip-
munk peering from the wall was pretty sure to re-
ceive a fatal wound. I do not remember that I then
had any pity for him. In fact, I think I rather en-
joyed the sport of hunting him. That is the boy
of it. Needless to say, I could not do such a thing
now. .

Last summer the rats raided my garden and de-
stroyed scores of the ears of my Golden Bantam
corn, They would climb up the stalks at night and
strip off the husks like raccoons, and leave only the
cobs. I set traps in their runways baited with corn,
and caught a dozen or more of them; but one after-
noon, to my dismay, I found two chipmunks in the
traps. The mishap pained me so that I took the
traps away and let the rats have full swing. The
chipmunks had been lured by the corn that I had
scattered over the ground and placed on and under
the pans of the traps.

141

FIELD AND STUDY

The chipmunk is a ground-dweller and a worker
in soils, but no tree-dweller is more bright and tidy.
His tail is as clean and perfect as if it had never been
whisked in and out of a hole in the ground times
without number. He carries it so deftly and grace-
fully when he makes a dive for his hole that appar-
ently not a hair of it ever comes in contact with the
soil. You are not surprised to see his face so clean,
because he is washing it on all occasions. His sani-
tary regulations in his den also seem to be wisely
looked after. He stores up nothing that would fer-
ment or mildew — only dry-cured food. He will eat
the green corn that you give him and add the dry
kernels to his winter stores.

At my summer home in the Catskills, called
Woodchuck Lodge, I cultivate friendship with the
chipmunks, but rather frown upon the red squirrels,
which are much more aggressive and destructive
about the orchards and farm buildings. Besides,
they are so impish and defiant that they do not win
your heart as do the chipmunks.

The red squirrels and the gray come and go, but
the gentle chipmunk we always. have with us. He
loves the open country, where the stone fences give
him lines of communication. He has a curious habit,
when he sees or hears a wagon or car coming, of
suddenly running across the road‘in front of it. I can
offer no explanation of this behavior unless it be
that the apparent hazard of such a dash affords him

142

A CLEVER BEASTIE

a little excitement that he relishes. I find more of
their dens along highways than anywhere else.

The chipmunk is one of the most provident of
our wild creatures, Neither the red nor the gray
squirrel regularly stores up a winter supply of food,
although at times the red seems to do so in a tenta-
tive, uncertain kind of way, but not with the unmis-
takable provident purpose of the chipmunk when
it stores up food. You will see both of them in the
fall carrying nuts from the trees and hiding them
here and there under the leaves and grass, but it is
doubtful whether they ever seek them again for
food. What they are really doing is unwittingly
planting oak and chestnut and hickory trees.
Nature seems to utilize their love of nuts for her
own purpose, as she does that of the crows and
jays.

But the chipmunk is rarely a tree-planter. He is
absorbed in his own economies. He has two capa-
cious cheek pockets that are invaluable to him, and
those pockets have a power that ordinary pockets
do not possess — the power of deglutition, and also
the power to reverse the process. The pockets liter-
ally swallow the grains and nuts and as literally dis-
gorge them. An acorn or other nut too large for his
pockets the chipmunk carries in his teeth.

Early in the season, or as soon as he can find any
ripened seeds, the chipmunk begins to provide for
his winter needs. In my morning walks I usually

143

FIELD AND STUDY

take a few handfuls of mixed grain in my pocket and
distribute it here and there along the stone walls
near where I know my little friends have their homes.
They soon “catch on,” as the boys say, and the
sight of me raises expectations among them. After a
little time they allow me to come within a few yards
of them, showing only an unusual eagerness and
curiosity. Then as I move on they quickly gather
up the wheat and corn and carry it to their dens.

The recipients of my bounty seemed to excite
the jealousy of the chipmunks that lived farther
away, or off the line of my walks. I had often won-
dered whether animals of the same kind ever plun-
dered one another’s stores. I had believed that they
did not, but last fall, under the unequal conditions
that I established by my limited bounty, I discov-
ered that they did. On three occasions I saw chip-
munks raiding their neighbors’ stores. From the
relative size of the robbed and the robber in two
cases that I observed, I got the impression that the
male was the robber in one case-and the female in
the other.

For two years a chipmunk has had a den by the
roadside near the stone wall in front of my house,
and many a handful of wheat and buckwheat and
Indian corn have I placed upon the wall for her, if
it is a “her.” In July she began to make long trips
up and down the stone wall, returning to her den
with full pockets, so that by mid-October I con-

144

A CLEVER BEASTIE

cluded that with her own harvests and the additions
from my granary her stores were considerable.

One morning I happened to. see a chipmunk,
larger and a little lighter-colored than my neighbor
across the way, come down out of the orchard, cross
the road to the wall, and quickly work his way
down to her den, which he boldly entered. I had
just seen the rightful owner go off down the wall the
other way, but in a moment she came back and
entered her hole.

“Now there will be trouble,” I said to myself.

In a few seconds there was a yellow streak out of
the hole, and two chipmunks were spinning along
the wall at their best speed, the larger one keeping
about a yard ahead. I could see that the leader had
something in one cheek pocket. It is curious that on
such occasions, among both birds and animals, the
thief, no matter if he is the larger and stronger, will
always flee. A guilty conscience seems to make
cowards of all creatures, and a sense of right em-
boldens the weakest.

My plucky little neighbor pursued the intruder
until I lost them from sight. That she compelled
him to disgorge I can hardly believe. When she
returned, five or six minutes later; she fell to eating
the kernels of green corn that I had placed upon the
wall in front of her den.

A quarter of an hour later I saw the thief coming
cautiously along the wall, as if bent on making

145

FIELD AND STUDY

another raid. He paused every:few yards to see
whether the coast was clear. My little unsuspecting
friend, enjoying the sweet corn, was completely hid-
den from him behind a big stone on the top of the
wall. The robber came near and.slanted his course
down the side of the wall to the ground near the hole.
From this point he must have seen the owner of the
den, for he turned hurriedly back up the wall and
disappeared.

Some time later I saw him coming back along the
wall again. His approach was very cautious and
hesitating, just as yours or mine would be if we
were bent on such an errand. He skulked along
the side of the wall; he paused behind stones; he
peered toward the den — every act betrayed guilt
and trepidation. I had seen his intended victim enter
her den, but he had not, and I could see that he was
in a quandary as to whether or not she was at home.

As he neared the den, he got: off the wall some
yards away, and came cautiously along in the grass,
pausing and watching. Finally he reached the hole,
and hesitated there for some seconds. Three times
he raised his head and glanced round; then he dis-
appeared.

“He is in,” I said, but had barely said it when out
shot the yellow streak again and went coursing up
the stone fence as before. It was nip and tuck, but
the robber kept ahead. My neighbor was gone so
long this time that I began to fear she had come to

146

A CLEVER BEASTIE

grief; but at last she came scurrying back. Whether
or not her little earth castle was ever assaulted again
by the brigand from the bush I do not know.

On both sides of my camp in the orchard, and not
more than fifty feet apart, two chipmunks had their
dens, and here I chanced to see one of them rifling
the stores of the other. This time I got the impres-
sion from the slight difference in size that the robber
was a female, but I am not certain. I had fed both
of them freely, but the female was the tamer and
gentler. She learned to come into my bush tent and
to pick up the grain at my feet, and finally to take
it from my hand. In going home with her ill-gotten
gains from her neighbor’s stores, she did not trust
herself on the ground, but took a course through the
apple-trees and across the canvas roof of my camp,
and into her den that way.

On one occasion I saw a chipmunk waylay her in
one of the apple-trees and make a savage drive at
her, but whether or not it was the owner of the
stores she was pilfering, I do not know. Chipmunks
all look so near alike that it is not always easy to
tell who’s who in that community.

In a den that a chipmunk excavated one Sep-
tember in a bank by the roadside I witnessed an-
other case of house-breaking. I saw a chipmunk
enter the hole when I knew the owner was at home.
I bent my ear above the ground for a moment to
take in, if I could, what was said: I soon heard an

147

FIELD AND STUDY

angry altercation there under the sod — tones of
complaint, but not of pain. Presently a head popped
up, evidently urged from behind, but it dropped
back on seeing me so near. Then it hastily appeared
again, and as I withdrew a few paces, the chipmunk
shot out and fled.

This nest was very artfully excavated. Instead of
the pile of freshly dug earth that usually attracts
the eye where a chipmunk has recently been at
work, there was only a little curtain of earth on the
side of the bank, strung along four or five feet with
a roll of grass and moss above it, and fading off into
the soil of the bank that the road-menders had ex-
posed. Only the eye of a passer-by looking for such
signs would have noticed it. It was as if the squirrel
had had a little tramway a few feet long at the top
of the bank under the roll of moss and turf, and had
dumped his newly dug earth from that and let it
stream down the bank until it found the angle of
repose. The entrance was a clean-cut hole hidden
in the grass on the top of the bank.

When one chipmunk receives favors in the way
of extra food, all his neighbors seem to find it out,
and, I suspect, make an effort to equalize things a
little. One season I tried to find out whether a chip-
munk’s provident instinct would get the better of
his prudence and lead him to add to his stores until
he had no room left in his den for himself. I supplied
a greedy fellow with about a peck of hickory-nuts,

148

A CLEVER BEASTIE

chestnuts, corn, cherry-pits, and peach-pits, and I
saw him carry every nut and kernel of grain into
his den.

How hurriedly and exultantly he worked, as if
he had feared that this great windfall might be all
a dream, or that his neighbors might want to share
it!

Well, I am compelled to believe that his neighbors
did share it, but just how and when I do not know.
I saw the nuts go into the den,a plump peck of
them, and I marveled at that den’s capacity. I had
dug out two chipmunks in their winter retreats,
and neither den was large enough to hold much
more than four quarts and leave breathing-room for
the occupant and space for his nest.

It is true that in excavating his retreat the chip-
munk had brought to the surface a bushel of earth.
I had measured it; but probably more than half of
this amount had come from the three tunnels five
or six feet long that led out from the central cham-
ber. The chipmunk in the Catskills goes down just
below the frost line, — in the open fields a little more
than three feet, — but his tunnels are very crooked.
If any fresh earth had appeared at the surface I
should have thought that my little fellow worked
nights enlarging his quarters to meet the sudden
and extraordinary supply of food; but no soil ap-
peared.

It is certain that one chipmunk for once in his life

149

FIELD AND STUDY

had his fill. At the last he began to hesitate, and to
hide some of the hickory-nuts here and there in the
grass. I was tempted to dig into his chamber at
once, but it seemed such a pity to bring rack and
ruin on his house just on the threshold of winter
that I deferred my investigation until spring. Then
I breached his walls, and to my amazement I found
the usual small vault such as I had found before,
and only a few empty shells of hickory-nuts and
chestnuts — not a double handful in all. It seemed
as if my fall observations must have been a midday
dream. It was all incredible.

The owner was not at home when I forced his
dwelling, but he had evidently passed the winter
there. But where did he store all those nuts and
what had become of them? His neighbors must
have decided to share them with him.

A couple of feet from the old entrance I found a
new one. In all cases of dens that I have had under
observation during the fall, I have noticed that
new entrance the next spring. They are all made
from beneath. What becomes of the soil that the
chipmunk must remove in making the new hole is
one of the mysteries I have not yet cleared up.
There is no sign of it at the surface.

The other question that long puzzled me — the
holes that had no pile of earth, old or new —I
think I have solved: they are the entrances to old
dens that have had their pile of fresh earth near by,

150

A CLEVER BEASTIE

which time and the elements have obliterated. But
what has become of the excavated earth of the new
spring entrances, which in some cases must be from
a tunnel eight or ten feet long, is still a mystery.

If my reader can surprise a chipmunk digging his
hole, as I did last September, he will be very lucky.
No doubt he has found along the road or on the
borders of the woods a fresh pile of earth, usually
about a bushel of it, with a clean-cut hole down
through the turf near it, and with not a grain of soil,
or any sign of a path between the pile of earth and
the hole. If he investigated, he may, in some cases,
have found in the pile of soil one or more earth-
stained stones that he could not put back into the
hole out of which they appeared to have come.
There is no deception or sleight-of-hand about it —
those stones actually came out of the ground with
that pile of earth. But the hole out of which they
came is plugged up and covered up by the pile of
earth and is no longer used. They did not come out
of the obscure hole which is now the only entrance
to the den.

».«
PHASES OF ANIMAL LIFE

\ 7O doubt there are tides in the affairs of our

N wild neighbors no Jess than in the affairs of
men — vicissitudes of fortune that affect not merely
individuals, but whole tribes and races. I noticed
the past season in widely different parts of the
country that the goldfinches did not breed as freely
as they usually do. Not one nest could I find in the
orchards or bushy fields of the home farm, where,
the season before, I had found half a dozen. What
was the matter? The old birds were there, and the
thistles bloomed as usual, but no nests could be
found, and only two or three young birds were seen
in August and September, where I used to see and
hear scores of them. What caused the ebb in the tide
of goldfinch life? Some other season may bring the
flood, as it has in the case of our pretty little rodent
the chipmunk. For twenty years or more the chip-
munks have been slowly disappearing from all
parts of the country with which I am familiar;
hardly one of late years where there used to be ten
when I was a boy. But suddenly last year they hbe-
gan to be noticeable, and the present season they
are here in something like their old-time numbers. I
hear of them from different parts.of the State — the

152

PHASES OF ANTIALAL LIFE

result of migration. I was at first inclined to think,
till John Lewis Childs told me they had become
suddenly numerous on Long Island. This fact seems
to exclude the idea of migration from some other
part of the country. Some parasite, some plague —
ehipmunk smallpox, or cholera — may have kept
their numbers down for years, when suddenly the
enemy vanishes and the race recovers its lost
ground.

These vicissitudes. these ebbs and flows. probably
Tun all through the life of nature about us and we
observe them not. I know an ash-tree by the road-
side that year after year, early in the season. lost
part of its foliage by some form of leaf-blight. Surely,
I thought, that tree is doomed; then there came a
season when the blicht did not appear, and it has
not appeared since. A few years ago the elm-beetle
threatened to destroy all our elms here on the Hud-
son; then it met with a check and seems now to have
gone out entirely. A species of forest-worm denuded
the sugar maples in large sections of Delaware
County, and spread like fire from one wood to
another, and grew more and more devastating; then
a parasite, a species of ichneumon-fly, took a hand
in the game, and in one season the tide ebbed and
has never returned.

A year or two later another species of forest-worm
appeared in the same section of the country and
stripped the beeches; in midsummer the woods were

1538

FIELD AND STUDY

full of white moths for two seasons; then something
happened and these worms have-not returned.

Occasionally a favorable combination of weather
and seasonal conditions fills some parts of the coun-
try with a plague of grasshoppers, and the farmers
tremble for their next season’s crops, but the next
season may prove quite grasshopperless.

The tide in the affairs of some of our fruit and
tree pests, such as the gypsy and brown-tailed
moths and the San José scale, seems yet at its full,
but no doubt the ebb will come before the case is
hopeless.

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, everywhere in the
life of nature. When I lived upon the Potomac forty
years ago, the grass bunting, or. dickcissel, was a
common bird in the fields. Some years later these
birds began slowly to disappear, and now that part
of the country is said to be destitute of them, while
they are common farther south in Kentucky and
Tennessee. What caused the disappearance or mi-
gration of these birds, who knows?

Of late years the prairie horned lark has appeared
upon my native hills in the Catskills, where, in my
youth, they were never seen. Such game-birds as
the quail ebb and flow in New York and New Eng-
land, according as the winters are mild or severe.
Not many years ago a series of mild winters gave
the quail a great lift in the Hudson River Valley,
where I live. The call of Bob White lent a new charm

154

PHASES OF ANTAL LIFE

to the spring fields. Then came two or three very se-
vere winters and the cheery call of the quail is heard
in our fields no more. The same severe winters cut
off the race of possums, which had multiplied in our
country till they were as common as rabbits. A few
years ago there was a fearful ebb in the life of the
tuffed grouse, all over the country from Maine to
Mfinnesota. More than fifty per cent of the birds
vanished in a single season. The cause of it has not
yet been cleared up. Now the birds are slowly re-
appearing.

The natural balance of life in any field cannot
long be disturbed. Though Nature at times seems
to permit excesses, yet she sooner or later corrects
them and restores the balance. The life of the
globe could never have attained its present develop-
ment on any other plane. A certain peace and har-
mony have come out of the perpetual struggle and
warfare of opposing tendencies and forces.

The waters of the globe all tend to seek the same
level, but this equilibrium is constantly broken by
the solar forces, so that the currents flow perpetu-
ally. When one force pulls down, another force
builds up.

The weasel is the most fierce and bloodthirsty of
all our smaller mammals; mice and rats, squirrels
and rabbits, and birds vanish before him, yet he
does not overrun our fields and woods; he is quite
a rare beast; some unknown enemy or condition

155

FIELD AND STUDY

keeps him in check. The defenseless rabbit, upon
which so many creatures prey, easily holds its own
because it is so very prolific. It also has another
advantage; it can and does sleep. with its eyes open.
The flying squirrel would seem to have a great
advantage over the chipmunk, yet it is far less
numerous in our woods; it pays for its wings in some
way; it is probably less handy and _ resourceful.
Few animals will molest the skunk, yet the world
is not filled with skunks; where they are found side
by side, the woodchuck, which has many more nat-
ural enemies, is far more abundant, not because it
is more prolific, which does not seem to be the case,
but because, among other things, its food-supply is
simpler and more universal. The limitation of the
natural food-supply is, of course, the great factor
in the limitation of animal life everywhere. If our
spring is late and cold, the robins nest later, and
have smaller broods than during a warm, early
spring.

The gray squirrel is far less numerous in my
locality than the red because, in my opinion, he is
far less resourceful; he is not the same miscella-
neous feeder, and hence is much more restricted
in his range. The red squirrel, when hard put to it,
will come to your very door and chip up green ap-
ples and pears for the meagre supply of seed in
them. In May and June, when other supplies fail,
he helps himself out with birds’ eggs and with young

156

PHASES OF ANIMAL LIFE

birds, and in the colder seasons he raids the gran-
aries of the wild mice and the dens of the chip-
munks, He is a hustler and a freebooter at all times.
His natural enemies are black snakes, weasels,
hawks, owls, and cats, yet his tribe seems to be
increasing.

Man, of course, disturbs the balance of Nature
wherever he goes. Some forms of life disappear
before him, while others thrive and increase in his
footsteps. He adds greatly to the food-supply of
some species, while he cuts off that of others. Most
of the field animals partake of his bounty, but the
forest animals vanish before him. That any species
has actually become extinct through his instru-
mentality, unless it be that of the passenger pigeon,
may well be doubted, though he hastened the extinc-
tion of the great auk, and, maybe, the Labrador
duck. The buffalo would have become extinct under
his ruthless slaughter, had he not stayed his hand
in time. Whole tribes and races of animals, some of
them fearfully and wonderfully made, became ex-
tinct in geologic time, long before man could have
played any part in hastening their doom. A change
in their environment, through slow crustal move-
ments of the earth, or through ‘change of climate
that affected their food-supply, probably rendered
them unfit to survive.

XI
EACH AFTER ITS KIND

OW sharply most forms of life are differenti-
ated! The die that stamps each of them is
deeply and clearly cut. As I sit here in my bush
camp under the apple-trees, I see a chipmunk spin-
ning up the stone wall a few yards away. His alert
eye spies me, and he pauses, sits up a few moments,
washes his face with that hurried movement of his
paws over it, then hesitates, turns, and goes spin-
ning back down the stone fence: He seems to sniff
danger in me. He is living his life, he has a distinct
sphere of activity; in this broad, rolling landscape
he is a little jet of vital energy that has a character
and a purpose of its own; it is unlike any other. How
unlike the woodchuck in the next field, creeping
about the meadow, storing up his winter fuel as fat
in his own flabby body, or the woodpecker on the
apple-tree, or the noisy crow flying by overhead!
Each is a manifestation of the psychic principle in
organic nature, but each is an individual expression
of it. The chemistry and the physics of their lives
are the same, but how different the impressions
they severally make upon us! Life is infinitely vari-
ous in its forms and activities, though living things
all be made of one stuff.
158

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

Soon after the chipmunk there appears a red
squirrel going down the wall — half-brother to the
chipmunk but keyed to a much higher degree of
intensity. He moves in spasms and sallies and is
frisky and impish, where the chipmunk is sedate
and timid. His arboreal life requires different qual-
ities and powers; he rushes through the tree-tops
like a rocket; he travels on bridges of air; he is nearly
as much at home amid the branches as are the birds,
much more so than is the flying squirrel, which has
but one trick, while the red squirrel has a dozen.
That facile tail, now a cockade, now a shield, now an
air-buoy; that mocking dance, those derisive snick-
ers and explosions; those electric’ spurts and dashes
— what a character he is — the very Puck of the
woods!

Yesterday a gray squirrel came down the wall
from the mountain — a long, softly undulating line
of silver-gray; unhurried, alert, but not nervous,
pausing now and then, but striking no attitudes;
silent as a shadow and graceful as a wave — the
very spirit of the tall, lichen-covered birches and
beeches of the mountain-side. When food is scarce
in the woods he comes to the orchards and fields for
insects and wild fruit, and any chance bit of food
he can pick up. What a contrast he makes to the
pampered town squirrel, gross in form and heavy
in movement! The town squirrel is the real rustic,
while the denizen of the woods has the grace and

159

FIELD AND STUDY

refinement. Domestication, or semi-domestication,
coarsens and vulgarizes the wild creatures; only in
the freedom, of their native haunts do they keep
the beauty and delicacy of form and color that
belong to them.

A nuthatch comes upon the apple-tree in front of
me, uttering now and then his soft nasal call, and
rups up and down and round the trunk and
branches, his boat-shaped body navigating the
rough surfaces and barely touching them. Every
moment or two he stops and turns his head straight
out from the tree as if he had an extra joint in his
neck. Is he on the lookout for danger? He pecks a
little now and then, but most of the food he is in
quest of seems on the surface and is very minute.
A downy woodpecker comes upon the same tree.
His movements are not so free as those of the nut-
hatch. He does not go head foremost down the tree;
his head is always pointed upward. He braces and
steadies himself with his tail, which has stiff spines
at the ends of the quills. By a curious gymnastic
feat he drops down the trunk inch by inch, loosing
his hold for a moment and instantly recovering it.
He cannot point his beak out at right angles to the
tree as can the nuthatch. In fact, he is not a tree-
creeper, but a wood-pecker, and can penetrate fairly.
hard wood with his beak. His voice has a harsh, -
metallic ring compared with that of the soft, child-
like call of the nuthatch. His only contribution to

160

EACH AFTER ITs KIND

the music of the spring is his dry-limb drum with
which he seeks to attract his mate when the love
passion is upon him.

_ Oh, these wild creatures! How clear-cut, how
individual, how definite they are! While every
individual of a species seems stamped with the
same die. the species themselves. even in closely
allied croups. are as distinct and various in their
Iimeamenis and characteristics as we can well
conceive. Behold the order of rodents. including
the squirrels, the hares, the rabbits. the wood-
chucxs. the prairiecogs. the rats and mice, the
porcupines. the beavers — what diversity amid the
unity. what unlikeness amid the sameness! It makes
one marvel anew at the ingenuity and inventive-
ness of Nature — some living above ground, some
below. some depending upon deetess of foot and
keenness of eye for safety, some upon dens and
burrows always near at hand; the porcupine upon
an armor of barbed quills, the beaver upon his
dam and his sharpress of sense. If they all de
scezded from the same criginal typeform, how
that form has branched like a tree in the fields —
dividing and dividing and dividing again! But the
likeness to the tree fails when we consider that no
two branches are alike; in fact, that they are as
woke as pears and peaches and apples and berries
and cherries would be cn the same tree — all of the
same farily, but diverging widely in the species.

161

FIELD AND STUDY

The ground-dwellers, such as woodchucks and
prairie-dogs and gophers, have many similar habits,
as have the tree-dwellers and the hares and rabbits.
That any of these rodent groups will branch again
and develop a new species is in harmony with the
doctrine of evolution. But these evolutionary proc-
esses are so slow that probably the whole span of
human history would be inadequate to measure one
of them.

Nearly all the animal forms that we know are
specialized forms, like our tools and implements —
shaped for some particular line of activity. Man is
the most generalized of animals; his organization
opens to him many fields of activity. The wood-
pecker must peck for his food, the kingfisher must
dive, the flycatcher must swoop, the hawk must
strike, the squirrel must gnaw, the cat must spring,
the woodcock must probe, the barnyard fowls must
scratch, and so on, but man is not thus limited. His
hands are tools that can be turned to a thousand
uses. They are for love or war, to caress or to smite,
to climb or to swim, to hurl or to seize, to delve or
to build.

The organization of most animals has special
reference to their mode of getting a living. That is
the dominant need, and stamps itself upon every
organism.

Man is a miscellaneous feeder and a world-wide
traveler, hence all climes and conditions are his.

162

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

He is at home in the arctics or the tropics, on the
sea, on the land, and in the air; a fruit-eater, a
grain-eater, a flesh-eater, a nut-eater, an herb-
eater; his generalized anatomy and his diversified
mentality make the whole earth his dwelling-place,
and all its thousands of treasure-houses are made
available for his needs.

What diversity in unity among the hawks! Con-
trast these two familiar species which are nearly of
a size—the marsh hawk and the hen, or red-tailed,
hawk. The marsh hawk has the longer tail, and
the back of the male is bluish-gray. We see it in
summer beating up and down, low over the fields
and meadows, its attention fixed upon the ground
beneath it. At the same time we may see the hen-
hawk soaring aloft, sweeping leisurely around in
great circles, or climbing higher in easy spirals, ap-
parently abandoning itself to the joy of its aerial
freedom. The hen-hawk is a bird of leisure in con-
trast with its brother of the marshes. We rarely see
it hunting; it is either describing its great circles
against the sky, apparently in the same mood that
the skater is in who cuts his circles and figures upon
the ice; or else it sits perched like a statue high up
on some dead branch in the edge of the forest, or
on some tree by the roadside, and sees the sum-
mer hours go by. Solitude, contemplation, a sense
of freedom, seem to be its chief delight, while we
rarely see the marsh hawk except when it is intent

163

FIELD AND STUDY

upon its game. It haunts the fields and meadows
over a wide area like a spirit, up and down and
around and across it goes, only a few feet above the
ground, eyeing sharply every yard of surface be-
neath it, now and then dropping down into the
grass, never swooping or striking savagely, but
halting and alighting rather deliberately, evidently
not in pursuit of a bird, but probably attracted
by field mice. The eye follows its course with pleas-
ure; such industry, such ease of movement, such
deliberation, such a tireless quest. over the summer
fields — all contribute to make a picture which we
look upon with interest. It is usually the female
which we see on such occasions; she is larger and
darker in color than the male, and apparently upon
her falls the main support of the family. Said family
is usually composed of three or four young in a nest
upon the ground in a marsh, where it is not easy for
the pedestrian to reach. The hunting habits of the
hen-hawk are quite different. It subsists largely, not
upon hens or poultry as its name would seem to in-
dicate, but upon field mice and other small rodents,
which it swoops down upon from a point in the air
above them, where it hovers a moment on beating
wing, or from the top of some old stub or dry branch
in the meadow. Its nest is usually placed fifty or
more feet from the ground in some large forest tree,
aud is made of dry twigs and branches. I have
found but one marsh hawk’s nest, and not more
164

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

than once in twenty years do I find the nest of a
hen-hawk.

Two species of our smaller hawks present about
as sharp a contrast as do the two I have just de-
scribed — the sparrow hawk and the pigeon hawk.
It is very doubtful if the sparrow hawk ever kills
sparrows, its food being largely insects, though the
pigeon hawk is not above killing pigeons — at least
of pursuing them with murderous intent. It is the
terror of the smaller birds, capturing robins, high-
holes, bluebirds, thrushes, and almost any other
it can get its claws upon. If you see a small bird
hotly pursued by a brown hawk, the chances are
that it is the song or field sparrow making desperate
efforts to reach the cover of some bush or tree. On
such occasions I have seen the pursued bird take
refuge in a thorn-bush the branches of which had
been cropped by the cattle till they were so thick
and thorny that you could hardly insert your hand
among them. In such cases the hawk is, of course,
defeated, but he will beat about the bush spitefully
in his vain attempts to dislodge his game.

The sparrow hawk is the prettiest of our hawks,
and probably the most innocent. One midsummer
when I was a boy on the old farm we had a sudden
visitation of sparrow hawks; there must have been
at least fifty about the old meadow at one time,
alighting upon the fence-stakes or hovering on the
wing above the grass and swooping down upon the

165

FIELD AND STUDY

big, fat grasshoppers. It was a pretty sight and un-
usual, as I have witnessed it only once in my life.
Our birds often differ in their habits much more
than in their forms and colors. We have two fly-
catchers singularly alike in general appearance —
namely, the phoebe-bird and the wood pewee —
which differ widely in their habits of life. The phoebe
is the better known because she haunts our porches
and sheds and bridges, and not infrequently makes
herself a nuisance from the vermin with which her
nest, especially her midsummer nest, often swarms.
She is an early-spring bird, and her late March or
early April call, repeating over and over the name
by which she is known, is a sound that every coun-
try boy delights in. The wood pewee is a little less
in size, but in form and color and manners is almost
the duplicate of phoebe. She is a much later arrival,
and need not be looked for till the trees begin to
turn over their new leaves. Then you may hear her
tender, plaintive cry amid the forest branches —
also a repetition of her own name, but with a sylvan
cadence and tenderness peculiarly its own. It differs
from the phcebe’s note just as the leafy solitudes of
the woods differ from the strong, open light and the
fence-stakes and ridge-boards where the phcebe
loves to perch. It is the voice or cry of a lonely,
yearning spirit, attuned to great sweetness and
tenderness. The phcebe has not arrested the atten-
tion of any of our poets, but the pewee has inspired
166

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

at least one fine woodsy poem. I refer to Trow-
bridge’s “Pewee.”

The nesting-habits of the two birds differ as
widely as do their songs. The pheebe is an architect
who works with mud and moss, using the latter in
a truly artistic way, except when she is tempted, as
she so often is, to desert the shelving rocks by the
waterfalls, or along the brows of the wooded slopes,
for the painted porches of our houses or the sawed
timbers of our outbuildings, where her moss is in-
congruous and gives away the secret she so care-
fully seeks to guard. You cannot. by any sleight-of-
hand, or of' beak, use moss on a mud nest so as to
blend it with a porch or timber background. But
in the niches of the mossy and lichen-covered. over-
hanging rocks of the gorges and mountain-sides,
where her forbears practiced the art of nest-build-
ing, and where she still often sets up her “procre-
ant cradle,” what in the shape of a nest can be
more pleasing and exquisite than her moss-covered
structure? It is entirely fit. It is Nature’s own handi-
work, and thoroughly in the spirit of the shelving
rocks.

The pewee uses no mud and no moss. She uses
lichens and other wild, woodsy things, and her nest
is one of the most trim and artistic of wild-bird
structures; it is as finished and symmetrical as an
acorn-cup. It is cup-shaped, and sits upon a hori-
zontal branch of beech or maple as if it were a grown

167

' FIELD AND STUDY

part of the tree — not one loose end or superfluous
stroke about it.

Two other species of our flycatchers, the kingbird
and the great crested, differ in form and coloration
as much as they do in life-habits — the kingbird
being rather showily clad in black, gray, and white,
with a peculiar, affected, tip-wing flight, and haunt-
ing the groves and orchards, while the great crested
flycatcher is rufous or copper-colored, with a tinge
of saffron-yellow, haunting the woods and building
its nest in a cavity in a tree, occasionally in or-
chards.

Nature repeats herself with variations in two of
our sparrows — the song sparrow, and the vesper
sparrow, or grass finch. The latter is a trifle the
larger and of a lighter mottled gray-and-brown
color, and has certain field habits, such as skulking
or running in the grass and running along the high-
way in front of your team. It does not wear the
little dark-brown breastpin that’ the song sparrow
does, and it has two lateral white quills in its tail
which are conspicuous when it flies. Its general
color, and these white quills, suggest the skylark,
and it was doubtless these features that led a male
lark which once came to me from overseas, and
which I liberated in a wide field near home, to pay
court to the vesper and to press his suit day after
day, to the obvious embarrassment of the sparrow.

The song sparrow is better known than the vesper

168

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

to all country people, because it lives nearer our
dwellings. It is an asset of every country garden and
lawn and near-by roadside, and it occasionally
spends the winter in the Hudson River Valley when
you have, carelessly or thoughtfully, left a harvest
of weed-seeds for it to subsist upon. It comes before _
the vesper in the spring, and its simple song on a
bright March or April morning is one of the most -
welcome of all vernal sounds. In its manners it is
more fussy and suspicious than the vesper, and it
worries a great deal about its nest if one comes any-
where in its vicinity. It is one of the familiar, half-
domesticated birds that suggest home to us wher-
ever we see it.

The song sparrow is remarkable above any other
bird I know for its repertoire of songs. Few of our
birds have more than one song, except in those cases
when a flight song is added during the mating sea-
son, as with the oven-bird, the purple finch, the
goldfinch, the meadowlark, and a few others. But
every song sparrow has at least five distinct songs
that differ from one another as much as any five
lyrics by the same poet differ. The bird from its
perch on the bush or tree will repeat one song over
and over, usually five or six times a minute, for two
or three minutes, then it will change to another
strain quite different in time and measure, and re-
peat it for a dozen or more times; then it drops into
still another and yet another and another, each

169

FIELD AND STUDY

song standing out distinctly as a new combination
and sequence of sparrow notes. And a still greater
wonder is that no two song sparrows have the same
repertoire. Each bird has his own individual songs,
an endless and bewildering variety inside a general
resemblance. The song sparrow you hear in Maine
or Canada differs widely from the one you hear in
the Hudson River Valley or on the Potomac. Even
in the same neighborhood I have never yet heard
two sparrows whose songs were exactly alike,
whereas two robins or meadowlarks or bluebirds
or wood thrushes or vesper sparrows or goldfinches
or indigo-birds differ from one another in their songs
as little as they do in their forms and manners, and
from one end of the country to the other there is
little or no variation.

During ten days by the sea one July I was greatly
entertained by a song sparrow which had a favorite
perch on the top of a small red cedar that stood in
front of the cottage where I was staying. Four fifths
of the day at least it was perched upon this little
cedar platform, going through its repertoire of song,
over and over. Getting its living seemed entirely a
secondary matter; the primary matter was the song.
I estimated that it sang over two thousand times
each day that I heard it. It had probably been sing-
ing at the same rate since May or earlier, and would
probably keep it up till August or later. The latter
part of July and the whole of August of the same

170

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

season I spent at Woodchuck Lodge in the Catskills,
and across the road in front of the porch there, on
the top of an old plum-tree, a song sparrow sang
throughout the greater part of each summer day,
as did the one by the sea, going through its reper-
toire of five or six songs in happy iteration. It, too,
sang about three hundred times an hour, and nearly
always from the same perch, and, as most assuredly
was the case with the seaside bird, singing within
earshot of its brooding mate. But its songs bore only
the most remote general resemblance to those of its
seaside brother. When, early in August, the mowing-
machine laid low the grass in the meadow on the
edge of which the old plum-tree stood, the singer be-
haved as if some calamity had befallen him, as no
doubt there had. He disappeared from his favorite
perch, and I heard him no more except at long
intervals below the hill in another field.

_ The vesper sparrow has a wilder and more pleas-
ing song than the song sparrow, but has no variety;
so far as my ear can judge, it has only the one sweet,
plaintive strain in which it indulges while perched
upon a stone or boulder or bare knoll in a hill pas-
ture or by a remote roadside. The charm of its song
is greatly enhanced by the soft summer twilight in
which it is so often uttered; it sounds the vespers of
the fields. The vesper sparrow is invariably a ground-
builder, placing its nest of dry grass in the open
with rarely a weed or tuft of grass to mark its site.

171

FIELD AND STUDY

Hence its eggs or young often fall victims to the
sharp-eyed, all-devouring crows, as they lead their
clamorous broods about the summer pastures. The
song sparrow more frequently selects its nesting-
place in a grassy or mossy bank by the roadside or
in the orchard, when it does not leave the ground
to take to a low bush or tangle of vines on the lawn,
as it so frequently does.

We have two other sparrows that are close akin
— indeed, almost like fruit on the same tree — yet
with clear-cut differences. I refer to the ‘“‘chippie,”
or social sparrow, and the field, or, as I prefer to
call it, the bush sparrow — two birds that come so
near being duplicates of each other that in my boy-
hood I recognized only the one species, the chip-
ping sparrow, so much at home in the orchard and
around the dooryard. Few country persons, I fancy,
discriminate the two species. They are practically
of the same size and same manners, but differ in
color. The bush sparrow is more russet, has a russet
beak and feet and legs, and its general appearance
harmonizes more with country surroundings. The
two species differ in about the same way that the
town-dweller differs from his rustic brother. But in
the matter of song there is no comparison — the
strain of the bush sparrow being one of the most
tender and musical of all our sparrow songs, while
that of the “chippie,”’ or the hair-bird, as it is often
called, is a shuffling repetition of a single unmusical

172

“EACH AFTER ITS KIND

note. The wild scenes and field solitudes are reflected
in the bush sparrow’s song, while that of the chip-
pie is more suggestive of the sights and sounds
near the haunts of men. The pure, plaintive, child-
like strain of the bush sparrow — a silver scroll of
tender song — heard in the prophetic solitude of
the remote fields on a soft April or May morning is
to me one of the most touching and pleasing bits of
bird-music to be heard in the whole round year.

The swarms of small sparrows that one sees in
August and September in the vineyards and along
the bushy highways are made up mostly of bush
sparrows. There is a little doubt but that these
birds at times peck and haggle the grapes, which
“Chippie” never does. The bush sparrow builds the
more compact and substantial nest, using more dry
grass and weedy growths, and less horsehair. It is
the abundant use of hair that has given “‘Chippie”
the name of the hair-bird.

The hair-bird appears the more strikingly dressed
of the two. Its black beak and legs, the darker lines
on its plumage, the well-defined, brick-red patch
on its head easily separate it to the careful observer
from the other species. When you have learned
quickly to discriminate these two kinds of sparrows,
you have made a good beginning in conquering the
bird kingdom.

XII
THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

PUNHE greatest pleasure of life is the pleasure of

knowledge, the knowledge of what men have
thought and done in the world — their history, their
literature, their religion, their philosophy. But Iam
going to speak here of a particular kind of knowl-
edge — the knowledge that has come to us through
the discoveries and the deductions of modern sci-
ence. This is comparatively new knowledge, but it
now modifies or colors all our old conceptions of the
universe. Yet a great many educated persons feel
but a languid interest in it. Its impersonal and
strictly objective character rather repels them.
There is a widespread feeling that it kills poetry and
romance, and is the enemy of religion. Of the old
historical religions founded largely upon man’s
credulity and superstition, it surely is the enemy. It
discloses to us new ground for wonder and awe in
the presence of the universe, and gives to the moral
law a surer foundation than can be found in the
dictum of any creed or sect.

The childish conception of nature of the pre-
scientific age we are lucky to get rid of. Do we ex-
perience any sense of loss when we find out that
echo is not a nymph hiding there in the wood or in

174

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

the rocks, and that the rainbow is not painted upon
the clouds by some mysterious hand as a sign and
promise to man, and that man himself has a line of
descent that connects him with the lowest forms of
life?

Without laying claim to being in any strict sense
a man of science, I yet take great pleasure in the
world of new truths which science offers us. I graze
eagerly in every one of its fields — astronomy, geol-
ogy, botany, zodlogy, physics, chemistry, natural
history. I do little more than graze in these fields.
I select what tastes good to me. I want only the
vital nourishing truths; for the lard, mechanical
facts, the minute details, the thistles of technical
knowledge I have little appetite. I join inquiry with
contemplation. I loiter about the rocks, but I carry
no geologist’s hammer. I observe the birds, but I
take no notes. I admire the flowers, but I can leave
them on their stems; I have no herbarium to fill. I
am curious about the insects, I consider their ways,
but I make no collection.

My science is as unprofessional as my religion.
I tarry under the trees, muse by the streams, and
commune with my own soul through the living and
non-living forms that surround me. Science only
seasons my observations. If I do carry home a
flower, it is for its beauty, or its association; if I
gather a zodlogical specimen, it is because it has
more than a zodlogical interest. Exact knowledge is

175

FIELD AND STUDY

good, but vital knowledge is better; details are in-
dispensable to the specialist, but a knowledge of
relations and of wholes satisfies me more.

All the facts of natural science that throw light
upon the methods and the spirit of nature, are
doubly welcome. I can assimilate them. I can appre-
ciate their ideal values. I can link them up with my
intellectual and emotional experiences. They make
me feel more at home in the world because they so
enlarge my field of interest. The ground under-
foot becomes a history, the stars overhead a reve-
lation, the play of the invisible and unsuspected
forces about mc and through me a new kind of
gospel.

Yet I seem to approach nature through my
understanding and desire for knowledge more
than through any ethical or purely poetical craving.
There is little of the moralist or preacher in me, but
a good deal of the philosopher and investigator. I
want to know the reason of things, and the relations
of things, their intellectual rather than their moral
values. I do not want the precise figures of the
astronomer, nor the detailed proofs of the geologist,
nor the formulz of the chemist, nor the data of the
zologist; what I want is light upon the whole of
Nature — her methods, her laws, her results, her
non-human ways. What I get out of botany would
hardly be available for the classroom; what I get
out of biology would not go into‘a textbook. I love

176

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

geology because it tells me much of the past of my
own landscape; it throws light on the methods of
Nature; it gives my imagination room to work; the
ground underfoot becomes historic; it is like the
story of one’s own family written large in the val-
leys and on the mountains. The rocks that cumber
your field are couriers from the geologic ages, the
mountains were not always there, and the streams
and rivers are as fugitive as the dew. The waterfalls
at the heads of the gorges — what stories they tell
of time and erosion! And the ledges and caverns are
eloquent of ages long gone. I do not look for sermons
in stones nor for books in the running brooks, I only
look for a page, or a fragment of a page, of earth’s
history. One picks up a stone with the interest he
might feel in picking up a relic on a battle-field; con-
tending forces have fought over that ground, not
often with shout and uproar, as on human battle-
fields, but silently and with the slowness of infinite
time. Here is a flint nodule, or an angular fragment
of granite rock, or a wave-worn pebble, or a rounded
granite boulder, where no other granite is — what a
tale of time and change each of these has to tell us
if we can but read it!

I have a paper-weight on my table picked up in a
Catskill trout stream. It consists of a wave-worn
quartz pebble about the size of a butternut, em-
bedded in a hard matrix of gray sand. It is a frag-
ment from the conglomerate sandstone that caps

177

FIELD AND STUDY

the higher Catskills, a chapter of world-history
in miniature. It tells of the ancient sea-beaches of
early Devonian times, and of the breaking-up of
vast sheets of quartz rock of still earlier times. It
tells of the laying-down of the sandstone strata in
this vastly remote period, and of floods that carried
and scattered these big quartz pebbles upon it. It
tells of the lifting-up of these strata in the great
Catskill plateau, and their subsequent erosion into
deep valleys, and their grinding-down by the great
ice-sheet. When I hold it in my hand I seem to hear
the great clock of geologic time ticking off the vast
periods that are but hours in the cycle of geologic
change.

In Georgia I used to see large areas of the red soil
under the plough, covered with fragments of quartz,
suggesting bones. What a story they told of the
decay of the granite rocks out of which so much of
the soil of the State is made, setting free the streaks
of quartz in them which is so hard that the tooth of
time makes little impression upon it.

The Southern granite decays much more readily
than does the New England granite, just why I can-
not say. New England granite erodes very slowly,
but Georgian granite seems to rot. Where these
brilliant red roads cut through the hills, they lay
open the earth from the ploughable soil at the sur-
face to the decaying, crumbling, highly colored

178

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

strata of granite ten or fifteen feet below. The ver-
tical sides of the roads are like painted charts show-
ing all the gradations of the decaying rock-strata.
Five or six feet below the surface one can cut the
granite like cheese. From a brilliant terra-cotta it
fades out as you go down, and as the rock becomes
harder and harder, until the original gray of the
strata begins to appear, and bars and wedges are
required to remove it. Occasionally a vein of quartz
is exposed which shows no sign of decay. All North-
ern granite that I have seen is as hard at the surface
as anywhere beneath it, but Southern granite seems
to possess some inherent principle of decay. Yet
there are here scattered areas where the rock resists
decay and huge masses crop out and seem to shake
their gigantic fists in the face of Time. One such
mass which I twice visited and climbed is called
“Stone Mountain,” not many miles east of Atlanta.
It is one of the most striking granite knobs in the
world. One sees it from afar rising above the sur-
rounding country, its light-gray surface mottled
with dark patches of pitch pine. Its base is six miles
around, and its summit nearly a thousand feet
above. Its shape suggests a huge pear, the stem end
being long and low, and the blossom end high and
abrupt. Standing on the high curve of this end, one
cannot see the base of the mountain beneath him,
and the cherry-pits which I dropped from my lunch
bounded down over the brim and fell to the ground
179

FIELD AND STUDY

many hundred feet below. The rock apparently does
not undergo any chemical change as has the rock
of the surrounding country in which it is rooted, but
it disintegrates much more rapidly than Northern
granite and has imparted a light-gray hue to the red
lands that spread out from its base. Huge slabs
weather off its surface and their degradation affords
enough soil here and there to give sustenance to low
growths of pitch pine. The rock as a whole must
have shrunk enormously even in our geologic age,
probably many times its present size; yet it remains
one of the most notable outcroppings of the orig-
inal granite in this country.

Why granite rock is so soft and ungranite-like
in the southern countries is to me a puzzle — the
result, perhaps, of some circumstance of its original
cooling. In southern California, at Riverside, tour-
ists climb or motor to a bold granite peak called
Rubidoux. The sides and the summit of the moun-
tain are strewn with huge rounded granite boulders.
I chanced to overhear a tourist explaining to a
friend that these detached boulders were brought
there and dropped by the old ice-sheet that covered
the northern part of the continent ages ago. But he
was giving his friend a bit of misinformation. The
old ice-sheet did not extend so far south, and these
plump, smooth boulders had simply weathered out
of the underlying granite, and had never left the
land of their birth. They were a titanic brood

180

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

hatched out of the mountain by Time brooding
over it for geologic ages.

Geology invests every square yard of the earth’s
surface with interest. I lay claim to only a fragmen-
tary knowledge of the noble science, yet it adds to
the enjoyment of every bit of new land I see, every
visit I make to quarries, every glance I get of the
stone tablets which the delvers and tunnelers bring
out of the earth. They are pages torn from the
great stone book of earthly revelations. They are
often nearly blank pages to me, but they pique my
curiosity and add to my interest in the great book.
A little knowledge of geology goes a great way in
giving me pleasure in my walks and excursions.
When a new friend, curious about such things,
comes to see me, I march him up to my hay barn
and show him a geological treasure in one of its
foundation stones; it is a complete and distinct im-
pression, in a fragment of the light-gray Catskill
formation, of the leaf of a plant or tree that flour-
ished millions of years ago, in Devonian times, prior
to the coal formation — a narrow, bladelike leaf,
about a foot long, parallel-veined and deeply graven
on the rock — one of the early Gymnosperms of the
order of Cycads, and called Cordaites costatus. One
has to supply a little imagination in order to get up
an interest in such a thing, but what is life, anyhow,
without imagination and void of curiosity about
the earth we inhabit?

181

FIELD AND STUDY

In a recent motor-car tour in the States south of
me — Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, East
Tennessee, and North Carolina — my interest in
the landscape was greatly heightened through my
knowledge of some of the larger facts of geology.
The deep, V-shaped valleys, in contradistinction to
my own broad, U-shaped valleys, at once caught
my eye. In many places the sides of the valleys were
so steep, and the tops of the hills so smooth and
round, that the farms were on their summits and
the hillsides left wooded. I should not have known
how to account for these features had I not known

_ that we were beyond the limits: of the great con-
tinental glacier that swept over the northern part
of the country many thousands of years ago, and
which so broadened and deepened our valleys and
strewed the landscape with rocks and stones. In
many places in West Virginia one could see where
there had been local glaciers by the drift boulders
and rocky fragments scattered over the fields. In
going from the Catskill region to the mountainous
region of Pennsylvania, one sees a change in the
landscape that his knowledge of this great ice-
sheet, and of the geological formation of the two
sections, helps to clear up. The farm lands in Penn-
sylvania are not stony and rock-strewn as they are
in parts of New York. In the Catskills the rock-
strata lie in thin horizontal sheets, and are easily
disrupted and torn away. In the mountains of

182

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

Pennsylvania, they are of different material and
are folded and thrust upward; hence they presented
the edges of the rock to the ice-sheet, instead of
broad, flat surfaces, and were not so easily dislo-
cated and broken up.

As a boy I had heard through relatives who had
moved from the Catskills to Pennsylvania that
they had to build their fences of rails, as their farms
were quite free from rocks and stones. Now I saw
the reason. The stone walls I had helped build in
my youth, and the stones that had been in the way
of my hoe in the cornfield, were chargeable to the
old ice-sheet. But the fragments of quartz that strew
some of the cotton-fields of the South have another
explanation; they are what is left of the granite,
the decay of which makes up the soils of those
sections.

This rudimentary knowledge of geology, com-
bined with a fair knowledge of the plants and trees,
the birds and the four-footed creatures, helps greatly
to make country life worth while.

I remember the look of mingled surprise and
incredulity of the old farmer when I told him that
his soil had once been rocks; that it was not created
as he saw it there being turned up by his plough or
spade; that it had been thousands, yes, millions of
years in the making. He fancied that the Almighty
fiat had called from nothingness the stones and
rocks where they lay upon the soil, and that the soil

183 |

FIELD AND STUDY

itself had come in the same way. From planets to
peas, things are slow a-coming, and ceaseless change
and transformation mark their courses.

One cannot store one’s mind with any consider-
able part of the technical knowledge which science
brings, and does not need to. An observer and lover
of Nature, like myself, craves only insight into her
methods; loves to trace her footsteps, as it were;
to contrast her prodigality in some fields with her
parsimony in others; to note her contradictions,
and to cross-question her till they are cleared up.
Bird and beast and tree and plant are each vital
points of contact with the vast whole, and the self-
same currents flow in each.

J turn to chemistry, not for technical knowledge
of substances and compounds, but for new proof
of Nature’s wonders and mysteries. It reveals to
me a new world that ordinarily our eyes and ears do
not take in — a world of activities and potencies so
unlike the world of tangible bodies and mechanical
forces in which we habitually live, that it never
ceases to be a surprise and delight to me. Mechanical
relations and rebounds we come in contact with
constantly — mechanical mixtures and suspen-
sions and siftings and transportations; but chemical
reactions and transmutations are entirely of an-
other order. In mechanics we get change of bulk,
of place, of direction, of form, of color; in chemistry
we get a change of substance, of quality, of nature;

184

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

it is as if two and two made three or five, as if one
gathered grapes of thorns, and figs of thistles. What
can be more marvelous than the elementary fact
that two invisible and tasteless and odorless gases,
oxygen and hydrogen, unite chemically in certain
proportions, producing water—a body totally
unlike either? Oxygen supports combustion, hy-
drogen burns freely, and yet water quenches fire —
the magic of chemical reactions truly!

Think of the terrific forces bound up in chemical
compounds which fire or a blow releases! We can
form no mechanical image of such things. Our
springs and coils and weights may hold great forces
in leash, but no more than what we put into them.
The clock in running gives back or uses up the
forces you put into it in winding, but the explosive
compound releases energy that is of chemical origin;
it is created then and there through the action of
the law of chemical affinity. Nitrogen is the princi-
pal element in all the terrible explosions, and yet
nitrogen is the most inert, lazy, or indifferent of
the primary elements. It is reluctant to combine
with any other element. Mixed with oxygen, the
two form our air. Were it suddenly to unite with
oxygen chemically, of which there is no danger, our
atmosphere would disappear; and we should have
in its place a sea of ammonia or of nitrous acids.

It is a kind of revelation when we know that the
greater part of the solid earth is made of gas. A

185

FIELD AND STUDY

large proportion of the earth’s crust is composed of
oxygen united with the mineral salts. The breath of
life goes to make up the rocks and the sea and the
soil we till. When two elements combine chemi-
cally, there is a mysterious interlocking of the
atoms of which these elements are composed. But
as the atom itself is inconceivable, — a solid particle
of matter non-divisible, — one cannot picture to
himself, or visualize, just what takes place. His ac-
quaintance with a mechanical world does not help
him. No more can he conceive what takes place
when the mere presence of a third body in some
cases causes two other bodies to unite chemically,
as if certain substances in relation to certain other
substances were capable of a sort of priestly func-
tion. This power is called catalysis.

A Swedish chemist has said that the third sib:
stance seemed to act by arousing the slumbering
affinities of the two other substances. So far as is
known, it does not part with an atom of its own sub-
stance; by its magical presence alone it hastens the
chemical union of the two other bodies. This fact
of catalysis is now largely made use of in the arts
of manufacture.

If we had the vision of the biochemist we should
see ourselves living in a world made up of two hos-
tile camps — the micro-organisms that build up
and the micro-organisms that pull down. An inces-
sant war is waged between them, but final victory

186

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

rests with neither. Indeed, it is a perpetual victory
and a perpetual defeat, and our well-being is in the
drawn battle. If living bodies were not pulled down,
there would very soon be no material to build more,
or to rebuild. It is like the compositor with his type.
If the compositor did not take down and redistrib-
ute his type, he could print no more books. Life
and death go hand in hand. Death has its living
side. What we call decay and corruption is the work
of living organisms, not less than are what we call
growth and health; but, we may say, of a lower and
less specialized order. The germs that pull down
the body of your dog are the same as those that pull
down your own body, but the germs that build
these up are different, at least they work to nobler
ends. The pulling-down process is to return to Na-
ture the elements that came from her; the build-
ing-up process is to produce a result that contrasts
strongly with the work of elemental nature. The
pulling-down process goes on mechanically all about
us, at all times, and it is equally active chemically.
You can hardly make two stones, one piled on the
other, stay piled long. Pile up your cord of stove-
wood in the woods as carefully as you may, and
very soon it begins to incline more or less to the
ground. Everything has a tilt. “Come down, come
down,” say the natural forces, “you oppose the
equilibrium I love.”” Wind, rain, frost, are the great
levelers. The hills and the mountains are every-
187

FIELD AND STUDY

where being slowly pulled down. Where they are
being lifted up by the shrinkage of the planet, their
surfaces are being constantly worn down by the
action of the elements. Mechanical erosion and
chemical disintegration play into each other’s hands.
The sea is only liquid land; all the elements of the
soil are in it, held in chemical solution or in mechan-
ical suspension. Indeed, many of these elements are
in the air also and are captured and used by the air-
plants. It is almost certain that what we call empty
space is filled with the dust of extinct or of un-
created worlds.

We know our atmosphere is: filled with living
organisms, as well as with mineral matter. It is only
with the mind’s eye that we can see the world of
elements and activities in which we are immersed.

The mechanical and the chemical processes that
go on all about us — the tearing and wearing, the
pulling and transporting, the falling and crushing,
then the burnings and explosions, the transforma-
tions and dissolutions, the reactions and precipita-
tions!

Then there is another process which we call vital
which is much more mysterious, which utilizes the
mechanical and chemical, but is not of them. These
two forces worked together through long astronomic
and geologic ages without producing living matter,
then the time dawned when what we call life ap-

188

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

peared. When I think of these things I am com-
pelled to see a new principle operating in non-living
matter to produce the living. We see chemical
affinity working to produce the various compounds
— why not vital affinity working to produce living
bodies?

The difficulty to the scientific mind is the idea
of a new principle. Physics and chemistry are coeval
with time, but life, as we are compelled to think of
it, is not. So there we are up a stump. One trouble
is we think too sharply of the beginning of life,
think under the figure of our own beginnings, or of
mechanical beginnings. Vital beginnings are brought
about by slow, insensible changes, there are no
sharp lines. The wheels begin to revolve, the ice
in the river begins to move. Life did not begin in
that way; it was beginning, or: beginning to get
ready to begin, for all time. The potentiality of it
existed in matter from the first, As the conditions
slowly ripened, life was slowly beginning, so we
have to think of it as life and not-life, positive and
negative, at the same time. But this is not the only
case in nature where contradictions unite. When
does the day begin to dawn, or the night to end?
The chick breaks the shell at a definite moment of
time, but when did it start on the road of chick-
hood? The clock begins to strike, but when did it
begin to be a clock? The beginnings and endings of
things are baffling. Where is the beginning of the

189

FIELD AND STUDY

circuit of the waters from the earth to the clouds?
Circles, circles, everywhere. When does a body be-
gin to decay? At any precise moment? We uncon-
sciously look upon the decay of dead bodies as a
spontaneous process; we think of it as inevitable.
But under certain conditions dead bodies do not
decay, no change in them takes place; place them
beyond the reach of the hosts of micro-organisms
and they are safe. These two hosts, the destructive
and the constructive germs, what is their relation?
The destructive are in the air, the water, the soil,
and in our bodies; where are the constructive?
The ferments and the enzymes are in our own bod-
ies, but where does the body get them? The cell is
the architect of the living body, but what is the
architect of the cell? We know its elementary con-
stituents, but what combines them, what guides
them, or inspires them to construct organs, and
inspires the organs to build up bodies? There we
are again with a chain that has but one end — an
impossibility.

Are the micro-organisms built up or pulled down
by other organisms, and so on ad infinitum?

Astronomy appeals to more persons than geology
does. The ground underfoot is a commonplace affair
compared with the midnight skies. The doings on
our little earth, even during the lapses of geologic
time, are trivial matters beside the birth of worlds

190

THE PLEASURES OF SCIENCE

and systems, or their destruction, in the abyss of
sidereal space. To immeasurable time is added im-
measurable space. Cosmic collisions and revolu-
tions make terrestrial upheavals and displacements
like happenings in your back yard. It is not every
night that one’s mind opens to take in the stupen-
dous spectacle of the starry sky. When in some
felicitous moment it does so, one can but exclaim.
Think of living in a world where any hour of the
night the curtain may be lifted upon such a scene
as that! — the Infinite baring its bosom to us, the
Eternal looking directly into our eyes! And how
much of this emotion, which at times overwhelms
us, we owe directly to science! Our untutored minds
are comparatively blind to such a spectacle. Science
has given us a new vision. The book of celestial
revelation has really been opened to us. What a
world of new knowledge has the spectroscope
opened to us! That all this heavenly host is in swift
motion, going no one knows whither, suns and
systems careering through space: like clouds across
the sky, and yet, to human eyes, during the historic
period appearing like fixed points in the celestial
vault — how wonderful is that!

To descend from astronomy to physics seems like
a great come-down, but it is only stooping from the
grandeur of orbs to the marvels of atoms, from the
infinitely great to the infinitely little, from seeing the
cosmic laws operating in the exterior universe above,

191

FIELD AND STUDY

to seeing them repeating the same motions in the
interior of matter at our feet. Physics reveals to us
what we may truly call the spiritual side of matter;
when we push our inquiries far enough we reach the
point where gross substance becomes disembodied
energy, and we find ourselves in a world as intangi-
ble as dreamland. Just as we are quite unconscious
of the astronomic relations and movements of the
globe upon which we live, so our ordinary lives do
not reveal to us the play of forces, the attractions
and repulsions that are going on in the objects
about us. Whoever has had a glimpse of the Bru-
nonian movement that is taking place in matter all
about us, has got some inkling of the tumult that
these attracting and repelling forces set up.

XIIT
NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

I. LIVE NATURAL HISTORY

| Benatar while reading Thoreau’s Journal,
I wondered why his natural history notes, with
which the Journal abounds, interested me so little.
On reflection I saw that it was because he contented
himself with making only a bare statement of the
fact — he did not relate it to anything else-or inter-
pret its meaning. There is a great deal of bald, dry,
natural history of this kind in his Journal which he
never wove together into a living texture.

When. he simply tells me, “I see a downy wood-
pecker tapping on an apple-tree and hear when I
have passed his sharp, metallic note,” he has not
interested me in the woodpecker. He must string
the bird on his thoughts in some way; he must re-
late him to my life or experience. The facts of nat-
ural history become interesting the moment they
become facts of human history. All the ways of the
wild creatures in getting on in the world interest us,
because we have our ways of getting on in the world.
All their economies, antagonisms, failures, devices,
appeal to us for the same reason.

Thoreau’s description of the battle of the ants in
“Walden” is intensely interesting because it is so

193

FIELD AND STUDY

human. Valor, heroism, stir us in whatever field
they appear.

As I write, a little chippie comes among the vines
on my porch looking for nesting-material. The old
spring impulse to increase and multiply is strong
upon her; she tugs at the strings'that tie the vines,
she scrutinizes every branch for some shred or bit
that will serve her purpose. She interests me and I
lend her a hand by releasing some of the strings
which she couid not manage. I am familiar with her
problem, as we all are. The cliff swallows daintily
gathering mud at the edges of a puddle in the road,
lifting their wings and standing on tip-toe as it
were, to guard against soiling their plumage, is a
sight I always pause to witness.

~ Yesterday I sat for an hour in the woods near a
dead maple-stub in which a flicker was excavating
her nest. At intervals the hammering would cease,
and the bird, on her guard against the approach of
stealthy enemies, would appear at the opening and
take a long look. Finally, when she discovered me,
she came out and went off in the woods, and seemed
to have some conversation with her mate.

All the industries and ways and means among the
animals are interesting. A chipmunk carrying nuts
and seeds to her den, a red squirrel cutting off the
chestnut burrs, too impatient to wait for the frost
to open them on the trees, even a woodchuck carry-
ing dry grass and stubble into his hole for a nest,

194

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

arrest the attention. The currents of life every where,
the lampreys piling up the stones in the creek-bot-
tom for a nest, the muskrat in the fall building his
aquatic tent with mouthfuls of sedge-grass, excite
our interest. In May all the seed-eating and nut-
eating creatures are hard put to it to obtain food.
The red squirrel comes in front of my door and eats
the sterile catkins of the butternut, and they evi-
dently help tide him over this season of scarcity.
One morning a gray squirrel in his quest for a break-
fast invaded the tree. The red squirrel soon spied
him and hustled him out of it very spitefully. The
gray went undulating along the top of the stone
wall, the picture of grace and ease, while the red,
with tail kinked, was in hot pursuit.

To find an interest in natural history one must
add something more than the fact, one must see the
meaning of the fact.

I feel no especial interest in the kingbird that
alights on the telephone-wire in front of me, but
when he climbs high up in the air and picks some
invisible insect from out the apparently empty
space, and brings it back to his perch, I am inter-
ested. It was a characteristic act.: The fox is inter-
esting for his cunning, the skunk and porcupine
for their stupidity. We see in the last two how the
weapons of defense which Nature has so liberally
bestowed upon them have left no room for the exi-
gencies of life to develop their wits.

195

FIELD AND STUDY

_ The novel, the extraordinary, the characteristic,
the significant, always interest us. The human bore
is a person who has no conception of what consti-
tutes the interesting; he or she pours out his own
private experiences upon us as if they were of the
same interest to us as to him. How prone we are to
think our special ailments are of universal interest,
but how rarely is this the case!

One afternoon two cuckoos, flying side by side,
passed my door. In the morning they passed again
in the same way and going in the same direction.
I became interested. I said, This means business.
Following the course they took, I went straight to
a clump of red-thorn trees a hundred yards distant,
and there was the nest, with young more than half-
grown. They were black-billed cuckoos. The mother
bird chided me in that harsh, guttural, staccato note
of hers, and kept her place on a branch near the
nest. One of the three young got out of the rude
nest and perched on a twig, holding its head or neck
nearly vertical. Its pronounced stubbly quills and
peculiar attitude gave it an unbirdlike look. The
cuckoos seem to time their nesting with that of the
tent-caterpillars upon which they feed. As the sup-
ply of these orchard pests, and many other similar
pests, had been nearly exterminated by the cold,
wet May of the previous year (1917), it would have
been very interesting to know how the birds made

196

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

up for the deficiency — what was the substitute.
But I could not find out.

Nearly every cuckoo’s nest I have happened to
find has been on a thorn-bush. Why do they choose
this tree? What special enemy are they on their
guard against? Our cuckoos evidently lay their eggs
at longer intervals than the other birds. In the
present case one of the young was clearly several
days older than its fellows. This fact, with the rude
skeleton of a nest, suggests some reminiscence of
the habits of the European cuckoo, a parasitical
bird.

The wild life around one becomes interesting the
moment one gets into the current of it and sces its
characteristics and by-play. The coons that come
down off the mountain into my orchard for apples
on the chill November nights; the fox that prowls
about near me and wakens me by his wild, vulpine
squall at two o’clock in the morning; the woodchucks
burrowing in my meadows and eating and tangling
my clover, and showing sudden terror when they
spy me peeping over the stone wall or coming with
my rifle; the chipmunk leaving a mound of freshly
dug earth conspicuous by the roadside, while his
entrance to his den is deftly concealed under the
grass or strawberry-vines a few yards away; the red
squirrel spinning along the stone wall, his move-
ments apparently controlled by the electric-like
waves of energy that run along his tail and impart

197

FIELD AND STUDY

to it a new curve or kink every moment, or chipping
up my apples and pears for the seed, and snickering
and cachinnating as if in derision when I appear
upon the scene — how much there is in the lives of
all these creatures that we should find keenly inter-
esting if we knew how to get at it!

This rainy morning I saw two red squirrels make
a wild dash through my garden, one in hot pursuit
of the other. A woven wire fence was in the way;
the fleeing one cleared one of the meshes neatly, but
his pursuer, intent on his enemy, blundered and
doubled up against the obstruction and was delayed
a moment — how much I wanted to know what the
mad racing meant, and how it resulted! The red
squirrel is a perky, feather-edged creature, the hot-
test and most peppery rodent we have in our woods
and orchards, every hair of him like a live wire,
and many of his movements are to me quite unac-
countable.

The search for the elements of the interesting in
nature and in life, in persons and in things — well,
is an interesting search.

Il, THE BARN SWALLOW

How winsome is the swallow! How tender and
pleasing all her notes! Is it boyhood that she brings
back to us old men who were farm boys in our
youth? We saw the swallows play out and in the
wide-open barn-doors in haying-time, their steel-

198

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

blue backs and ruddy throats glancing in the sun,
and their gentle, unctuous wing gossip falling on our
ears. Their coarse nests — mud without, but feath-
ers within — were plastered on the rafters in the
peak, and when the young were out we saw them
perched in a row on the ridge-board, resting from
their first flights.

Now, as I sit within my barn-door outlook, the
same swallows are playing before me, untouched by
the many long years that have passed, giving the
impression of perpetual youth; the same tender,
confiding calls, the same darting, wayward flight,
the same swift coursings above the shorn meadows;
darlings of the ripe summer air, aerial feeders,
reaping an invisible bounty above us, touching the
earth in quest of a straw or a feather, or for clay
for the nest, tireless of wing, and impotent of foot,
as of old.

The swallow has two words, one for her friends,
and one for her foes, — “ Wit, wit, wit,” uttered so
confidingly for the friends, and “‘Sleet, sleet, sleet,”
uttered sharply for the foes.

Instead of the ridge-board of my youth, the swal-
low now has a new perch, the telephone and tele-
graph wires strung along the highway.

Shall we look upon the swallow as a songster?
Virgil refers to him as such, and when he perches
upon the telephone-wire in front of my barn-door
and fills and refills his mouth with a succession of

199

FIELD AND STUDY

those squeaking, smacking, unctuous notes, his
throat swelling and throbbing, his beak opening and
shutting, glancing now to the right, now to the left,
as if to see if his mate is near, he looks, and we may
say is, the songster that Virgil called him. The
performance lacks resonance and the fluty quality
of our regular song-birds; it seems to be made in the
cheeks or by the softer parts of the mouth. The
beak is too small and feeble to play much of a part
in its production. What a waxy, adhesive sort of a
sound it is! I wonder if the swallow has the organ
called the syrinx common to the regular song-birds.
If one may compare sound with substance I should
say that the swallow’s strain seems viscous and
turbid rather than liquid and translucent like that
of the acknowledged song-birds. It is less a musical
performance for its own sake than a note of self-
congratulation, or of salutation to its fellows. The
bird does not lift up his head and pour out his strain
as if for the joy of singing; he delivers it as a
speaker delivers his discourse, looking about him
and laying the emphasis here and there in a con-
fident and reassuring tone.

The cliff swallows and the purple martins and bank
swallows are much more social and gregarious than
the barn swallows. I do not remember ever to have
seen more than one nest of the latter at a time in
the peak of the barn, though I am told that in New
England they nest in colonies. I.do not know that

200

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

they migrate in large flocks like the other swallows.
I only know that their season with us ends about
the 20th of August, and that they pass the winter in
South America, where I hope they have as happy a
time as they do here. If anything preys upon them
while they are here I do not know what it is. They
could laugh at the swiftest hawk. They share the
distrust of all birds toward the cat, though I have
never known Puss to catch one. They will swoop
down spitefully if she lingers about their haunts,
and I have seen her try to strike them with her paw,
but have never known her to succeed.

My swallows have a pretty habit, when the day
is chilly and cloudy or stormy, of collecting their
brood on the little ledges or shelves above the win-
dows on the south gable of the house and feeding
them there. The young sit there in a huddled row,
apparently looking off in the fields of air where their
parents are coursing for insects, and when they see
them returning, they break out in a happy and
grateful chatter. The old weather-worn gable is for
the moment the scene of a very pleasing and ani-
mated incident in swallow life.

III. INSECTS

One reason why all truthful and well-written
books upon insects interest us more than the sub-
ject would seem to warrant is that no creature is
small in print, or in a book. Print is the great equal-

201

FIELD AND STUDY

izer; it magnifies the little and it minimizes the big.
When Fabre focuses our attention upon a wasp or
a spider, his account engrosses our minds as com-
pletely as an account of a lion or an elephant would;
the insect is singled out and separated from the
thousand forms and entanglements that belittle it
in field and wood; it alone occupies the page. The
lion can do no more. It is precisely like putting the
flea under the microscope. The wars, loves, indus-
tries, activities of Fabre’s little people are de-
scribed in terms and images which we use in giving
an account of man and the greater beasts. The
words make them big, A moment ago a minute red
insect, a mere moving point, revealed itself to my
eye, crawling across this sheet of paper. It was so
frail and small that a bare touch of my finger, as
my pocket-glass showed, crushed it. If I could give
you its life history, and show its relation to other
insects, it would stand out on my page as distinctly
as if it had been a thousand times larger: its travels,
its adventures, its birth, its death, would fill the
mind’s eye; the reader would not have to grope for it
on my page, as my eye did when it discovered it.
There is no little and no big to nature, and there
is none to the mind. We think of the whirling solar
system as easily as of a whirling top. The space that
separates us from the fixed stars is no more to the
mind than the space that separates us from our
neighbors. In like manner the atoms and the mole-
202

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

cules of matter, when we have once conceived of
them, are as easy of apprehension as are the rocks
and the mountains. The theory of their nature and
activities figures as large in our minds as that of the
planetary systems. The stories of many of Fabre’s
flies and beetles interest us as much, and are quite
as significant, as the story of Jack the Giant-Killer
or of Robinson Crusoe. His history of the tumble-
bug amuses and interests us as much as that of any
of Plutarch’s heroes. But see the tumblebug there
in the path or by the roadside, struggling with his
little black globe, and he is little more than the
microscopic spider on my sheet of paper. His his-
tory must be written large, magnified by printer’s
type, before it comes fully within our ken or has
power to move us.

Fabre’s excursions afield are as entertaining and
suggestive as Roosevelt’s excursions into the big-
game lands of Africa. With the true artist size does
not count. The same is true of all the minutie of
nature — flowers, insects, birds, fishes, frogs. We
are bound to magnify them by describing them in
the terms of our experience with larger bodies.

A wasp will capture its prey, paralyze it, and leave
it upon the ground and then go a few yards away
and dig its hole. Then it will come back, look its
game over, take its measure, and apparently con-
clude that the hole is too small, then go back and

‘enlarge it, sometimes making several trips of this
203

FIELD AND STUDY

kind. Its attitudes and procedure would lead you
to say that the wasp was thinking and calculating
as a mechanic would under similar circumstances.
In another case the Sphex wasp has need to para-
lyze the mouth-parts of the prey she is carrying, so,
as she bestrides it and drags it also by its antennz,
it cannot grip her with its mandibles or impede her
progress by seizing upon blades of grass by the way.
Like a skillful surgeon, the wasp knows just what
to do, knows in what part of the head to insert her
sting to produce the desired effect.

“To know everything and to know nothing,”
says Fabre, “according as it acts under normal or
exceptional conditions: that is the strange antithesis
presented by the insect race.”

But we must never credit the insect with under-
standing as the result of cogitation; it knows noth-
ing; its life is a series of acts fatally linked together.
The mind of the insect is the mind of Nature; it is
action and not reflection. The plant does not con-
sciously select the elements in the soil or the air
that it needs, as we select; the vital chemistry in
the organism does the selecting. But the moment
we name what it is that does the selecting, we are
caught in a trap — we want to know what prompted
it to the act. We cannot find the under side of these
things, because there is no under side, or upper side
either, any more than there is to the earth,

204

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

IV. THE DOG

The most wonderful thing about the dog is not
his intelligence, but his capacity for loving. We can
call it by no other name. The more you love your
dog, the more your dog loves you. You can win your
neighbor’s dog any time by loving him more than
your neighbor does. He will follow you to the ends
of the earth if you love him enough. He may become
so attached to you that he fairly divines your
thoughts, not through his own power of thought,
but through his intense sympathy and the free-
masonry of love.

He is the ideal companion because he gives you
a sense of companionship without disturbing your
sense of solitude. Your mind is alone, but your heart
has company. He is below your horizon, but some-
thing comes up from his life that mingles with your
own. This friend walks with you, or sits with you,
and yet he does not come between you and your
book, or between you and the holiday spirit you
went out to woo. He is the visible embodiment of
the holiday spirit; he shows you how to leave dull
care behind; he goes forth with you in the spirit of
eternal youth, sure that something beautiful or curi-
ous or adventurous will happen at any turn of the
road. He finds no places dull, he is alert with expect-
ancy every moment.

In him you have good-fellowship, always on tap,

205

FIELD AND STUDY

as it were. Say the word, and he bounds to your
side, or leads the way to the woods.

My dog enjoys a walk more than I do; his nature-
study is quite as real as mine is, though of a totally
different kind; the sense of smell that plays such
a part in his excursions, plays little or none in mine,
and the eye and the mind, which contribute so much
to my enjoyment, are almost a blank with him.
He enjoys the open fire, too, and a warm, soft bed,
and a good dinner. All his purely animal enjoy-
ments are as keen or keener than mine, but has he
any other?

How different his interest in cats is from mine,
and in dogs, and in men! He is not interested in the
landscape as a whole: I doubt very much if he sees
it at all; but he is interested in what the landscape
holds for him — the woodchuck-hole, or the squir-
rel’s den, or the fox’s trail. His life is entirely the
life of the senses, and on this ground we meet and
are boon companions.

Tf he has any mind-life, and ideas, if he ever looks
back over the past, or forward into the future, I see
no evidence of it. When there is nothing doing he
sleeps; apparently he could sleep all the time, if
there were nothing better going on.

V. WOOD WAIFS

Those little waifs from the woods — chickadees,
nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and brown creep-
206

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

ers — that come in winter and feed on the suet on
the maple in front of my window, how much com-
pany they are to me! What thoughts and associa-
tions they bring with them! What a pleasure to
have them as my guests on the old tree! The cold,
naked, snow-choked woods — what can those little
pilgrims get there? I think the nuthatch touches me
the most closely; he is pretty to look upon, and his
voice is that of a child, soft, confiding, contented, and
his ways are all ways of prettiness — his sliding up
and down and round the tree, his pose, with head
standing out at right angles to the body, which en-
ables him to see the approach of danger as readily
as if he were perched on a horizontal limb, his
pretty habit of making a vise of a crevice in the bark
to hold a nut. All his notes and calls are pleasing;
he is incapable of a harsh sound. His call in the
spring woods when we made maple sugar in my boy-
hood — “yank, yank, yank” — how it comes back
tome! Not a song, but a token — the spirit of the
leafless maple-woods finding a voice.

And now for two or three weeks I have had an-
other guest at the free-lunch table, the prettiest
of them all, the red-breasted nuthatch from the
North, and he so appreciates my bounty that he
has taken up his temporary abode here in a wren’s
box a few yards from the lunch-table. One cold day
I saw him go into the box and remain for some time.
So at sundown I went and rapped on his retreat, and

207

FIELD AND STUDY

out he came. He spends nearly half his time at the
suet lunch. How pretty he is! and as spry as a
cricket; about two thirds the size of the white-
breasted, he is quicker in his movements. He glides
round the old tree like a spirit. He does not seem
to have the extra joint in his neck that his larger
cousin has; he does not point his bill straight out
from the tree at right angles to it, but turns his head
more from side to side. I call him my baby bird, he
is so suggestive of babyhood. It is amusing to see
him come down upon a fragment of hickory-nut
when he has wedged it into the bark. Each blow is
seconded by a flash of his wings, as if the tiny wings
reinforced the head. One day I put out a handful of
cracked hickory-nuts, and he hustled them all away
as fast as he could carry them, hiding them here and
there, in the vineyard, in the summer-house, on the
woodpile, whether with a view to hoarding them for
future use, or whether in obedience to some blind
natural instinct, I know not. The white-breasted
does the same thing, but I never see either of them
looking up their hidden stores.

‘Two downy woodpeckers, male and female, but
evidently not mated at this season, come many
times a day. The male is a savage little despot; no
other bird shall dine while he does. He bosses the
female, the female bosses the big nuthatch, the nut-
hatch bosses the red-breast, the red-breast bosses
the chickadees, the chickadees boss the brown

208

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

creeper and the juncos. Not one bird is hospitable
to another. Each seems to look upon the suet as its
special find,

The more inclement the season, the more our
sympathy goes out to our little wild neighbors who
face it and survive it. The tracks of the mice and
the squirrels in the winter woods have an interest
for one they could not possibly have in summer were
they visible then. O frost and snow, where is your
victory? O white and barren solitude, thou art not
all-potent! How distinctly I remember where our
schoolboy path through the woods crossed an old
bush fence, and the fresh prints in the snow of the
feet of the red and gray squirrels to whom the old
fence served as a highway. Those sharp, nervous,
hurried tracks and the silent, snow-choked woods,
— silent except when the frost pistols snapped now
and then, — how vivid the picture of it all is in my
memory!

The delicate tracks of the wood mice and their
tunnels up through the snow here and there beside
our path — they are still unfaded in my mind, after
a lapse of more than seventy years. Occasionally the
stealthy track of a red fox would cross our trail both
in field and wood — never hurried like that of the
mice and the squirrels and the hares, but slow —
a watchful, listening walker in the midnight winter
solitude.

Wild life in winter is like black print on a white

209

FIELD AND STUDY

page — he who runs may read. In summer it is
print on a green or brown or gray page. The little
waifs from the woods that come to my door day
after day in winter, so active and cheery and brave-
hearted, — heroic little figures that ask no favors
of me or any one, yet who complacently help them-
selves to the proffered suet and nuts, and go their
way like a merry gypsy band, — they little know
that they are my benefactors as much as I am
theirs.

VI. AN INTERESTING PLANT

In our walks we note the most showy and beau-
tiful flowers, but not always the most interesting.
Who, for instance, pauses to consider that early
species of everlasting, called in the botany Anten-
naria, that grows nearly everywhere by the roadside
and about poor fields? It begins to be noticeable in
May, its whitish downy appearance, its groups of
slender stalks crowned with a corymb of paperlike
buds, contrasting with the fresh green of surround-
ing grass or weeds. It is a member of a very large
family, the Composite, and does not attract one
by its beauty, but it is interesting because of its
many curious traits and habits. For instance, it is
dicecious, that is the two sexes are represented by
separate plants; and what is more curious, these
plants are usually found separated from each other
in well-defined groups, like the men and women in

210

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

an old-fashioned country church. Always in groups,
here a group of females, there a. few yards away a
group of males. The females may be known by their
more slender and graceful appearance and, as the
season advances, by their outstripping the males
in growth. Indeed, they become real amazons in
comparison with their brothers. The staminate, or
male, plants grow but a few inches high; the heads
are round and have a more dusky or freckled ap-
pearance than do the pistillate; and as soon as they
have shed their pollen their work is done, they are of
no further use, and, by the middle of May or before,
their heads droop, their stalks wither, and their gen-
eral collapse sets in. Then the other sex, or pistillate
plants, seem to have taken a new lease of life; they
wax strong, they shoot up with the growing grass
and keep their heads above it; they are alert and
active, they bend in the breeze, their long, tapering
flower-heads take on a tinge of color, and life seems
full of purpose and enjoyment with them. I have
discovered, too, that they are real sun-worshipers;
that they turn their faces to the east in the morning
and follow the sun in his course across the sky till
they all bend to the west at his going down.-On the
other hand, their brothers have stood stiff and
stupid and unresponsive to any influence of sky
or air so far as I could see, till they drooped and
died.

Another curious thing is that the females seem

Qll

FIELD AND STUDY

vastly more numerous —I should say almost ten
times as abundant. You have to hunt for the males;
the others you see afar off. In my usual five-minute
morning walk to the post-office I pass several
groups or circles of females in the grass by the road-
side. I note how they grow and turn their faces sun-
ward. I observe how alert and vigorous they are
and what a purplish tinge comes over their mamme-
shaped flower-heads, as June approaches. I looked
for the males; to the east, west, south, none could be
found for hundreds of yards. On the north, about
two hundred feet away, I found a small colony of
meek and lonely males. I wondered by what agency
fertilization would take place, by insects or by the
wind. I suspected it would not take place, no insects
seemed to visit the flowers, and the wind surely
could not be relied upon to hit the mark so far off,
and from such an unlikely corner too. But by some
means the vitalizing dust seemed to have been con-
veyed. Early in June the plants began to shed their
down, or seed-bearing pappus, still carrying their
heads at the top of the grass, so that the breezes
could have free access to them and sow the seeds
far and wide.

As the seeds are sown broadcast by the wind, I was
at first puzzled to know how the two sexes were
kept separate, and always in little communities,
till I perceived what I might have read in the bot-
any, that the plant is perennial and spreads by

212

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

offsets and runners like the strawberry. This would,
of course, keep the two kinds in groups by them-
selves.

VII. NATURE NEAR HOME

After long experience I am convinced that the
best place to study nature is at one’s own home,
—on the farm, in the mountains, on the plains,
by the sea, —no matter where that may be. One
has it all about him then. The seasons bring to his
door the great revolving cycle of wild life, floral
and faunal, and he need miss no part of the show.

At home one should see and hear with more fond-
ness and sympathy. Nature should touch him a little
more closely there than anywhere else. He is better
attuned to it than to strange scenes. The birds
about his own door are his birds, the flowers in his
own fields and wood are his, the rainbow springs its
magic arch across his valley, even the everlasting
stars to which one lifts his eye, night after night,
and year after year, from his own doorstep, have
something private and personal about them. The
clouds and the sunsets one sees in strange lands
move one the more they are like the clouds and sun-
sets one has become familiar with at home. The
wild creatures about you become known to you as
they cannot be known to a passer-by. The traveler
sees little of Nature that is revealed to the home-
stayer. You will find she has made her home where

213

FIELD AND STUDY

you have made yours, and intimacy with her there
becomes easy. Familiarity with things about one
should not dull the edge of curiosity or interest.
The walk you take to-day through the fields and
woods, or along the river-bank, is the walk you
should take to-morrow, and next day, and next.
What you miss once, you will hit upon next time.
The happenings are at intervals and are irregular.
The play of Nature has no fixed programme. If she
is not at home to-day, or is in a non-committal
mood, call to-morrow, or next week. It is only when
the wild creatures are at home, where their nests or
dens are made, that their characteristics come out.

If you would study the winter birds, for instance,
you need not go to the winter woods to do so; you
can bring them to your own door. A piece of suet
on a tree in front of your window will bring chicka-
dees, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, brown creep-
ers, and often juncos. And what interest you will
take in these little waifs from the winter woods that
daily or hourly seek the bounty you prepare for
them! It is not till they have visited you for weeks
that you begin to appreciate the bit of warmth and
life they have added to your winter outlook. The
old tree-trunk then wears a more friendly aspect.
The great inhospitable out-of-doors is relenting a
little; the cold and the snow have found their
match, and it warms your heart. to think that you
can help these brave little feathered people to win

214

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

the fight. Not a bit daunted are they at the fearful
odds against them; the woods and groves seem as
barren as deserts, the earth is piled with snow, the
trees snap with the cold — no stores, no warmth
anywhere, yet here are

“these atoms in full breath ;
Hurling defiance at vast death.”

They are as cheery and active as if on a summer
holiday.

The birds are sure to find the tidbit you put out
for them on the tree in front of your window, be-
cause, sooner or later, at this season, they visit
every tree. The picking is very poor and they work
their territory over and over thoroughly. No tree
in field or grove or orchard escapes them. The won-
der is that in such a desert as the trees appear to be
in winter, in both wood and field, these little adven-
turers can subsist at all. They reap a, to us, invisible
harvest, but the rough dry bark of the trees is not
such a barren waste as it seems. The amount of ani-
mal food in the shape of minute insects, eggs, and
larvee tucked away in cracks and crevices must be
considerable, and, by dint of incessant peeping and
prying into every seam and break in the bark, they
get fuel enough to keep their delicate machinery
going.

The brown creeper, with his long, slender, de-
curved bill, secures what the chickadee, with his

Q15

FIELD AND STUDY

short, straight bill, fails to get. The creeper works
the trunk of the tree from the ground up in straight
or in spiral lines, disappearing quickly round the
trunk if he scents danger. He is more assimilatively
colored than any of his winter congeners, being like
a bit of animated bark itself in form and color, hence
his range and movements are more limited and rigid
than those of the woodpeckers and chickadees. The
creeper is emphatically a tree-trunk bird. His ene-
mies are shrikes and hawks, and the quickness with
which he will dart around the trunk or flash away
to another trunk shows what the struggle for life
has taught his race.

The range of the nuthatch is greater than that of
the creeper, in that he takes in more of the branches of
the tree. He is quite conspicuously colored in his suit
of black, light gray, blue, and white, and his power
of movement is correspondingly varied. His bill is
straight and heavier, and has an upward slant with
the angle of the face that must serve him some useful
purpose. He navigates the tree-trunks up and down
and around, always keeping an eye on every source
of danger in the air about him. I have never seen
a nuthatch molested or threatened by any bird of
prey, but his habitual attitude of watchfulness while
exploring the tree-trunks, with head bent back and
beak pointing out at right angles, shows clearly what
the experience of his race has taught him. Danger
evidently lurks in that direction, and black and

216

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

white and blue are revealing colors in the neutral
woods. But, however much the nuthatch may be
handicapped by its coloration, it far outstrips the
creeper in range and numbers. Its varied diet of nuts
and insects no doubt gives it a more vigorous con-
stitution, and makes it more adaptive. It is the
vehicle of more natural life and energy.

How winter emphasizes the movements of wild
life! The snow and the cold are the white paper upon
which the print is revealed. A track of a mouse, a
bird, a squirrel, or a fox shows us at a glance how
the warm pulse of life defies the embargo of winter.
From cracks and rents in the frigid zone which
creep down upon us at this season there issue tiny
jets of warm life which play about here and there
as if in the heyday of summer. The woods snap and
explode with the frost, the ground is choked with
snow, no sign of food is there for bird or beast, and
yet here are these tiny bundles of cheer and con-
tentment in feathers —the chickadees, the nut-
hatches, and their fellows.

Part If
STUDY NOTES

Part II: Stupy Notes
I
LITERATURE

HE natural history of the fields is usually as
welcome to the poet as to. the field natural-
ist, even though he does not put it into his song. It
was certainly welcome to Emerson, and his poems
abound in allusions to the life of the fields, both
floral and faunal. But the poet is not out in quest
of natural-history facts; he is in quest of any facts
he can make into poetry. “A little more than a
little” of these things would burden his lyric. He
is intent upon the play of his own fancy and feel-
ings over the larger and more general aspects of the
landscape. Emerson went to the woods, not to
bring home bird or botany lore, but to fetch the
word of the wood-god to men. When he brought the
asters back with him, each came “laden with a
thought,” but when he brought back the poems of the
“Humble-Bee” and “The Titmouse,” he brought
back, in each case, a bit of sound natural history,
animated and expanded with genuine poetic emo-
tion. His “May-Day’”’ is rife with close observation
of nature at this season, but it is not burdened with
the details.
The poet uses the facts of natural history and of
Q21

FIELD AND STUDY

science generally in a large and free way, not to
convey information, but to stimulate the poetic
sense. His treatment is synthetic and not analytic.
Every cloud that floats above him “writes a letter
in his book,” but these things are not ends in them-
selves, they are but the colors upon his palette.
The picture he paints is not in nature, but in his
own soul. He uses objects in nature to figure forth
a mood of the soul, not for the flower’s or the bird’s
sake, but to fathom the sense of solitude in the
spirit. Such poems express a sympathy with nature
that was quite alien to the ancient mind.
§

Shall we ever again have a group of poets who can
deal with nature in the large, virile way in which
some of our older poets did, giving us the same sense
of reality, stirring the same universal emotions of
our common humanity, portraying what we all see
and feel but cannot all express, as Bryant did in his
“Waterfowl,” and several other poems, as Emer-
son did in his ‘“‘Humble-Bee”’ and “Titmouse,” as
Burns did with his “ Mouse,”’ as Wordsworth did in
the “Cuckoo” and the “Daffodils” and in scores
of poems, as Whitman did in numerous passages
in his large, flowing lines, as Trowbridge did in
his “Pewee,” and “Mid-Summer,” and as Celia
Thaxter did in her “Sandpiper”?

I recall but one of our current poets who has
touched a nature theme in the old, felicitous, and,

222

_ LITERATURE

at the same time, truthful way, and that is Robert
Loveman in his immortal “Rain Song.”

The school of younger poets, with their free verse,
turn perpetually to nature themes, but the large,
free handling of them is not their gift. Neither is it
the gift of the poets who adhere to the old conven-
tional form of verse. They are pretty and refined,
they are often subtle and fluent, but there is not a
particle of “original sin” in any of them — nothing
that gives flavor and reality; it has all been bleached
out; they are a by-product of a. bookish and arti-
ficial age; they are skilled craftsmen, but not poets;
they are what is left for the making of poets after
the first-hand grit and energy of the race has been
drawn off by the demands of a great practical indus-
trial age. These pale, thin, anzemic versifiers are the
left-overs.

§

The secret of good writing is not in the choice of
words; it is in the use of words, their combinations,
their contrasts, their harmony or opposition, their
order of succession, the spirit that animates them.
A writer upon Nature may expatiate on her beau-
ties, but can he show us her beauties in simple lan-
guage? Can he in plain words make us feel the
poetry in the morning, or in the twilight? Just to
name objects in nature, like the dew, the rain, the
snow, a summer morning, a clover-field, the mid-
night skies, the clouds, the brook, is enough, through

223

FIELD AND STUDY

the power of association, to fill the mind with
pleasing emotions.

A writer may use pure English and yet his pro-
duction be flat and insipid. No matter what words
a fourth- or fifth-rate poet uses, his verse will be
fourth- or fifth-rate. Take any great piece of prose
and break it up into its word elements, and see if
you can find the secret of its power or beauty. The
words “beauty” and “power” may not be in it,
and yet it may have both these qualilics. The dif-
ference between a quartz pebble and a precious
stone is not one of elements, but one of different
arrangement of the same elements. Both the dia-
mond and a lump of charcoal are made up of carbon
molecules, but behold the difference!

“In good writing words become one with things,”
says Emerson. They give a sense of reality, the mind
feels them as tangible things. Of course, words that
stand for specific, concrete things come home to us
in a way that general and abstract words do not,
Take this quatrain of Emerson’s: —

“Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,

Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and fect.”

How vivid and concrete the language! Certainly
the words are one with things.

224

LITERATURE

§
Mr. Perry, in his “Life of Whitman,” does not

bring out Whitman’s main characteristics very
clearly — the fact that he stood so entirely upon
ground of his own, was, in fact, a new type of man
appearing in literature, and that he proved and
justified himself upon those new grounds.

Mr. Perry has to chip away a good deal of Whit-
man to make him conform to the accepted academic
models, and the process is like shearing Samson of
his locks — his strength and significance are gone.
If one fails to see that here is the democratic spirit
assuming almost colossal proportions, taking pos-
session of the world in its own right, gay, proud,
nonchalant, but loving and all-inclusive, reverent
toward the past, receptive toward the present, con-
fident toward the future, taking science at its word
that the celestial laws are operative here underfoot
as well as up there in the sky, taking religion at its
word that the greatest thing in the world is love
and that man is divine inside and out, writing
his poems from the inspiration of these ideas, and
bringing the democratic standard, the standard of
the fundamental equality of all men, to bear upon
all things, and thereby making in a sense a new
scale of human values — unless, I say, one sees this
in Whitman, one misses the main thing. It seems to
me almost an impertinence to compare him to
Rousseau, or Wordsworth, or our own Whittier,

225

FIELD AND STUDY

because his spirit and aim are so foreign to theirs.

The spirit of these men was not inclusive but exclu-

sive; not one of them could say: —

“My spirit has passed in compassion and determination around
the whole earth;

I have looked for equals and lovers and found them ready
for me in all lands.”

Whittier was a democratic poet within certain
narrow limits, as are most of our poets, but as an
enclosure of his country, and of the modern world,
he is a child compared with Whitman. The poets
just named are poets of the select, the refined, the
exceptional. Whitman is the poet of the All. But
all is not beautiful or poetic. Granted. Yet Whitman
included it just the same, and, what is more, he
gives you the impression of being adequate to in-
clude it. It does not stagger him or swamp him; his
spirit dominates it. Had he not loaded his work with
material which in itself does not awaken the poetic
thrill, he could not have given this impression of
all-inclusiveness and of cosmic power.

Whitman’s catalogues, and his affiliations with
what is considered unclean, would have destroyed
Whittier, because Whittier’s spirit was not ade-
quate to bear this burden. Nothing but Whitman’s
tremendous egoism, and the power to keep his own
spirit always to the front, enabled him to stand up
under the load he assumed.

This want of selection in Whitman, which Mr.

226

LITERATURE

Perry, like the other critics, makes much of, was a
vital part of Whitman’s entire scheme. The question
is not, Does he transmute his common material into
the gold of poetry? but, Has he enough gold in his
vaults to redeem it? Is he master of it? What would
elog a brook is lost in a river. Had Whitman at-
tempted to prettify these things, to dress them up
in the habiliments of rhyme and poetic finery, that
would have put another face on. his enterprise.

The most precious thing any imaginative work
can give us is the impression of a large, loving, and
powerful personality. I care not what the medium is
if it gives us this impression. Is not greatness of
soul above all else? Plenty of pocts give us the im-
pression of the refined, the pretty, the gentle, the
devout, but how many yive us the impression of
the great, the powerful, the godlike? Of the cosmic
and the all-inclusive, Whitman alone among poets
gives us the impression.

Were the final impression which he makes that of
the uncouth, the coarse, the half-cultured, or the
merely big, how long, think you, could he hold the
attention of thoughtful minds? Not long, surely.
This was the first impression he made upon John
Addington Symonds. “But in course of a short
. time,” he says, “Whitman delivered my soul of
these debilities ’’; that is, brought him a stimulus
and a message which are never the gift of the coarse
and the uncouth.

Q07

FIELD AND STUDY

The purely academic mind always gets the im-
pression of uncouthness from Whitman, and, if
there are not native and original gifts back of the
academic veneer, as there were in Symonds, gets
no farther.

You may refuse to call Whitman’s work poetry,
but it is not prose. His attitude toward his subject
and toward his reader is not that of the prose-writer.
It is more intimate and personal, more symbolical
and representative. It is that of the bard and
prophet, if not of the poet. The prose-writer is bent
on elucidation, argumentation, description, or the
conveyance of knowledge. Whitman’s aim is none of
these. The personality of the man is immanent in
all Whitman’s best work; he gives himself. His spirit
is creative, primary, elemental. He identifies himself
with men and things, and they speak through him
instead of his standing apart from them and merely
portraying them or contemplating them or singing
of them. The poets quicken one’s pulse by their
fine descriptions and imaginary touches. Whitman
speaks in the spirit of Nature as a whole; not beauty
merely is his aim, but love, power.

§

I return to Wordsworth again and again, year
after year. His privacies with Nature, his commun-
ing with his own soul, through her shows and ob-
jects, appeal to me. This modern devout feeling
toward Nature, as distinguished from the ancient

228

LITERATURE

pagan feeling of simple fear and wonder, we are all
sharers of. It is the aftermath of the human mind
that follows the decay of the old religious forms and
creeds, Wordsworth’s natural religion was the real-
ity with him; his Church of England religion was
only a form.

I return to Whitman again and again, year after
year, not for his privacies with Nature, but for the
sweep of his mind and the power of his personality.
His tremendous humanism and large style always re-
fresh me. He makes me ashamed of our partialities
and refinements and false modesties. His frankness
and directness are as appealing as his unconvention-
alities. His candor equals his charity, his democracy
matches his patriotism. He does not distil the es-
sence of wild Nature for me as Wordsworth does —
Nature transmuted into a kind of intellectual sen-
timent; he distils nothing, he confronts me with
the immeasurable universe and makes me feel how
the ground I walk upon is a part of the solar system.
It is not Nature perfumed with literature that he
gives me, but something much nearer the breath of
Nature as she appears on the shore, the plains, the
mountain-tops.

There is no direct savor of science in this pas-
sage :—

“I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems,

And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the
rim of the farther systems.

229

FIELD AND STUDY

“Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding,
Outward and outward and forever outward.

“My sun has his sun and round him obediently wheels,
He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit,
And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside
them.”

That is all good astronomy, and it is all good
poetry.

Whitman’s personality is always the dominant
fact. He assimilates and transmutes science as easily
as anything else. His tremendous egoism cannot be
obscured or thwarted. It enables him to identify
himself with all objects and persons without suffer-
ing the least embarrassment or degradation. While
other poets aim to write beautiful poems by selec-
tion and elaboration, Whitman aims to write poems
of power by including all and elaborating nothing.
While other poets seize upon some special phase of
Nature, and make much of that, Whitman gives
the spirit of Nature in her totality. Many persons
who are moved by a flower, a bird, a sunset, or a
shell on the beach, are unmoved by the midnight
skies and the larger elemental displays. Vastness,
power, universality, are Whitman’s characteristics
as a poet. While touching the highest point of mod-
ern knowledge and humanitarianism, on the one
hand, he reaches to the antique simplicity and reli-
gious fervor on the other. He is prophetic and crea-
tive, while he is Darwinian and democratic. His

230

LITERATURE

subject-matter is the universe. He says his book is a
poem of himself; it is himself in relation to the whole
of life and of Nature. He is no more a gatherer of
flowers or of shells upon the beach than a rhapsod-
ist of the ocean or a worshiper of the stars; no
more a lover of men than a disciple of the gods;
no more a countryman than a “lover of populous
pavements”; no more a lover of solitude than a
lover of the mart. He is always large, he always
gives one a sense of mass and magnitude, of move-
ment and power.

As an artist he does not loiter, he does not elab-
orate, he does not finish specimens; he showers
them, as he says, by exhaustless laws, continuously,
as Nature does. He is always fluid and flowing, al-
ways central, never baldly intellectual or reflective
or studiously subtle. He does not savor of books or
of schools. He is not a product of culture and of
generations of speaking and writing men, as Emer-
son is; hence he has little of the peculiar Emersonian
aroma of scholars and scholarly traditions, or of
the distilled and concentrated essence of the wild
and the secluded, which in certain moods is so wel-
come to us. His “Leaves” do not lure us to the
woods or to the brookside, but rather to the sea-
shore or to the mountain-top. He does not make
you conscious of his craft; he fills you with the
feeling of himself.

In the modern nature poets, such as Wordsworth

231

FIELD AND STUDY

and Emerson, we get the thrill of the idyllic, or the
charm of the pastoral. In Whitman we get the lift
and sweep of the epic, and, at times, the stir of the
dramatic. We may not like him, — not everybody
can endure a plunge in the surf, — but we should
recognize his power, and the genuineness of his in-
spiration, and that our dislike of him comes more
from our indoor and bookish habits, our over-
refinements, our artificial standards, our anemic
blood, than from any want of the truly poetic in his
“Leaves.” ;

His attitude toward his subject-matter is always
that of the creative artist, never that of the prose-
writer, or the preacher, or the speculative philoso-
pher. He gives nothing as duties, as he himself says,
but as living impulses; he gives nothing as finished
poetry, but as the soul and suggestion of poetry.
His book is not a temple of art, builded as the great
architects of verse, from Virgil to Tennyson, built
it, but is the work of the creative and assimilative
artistic spirit where life is unloosed and we breathe
the air of primal and universal nature. To describe
him as merely rude and hirsute and untaught is to
miss the mark entirely; he is elemental and prim-
itive, but he is orbic and inclusive. Neither do the
epithets “robust,” “athletic,” “masculine,” and
the like fitly describe him. He is more and better
than these; he is tender, yearning, motherly.

232

LITERATURE

§
It has been said that “Milton is the most literary

man in literature.” I should say the greatest purely
literary man in English literature. Virgil matches
him in Latin literature. Who matches him in
French? By a literary man, in the sense here re-
ferred to, I suppose we mean one whose primary
interests are in literature rather than in men and
things — the product of books, of the schools.
Shakespeare was not literary, nor Scott, nor
Wordsworth, nor Carlyle, nor Burns, nor Emerson.
Emerson’s interest in poetry was great, was almost
supreme, and yet he was not literary in the sense
that Arnold was or that Lowell was. He again was
a poet and prophet combined, or a critic and a seer
combined; a preacher who hated preaching and the
church, a poet thrilled by the grandeur of the moral
law, an essayist whose central theme was God and
Nature, a critic who saw literary values through his
religious sense, a philosopher who thought in tropes
and symbols, a naturalist who translated his natural
history into the language of the spirit.
§

How prone we are to speak of style as something
apart from the man, and to compare it to a garment
that can be put off and on! whereas style is a quality
of mind, and either a man has it or he has it not.
It is as inseparable from the man himself as his
temperament or complexion. A writer has style if

233

FIELD AND STUDY

his page is vital and gives the impression of an
original and attractive personality. Again we speak
of the style and the thought as being separable. but
they are one as the line of a pear! is one with the
substance. There is a world of good writing which
yet differs from literature as a tree differs from a
pile of lumber. Lucidity as a requisite of style cer-
tainly stands first, and next that which is isep-
arable from it, simplicity. In mv own case I trv to
get language out of the way as far as possible, and
to put my mind directly to that of my reader.
Hence, when I have been told that my page does
not seem like writing, that it offers no resistance,
and so on, I feel highly complimented. I would
have it fit the mind as water fits the hand. Deliver
me from language as such, from fine phrases; in
short, from conscious style. The author must not
know that he is writing, but seem only to be speak-
ing. The moment he knows he is writing, his words
begin to rattle and sound hollow. I do not want to
hear or see or feel the machinery. I want the perfect
product. I want the writer to be so intent upon what
he is saying, so single of purpose, and so honest with
his reader, that he takes no thought of his style as
such; he takes thought only of how to convey his
meaning in the clearest, freshest, most direct and
vivid manner. O to be natural, to have the quality
of freshness and inevitableness, of the unlabored,
the spontaneous! To be brisk and not flippant, to be
234

LITERATURE

original and not strained, to be smooth and not
polished, to be suggestive and not obscure and in-
definite, to be bright and not brilliant, to have wit
without the sting, to have humor without the guf-
faw, to have learning without pedantry, to have
joy without hilarity, — ‘“‘sober on a fund of joy,” as
Emerson says, —to be serious and not heavy, to
teach and not moralize, to be lucid and not super-
ficial, to be eloquent and not rhetorical, to have
common sense and not be commonplace — this is
my prayer.
§

Whoever can bring to scientific subjects a free
play of mind and find room in them for feeling and
imagination, can make literature of them. Astron-
omy, geology, botany, chemistry, physics, all lend
themselves to literary treatment to the born liter-
ary mind. Their exact facts may be made flexible
and grouped in a picturesque manner, and invested
with the atmosphere of poetry and romance.

§

I think we all in a measure share the feelings of
those who would rather read an account of an event
or a description of an object by a great writer than
to see the object or be present at the event itself.
To persons with the literary and artistic sense highly
developed, the reality is generally less pleasing than
a picture of the reality.

It is said that all martyrdom looks mean in the

235

FIELD AND STUDY

act. I had rather read “Macbeth” than to have
been present at the scenes upon which it is founded.

The difference between a photograph and a
painting is an important difference, not so much a
difference of fact as a difference of spirit and atmos-
phere. The artist does something to his facts, the
photographer does not. Facts that have passed
through the personality of an artist meet with a
change; a touch of the ideal has been added; there
is a novelty, a beguiling strangeness; the spirit of
romance has breathed upon it and, without blurring
its realism, has imparted a charm which the reality
did not have. The literary artist goes to nature or
to human life for his material, but unless he does
something to that material, something analogous
to that which the bee does to the nectar which she
gathers from the flowers before. she stores it as
honey, it will be unworthy the name of literature.
It may have value as science, or as statistics, but
not as literature. The bee concentrates the sweet
water which she gathers from the flowers and adds
a minute drop from her own body in the shape of
formic acid before she achieves honey. The writer
who goes to the field or the street or the mart or
the trenches for his subject-matter will not achieve
literature by merely a faithful transcript of what he
sees and feels — his matter must be touched to the
finer issues of the imagination. Much of that which
passes for realism in current literature is merely the

236

LITERATURE

crude material of literature; it has not met with the
change to which I refer. Fidelity to the fact is not
enough; fidelity to the ideal is also necessary.
When the sap of the tree rises from the roots to
the leaves, it is crude sap; when it has been touched
by the sun through the leaves and flows downward
to build up the tree and its fruit, it is another mat-
ter. When our experiences and observations have
been touched and sublimated by emotional and
ideal nature, they become another matter, too.
Who would not read of a street brawl, or a scene in
a gambler’s den by a great imaginative writer,
rather than witness the reality? Who would not
rather meet Falstaff or Hamlet or Lear in the
pages of Shakespeare than in the street or the house?
I confess I cannot read the stories of our new
writers without being disturbed by their bald, hard
realism. Their tales of frontier life are almost as
repulsive as the reality. With all the wit and the
accurate character-drawing, their impact upon my
mind is not that of literature, but of naked reality.
A bar-room brawl is a bar-room brawl and nothing
more, repulsive in the beholding and distasteful in
the reading, without a touch of that light that
never was on sea or land — the touch which past
events have in our memories. I do not hesitate
to say boldly that there is no art or literature until
the matter has been breathed upon by the great
god of romance. If I confess I had rather have a
237

FIELD AND STUDY

photograph of my friend than a painting, it is that
the photograph brings him nearer. The painter will
disguise him a little. Would not.one rather have a
photograph of any of the great: characters of the
past, or of his own great-great-grandfather, than
a picture of him by any portrait-painter? One
would like to know exactly how he looked, the
naked reality. Yet a painting of my native hills
pleases me more than a photograph, because I sup-
pose the question of color and atmosphere plays
such a part, while in the face of your friend expres-
sion plays the main part and color a'very minor one.
The camera has no imagination, no sentiment, and
no memory, and its literal truth is not art; but for
that very reason, it gives us the nude reality when
we wish it most. Our own memories and feelings do
the rest.

Here we come upon ticklish ground and must
choose our words. I have no sympathy with those
readers who, for instance, had rather read Audu-
bon’s account of a bird than see and hear the bird
itself, or read a great historian’s description of a
battle than to have witnessed it. The great and the
momentous things in life one wants to see; in the
absence of that experience, then an account of them
by a great writer. In all cases the written descrip-
tion will give one a kind of pleasure that the real-
ity could not give, an esthetic pleasure, but the
reality drives deeper and is unforgettable. You for-

238

LITERATURE

get a description of Niagara, but you do not forget
the vision of it. As we cannot always see the reality,
but must read about it in innumerable books, we
want the reading to spare us the triteness and dis-
agrecableness that we are bound to get more or less
of from the reality.

I am not trying to discount the real thing; we go
around the world to see real things; I am only try-
ing to say that when we aim to make literature or
art out of them, we must invest them with a feeling,
an atmosphere, that the literal fact cannot give;
we must work some magic upon the facts.

You may put into your picture what cannot be
found in nature, but I must not be able to put my
finger on it. It must be your own spirit, your own
atmosphere. It must be in the tone, in the quality
— something that will make me want to go to that
place and live there always. Your elms must be elms
and your maples, maples, and your rocks, rocks,
but there must be a light upon them that never was
upon sea or land.

Who could paint for me the old homestead with
the charm it has in my memory, not changing a
single feature, but touching every feature with the
charm and pathos with which it haunts me?

Pass a landscape through the soul of a great artist
and it is in a measure transfigured, while it remains
the same.

Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” gives us more than

239

FIELD AND STUDY

the daffodils of the botanist; Emerson’s “‘Humble-
Bee” gives us more than we can get from any work
on entomology; Burns’s “Mouse”’ is a real mouse,
but not the one you catch in a. trap; and Shake-
speare’s violets — where do they grow save in the
magic page of Shakespeare? Art always rises above
fact.

I am insisting upon these things as if I thought
there were those who would dispute them, but prob-
ably there are not. Realists and idealists must agree
when they understand one another.

§

Young men of literary ambition often ask me
what they shall do to become good writers, I usually
answer that there is not much hope for them or they
would not ask that question. If they were born to
write, they will not need much guidance. If they
were not, who can really help them? The old advice,
“Look into your heart and write,” puts the whole
matter in a nutshell, but if the heart has no interior,
if it is not in some sense a mirror of the universe,
what is the use of looking?

One may say straight seeing, clear thinking, and
keen feeling are among the prime requisites for
good writing, but telling the blind to see and the
dull to feel and the halt to be nimble is not very
practical advice.

II
RELIGION

Y readers sometimes write me and complain
y that there is too much Nature in my books
and not enough God, which seems to me like com-
plaining that there is too much about the daylight
and not enough about the sun. What, then, is
Nature? Whence its source? Why are we Nature-
lovers?

Of course the above criticism springs from the
old conception which has been so Jong drilled into
us, namely, that there are two — Nature and God
—and that they are often at strife as Tennyson
hints when he asks, “Are God and Nature then at
strife?”

I look upon Nature not merely as the garment of
God, but as his living integument. With a manlike
God, the maker and ruler of the universe, and ex-
isting apart from it, I can do nothing.

When I write about Nature and make much of
her beauties and wonders, I am writing about God.
The Nature-lover is the God-lover. I am chary
about using the term “God” because of its theo-
logical and other disturbing associations. There is
something too austere and forbidding, and even
terrible, in the conception it calls up. But call it

Q41

FIELD AND STUDY

Nature and it is brought immeasurably near. I see
it, touch it, hear it, smell it. I see the flowers, the
birds, and all engaging aspects of field and wood
and sky. I am a part of it. I see my absolute de-
pendence upon it, and that denying it or slighting
it, or turning my back upon it, were like denying or
slighting gravity.
§

Where are the tracks we made in the snow last
winter? How real they seemed! how much they
expressed! They told which way we were going,
whether we were hurrying or sauntering, what we
had on our feet, and they might easily tell if we
bore a burden, or if we were drunk or sober, if we
were man, or woman, or child. They were real.
The snow still exists in the form of water or vapor,
and the feet that imprinted themselves upon the
snow may still exist, but the tracks that meant so
much — where are they? The track was simply a
record, like any other print or writing, and does not
exist apart from the material substance that gave
and took the impression. Are we ourselves anything
more than the tracks of the Eternal in the dust of
earth?

§

The serious, reverent, and truth-loving mind will
never be without religion, because these traits are
the fountain-head of all religious emotion. Add the
logical faculty, and the gift of imagination, and such

242

RELIGION

a mind will go to nature for its religion rather than
to creeds and traditions. It must have something
tangible, and it must have something that stimu-
lates its idealism. Science may afford its foundation,
but not its finish. Its science must be supplemented
by its philosophy. Minds without reverence and
ideality stop with science and usually end in ma-
terialism, but minds trained in the scientific method,
and with the gift of ideality, like Tyndall, Huxley,
and others, can never rest content in what is usually
called materialism.
§

That one of our well-known college professors
should recently have named his volume treating of
the physical aspects of the earth and our relations
to it ‘The Holy Earth” shows what a change has
come over the lay mind in regard to universal nature
in comparatively recent times. The lay mind is
rapidly becoming more truly devout than the cler-
ical mind — more inclined to act upon the literal
truth of the assertion that the earth is divine, and
that God is everywhere. The clergy have barely yet
discovered that the earth is a celestial body as are all
the rest of the hosts of heaven, and that the morn-
ing star is no more divine than the morning earth.

§

The man of science is forced to account for man
upon natural grounds. He knows no other. In
searching the heavens and the earth through, he

243

FIELD AND STUDY

can find no other. The whole procession proceeds
according to natural law. No hand is reached forth
out of the void arbitrarily to change anything, or to
introduce anything, or to interfere with the regular
order. Everything has its antecedent, or refers to
something gone before. Nothing begins de novo.
We appear and play our part in a series of events
which we fancy must have had a beginning and
which will have an ending, but we deceive ourselves;
we measure the infinite by the finite; there is no
beginning or ending to the universe, there is only
continuance with incessant change. The earth did
not begin as the world we know; it did not begin as
we find it in any past geologic age, or astronomic
age. It probably came out of the sun, and it came
out of a vast cyclone of star dust; and it came out of
what? Be assured out of some preceding condition
of eternal matter.
§

The change of man’s attitude toward nature is
one of the most, if not the most, remarkable changes
in his mental and spiritual story in modern times.
It amounts to a revolution. What he once feared and
fled from, he now loves and studies and endows with
a high degree of religious and spiritual value.

The fields, the woods, the waters, the starry
night, have an attraction and a meaning to the mod-
ern mind that the mind of the pre-scientific ages had
no conception of.

244,

RELIGION

“The meanest flower that blows ” can bring to
Wordsworth “thoughts that do often lie too deep
for tears.”” How impossible such a poet as he in an
earlier time! With all his outward adherence to a
religion of creeds and rituals, he was at heart the
poet of Nature. His attitude toward her was a reli-
gious attitude, as has been more or less the attitude
of the leading poets since his day. “The primal
sympathy ” which he celebrates — the sympathy
with birds, flowers, trees, rocks, winds, waves —
we are all more and more conscious of, partly be-
cause he gave that sympathy utterance in such in-
spired lines, and partly because science has given
us a more intelligent conception of the mysteries
and the glories that surround us. Many of us can
now say with him: —

“And I have felt:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
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:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense,

245

FIELD AND STUDY

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”

That creative eye and ear in the presence of
Nature is what mainly distinguishes the modern
attitude from the ancient. Sympathy is always crea-
tive. “Thanks to the human heart by which we
live.”

§

Emerson refers to a Swedenborgian neighbor of
his who was a philosopher up to a certain point, and
then accepted the village church as a part of the sky;
he says the day is not far distant when men will
cease thus to patch the ecliptic of the universe with
a small bit of tin. Is not this the mistake all the
good church people make? Nature is so much bigger
than their creed, and so much more real, that it is
like confounding a shingle roof with the firmament.
The gulf between the sky and the church is no
greater than the gulf between the orthodox religion
and our natural knowledge.

§

That Christ came .out of the earth, that the
Hebrew prophets, that Paul, that all the saints and
poets and philosophers of the world came out of the
earth; that our planet, and the system of which it
forms a part, should hold the elements of such men;
that they should be struck from it as the spark is
evoked from the flint — such facts as these should

246

RELIGION

open our eyes to the marvels in which we live. But,
you may say the spark is not evoked from the flint;
it is the result of the collision of the flint with the
steel, and represents the energy of the arm that
wielded the steel —the spark is visible energy.
True enough, and man was not. evoked from the
earth without some force or push in matter which
our analysis of it does not disclose — an aboriginal
intelligence which worked its will upon the atoms
and molecules.
§

That the roar of the tempest and of the volcano
as they crush or consume towns and cities, is the
voice of God, is a conception of Deity that belongs
to an earlier age of the world. Yet these are all
a part of Nature. What are we to do with them?
There is no alternative but to dehumanize God and
regard him as he actually is in the material universe
which surrounds us, and of which we ourselves are
an integral part — a part, at times, as irrational, as
cruel, as destructive, as selfish, as frenzied, as the
elemental forces out of which we came. The Nature-
God is no better than we are, and we are as good as
he is, we are bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh,
mere atoms and molecules in a corporeal frame that
fills and is the universe. What the Nature-God does,
we do; our mad, irrational warrings are matched on
a vaster scale by his conflicting and destroying
forces. Our intelligence is a spark of his intelligence,

Q47

FIELD AND STUDY

our sanity, our beneficence, are feeble reflections of
his sanity and beneficence. All is of a piece in this
universe.

§

Sooner or later, if one would not. be divided against
himself, he must face this terrible question of Na-
ture— of the Cosmos as a whole. Is it of God, or of
the Devil, or of both? The pious souls seem long to
have held that it is of both, that the more genial
aspects of Nature— birds, flowers, streams, stars,
sunsets, summer breezes, fair prospects — were of
God, and that Nature’s destructive, terrifying
aspects and forces — storms, earthquakes, pesti-
lence, wars— were of the Devil. Men have rarely
had the courage to say that it is:all of God, that it
is all divine; that the cyclone, the volcanoes, the
earthquakes, the thunderbolt, are as truly of God
as are the forms and forces that directly please and
minister to us.

We teach our children to say glibly that God is
everywhere, in us and without us, above us and
below us, and that in Him we literally live and move
and have our being. Then when they ask us, Is He
in the cesspool, in the cyclone, in famines, in the
war, in all the dark and cruel aspects of Nature,
we are at a loss for an answer. In his “Journal”
Emerson asks, half quizzically, “Is God in a load of
brick, is he in the barber-shop, and the bar-room?”
When confronted with such questions we are forced

248

RELIGION

to have two gods, a good God and a bad God, or
else to give up all notions of a man-made personal
God, —the awful maker and ruler of the universe,
whom our fathers worshiped, and whose wrath we
seek to shun or propitiate by our good deeds, —
either this or else the identification of God with
universal Nature in all her multiform beneficent
and malevolent aspects.

We seek to evade the issue by saying that God
cannot be the author of evil; man himself is the
author of evil; he is a free moral agent and can
choose the evil from the good. But who made man?
Who gave him the capacity to choose between good
and evil? By whose laws is the distinction made?
If he burn his neighbor’s barn or covet his neigh-
bor’s wife or steal his neighbor’s goods, does he
create out of himself some new force or employ
some new agent? Does his will have anything to
do with his instincts, his temperament, his disposi-
tion, the color of his hair, the quality of his brain,
his stature, his weight, his mental or spiritual en-
dowment? Are not these things all of God, or from
sources outside the sphere of man’s voluntary activ-
ities? Hedge or qualify as we will, man is a part of
Nature. His conscious opposition to Nature is also
a part of Nature. Whence comes his capacity to use
Nature, to improve upon her, to pit her forces against
each other, but from Nature herself? Can there be
anything in the universe that is not of the universe?

249

FIELD AND STUDY

Can we make two or three out of the one? Is there
an outside to the Cosmos, a beyond? Or an inside
that is a world apart? When a man can lift himself
into his carriage by his waist-band, or hurl a stone
against gravity without the aid of gravity, or the
swimmer overcome the resistance of the water
without the aid of water, or sail his boat against
the wind without the aid of the wind, or walk with-
out that which resists his walking, then can man do
some act or think some thought without the aid of
Nature. These familiar facts or deductions of sci-
ence Emerson has put poetically in his poem,
“Brahma”: —

“Tf the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

“Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

“They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

“The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.”

250

RELIGION

The physician thinks he aids Nature, as he often
does, especially in surgery, but it is only by the use
of means which Nature has given him. He is a bit
of Nature himself and can lend a hand to the strug-
gling Nature within us. Man’s use of Nature con-
sists of short cuts; he abridges, cut outs the waste
and delays, removes obstructions and directs forces
in new channels,

Til
SCIENCE

N my excursions into nature, science plays a

part, but not the leading part; it is like a silent
monitor and friend who speaks when spoken to.
Or I may say that I carry it in the back of my head
and only now and then in the front. I do not go forth
as an ornithologist taking note of the birds, nor as a
botanist taking note of the flowers, nor as a zodlogist
studying the wild creatures, nor as a biologist, peep-
ing and prying into the mysteries of life, but as a
nature-lover pure and simple, who gathers much
through sympathy and observation.

I am committed to no specific object; my walk is
satisfactory if I fail to add a particle to my store
of nature knowledge.

Oh, the wisdom that grows on trees, that mur-
murs in the streams, that floats.in the wind, that
sings in the birds, that is fragrant in the flowers,
that speaks in the storms — the wisdom that one
gathers on the shore, or when sauntering in the
fields, or in resting under a tree, the wisdom that
makes him forget his science, and exacts only his
love — how precious it all is!

Love of nature does not depend upon exact
knowledge, though exact knowledge has its value.

252

SCIENCE

My interest in the rocks, in the fields, and in the
cliffs above them is enhanced by what science has
told me about them, but isnot summed up by that.
A knowledge of the fundamentals of geology greatly
adds to one’s enjoyment of the earth’s features.
Science is always a good seasoning, but one does
not want too much of a good seasoning.
§

How it makes one wilt to think of the vast time
ahead of us — time to match the abyss of geologic
time behind us! How trivial and futile seem all our
ambitions and all our achievements in the face of
the eternity to come! Consider only ten thousand
years hence —a mere tick of the great Clock of
Time — what or who will be where the nations are
to-day? The natural philosophers think that life
upon this globe may go on two or three million
years yet. What a staggering proposition! Man has
probably been man only a few hundred thousand
years; with the brain and body he now has, only a
few millenniums. What will he be in half a million
years hence? Will any records or memories of our
times last till then? Of course it is possible that
some cosmic catastrophe may blot out our solar
system before that time — possible but not prob-
able.

§

We use the term “celestial mechanics,” and fitly

enough, because the forces we see in operation are
253

FIELD AND STUDY.

physical forces, but how radically unlike any mech-
anism we know among the bodies on the surface of
the earth! With all our science and our mastery
over the physical forces we cannot reproduce on any
scale such a mechanism as that of the moon revoly-
ing around the earth, or as that of the earth
around the sun, or as the revolution of the earth
upon its axis. Every ball we project into space, by
whatever means, spins on its axis, but it sooner or
later stops spinning and falls to the earth; still the
globe spins on through the ether forever. But to
cause one ball to revolve around another without
any tangible connection, as the moon revolves
around the earth, is far beyond the reach of any
mechanics we possess. We name two forces to ac-
count for the phenomenon, centripetal and cen-
trifugal, but these names only cover a mystery. If
there are two such forces at work, why cannot we
invoke them in our mechanisms? Cosmic forces and
cosmic laws transcend terrestrial forces and laws.
They control the spheres and not the bodies on their
surfaces. Perpetual motion is impossible among
tangible bodies on the globe, but it is the rule in
celestial mechanics. Our great cosmic poet, Walt
Whitman, saw this: “There is no stoppage,” he
says, “and never can be.” The whirl and dance of
worlds and systems go on forever. The perpetual
movement in the molecules of matter, in the infin-
itely little, goes on among the orbs of heaven, the
254

SCIENCE

infinitely large. In celestial mechanics there is no
friction; the dissipation of energy does not take
place. How can the All either gain or lose? The Cos-
mos is a circle that has neither beginning nor end.
On the earth’s surface the laws of lines and angles
rule, but among the orbs there is another law. All
the work of man’s hands involve detachment, dis-
continuity, beginnings and endings, under and
over, falling and rising, but outside of the earth
these conceptions do not apply. They apply only in
the realm of parts and fragments. The sun, of course,
dissipates energy, but can the sum total of the energy
of the Cosmos be either increased or diminished?
It is like the dissipation of moisture on the earth —
the water takes another form.

There has been but one cosmic poet, Whitman.
The orbs occupy him more than they have occupied
any other and all other poets.

§

The slowness of the changes in cosmic nature is
suggested by the changes in the period of the
earth’s rotation, which, philosophers calculate, has
been lengthened about one three-hundredth part
of a second since 720 years B.c. This is certainly
holding the astronomical forces to a pretty rigid
account. It seems that Whitman was not quite
within the truth —the scientific truth —in his
rhapsody on the earth when he said it revolved
forever and ever in its own orbit without the un-

255

FIELD AND STUDY

truth of a single second, but we may readily acquit
him of any violation of poetic truth.
g

It is not easy to think of invisible or of dark light,
yet such exists. The ethereal vibrations produced by
the discharge of a Leyden jar obey all the laws of
optics, and yet the eye cannot perceive them; they
are too slow. They are only from a hundred thou-
sand to a million a second. What we call light is an
experience or sensation of the eye, and the eye takes
in only about two thirds of the vibrations that go
out from the sun. Of the potent ultra-violet rays the
eye knows nothing. The retina is incompetent to
respond to these rays, they are so rapid.

§

All energy comes from the sun, and the machin-
ery of the molecular process, the materialists tell
us, determines what form it shall take, whether
a plant or a man. But some agent or force must in-
tervene between the sun and the elements, some-
thing must weave the force into different patterns.
Do the molecules hold the pattern? Evidently the
molecules of the man hold the pattern of the man,
and the molecules of the frog hold the pattern of
the frog, and of the cabbage and the oak, the same.
But what did they hold before they entered into
this copartnership? We have to postulate the organ-
ism to set up this weaving. Carbon and oxygen do
not set up this weaving of their own accord in dead

256

SCIENCE

matter. Before they act, something must have hap-
pened to them in that imaginary world of atomic
motions and attractions. The solar energy was
poured upon the earth millions of years before life
appeared. While we know well that no life could
appear without it, we know also that something
happens to it before it appears as thought or love
in the brain of man. I do not urge that something
has to be added to physical forces to make them
psychical, but they have to be changed, or raised to
a higher power, through some agency that we can-
not translate into human speech.

To reduce our mental and spiritual life to terms
of physics and physiology is to reduce the flower to
ashes, life processes to chemical reactions. The
human heart is a pump, but is it not a pump plus
something else? We recoil from the cold scientific
analysis of any living thing, because the main
thing, the life principle, escapes. Can you find the
mind by dissecting the brain?

§

How man’s knowing faculties have come to the
front during the past hundred years! Time was
when his religious faculties and his emotions led all
the rest, and his artistic powers went hand in hand
with them. But now it is his understanding that
leads. Now his desire above all else is to know things
as they are in and of themselves. He is less religious,
less artistic, less superstitious; his emotions take

Q57

FIELD AND STUDY

a back seat, exact knowledge leads. This change has
its unhandsome side. Life is in many ways less
attractive. We have less veneration, less humility,
less virtue than our fathers. Large, loving, pictur-
esque personalities are becoming rarer and rarer,
both in private and in public life.

Tn his practical life man had to follow his reason
and common sense; he had to have a little practical
science or perish, but in his religious and emotional
life he was under no such pressure; he was free, and
has always been free, to let himself go, to give un-
bridled range to his imagination; hence his fan-
tastic beliefs, and his silly or horrible superstitions.

§

The earth grew as a whole like an organic being.
The hemispheres kept pace with each other in their
development. When the coal was being laid down in
Europe, it was being laid down in America; when
the chalk hills of England and France were being
formed, chalk-beds were being deposited in our
Southwestern States. When the Old Red Sandstone
was forming in Scotland, an equivalent formation
was being built up in this country. The great form-
ative and deformative movements were world-
wide. The continents are all built upon the same
plan, a foundation of granite and a superstructure
of sedimentary rocks, the different formations suc-
ceeding one another in regular order around the
globe. Earthquakes and volcanoes are local; over-

258

SCIENCE

thrusts and the crumpling of the earth’s crust are
local; but the periods of continental subsidence and
declination seem to have been universal, When any
part of Europe went under the ocean, some part of
North America went under, and some part of Asia
and Africa and South America.

We are prone to lose sight of the fact that large
bodies are subject to the same law as small, that
size does not count in nature. The earth is as much
a unit, as much an organic whole, as an apple on a
tree. In the development of life upon the earth the
same thing holds true; no part got much ahead or
lagged much behind the others, the different forms
appeared in the same ages in the different countries.

Whether this came about through migration, or
as the result of parallel lines of development, who
knows? Was life at first local, and then universal
by spreading? Was the horse, the camel, the ele-
phant, the bird, at first local? Was man? Did he
emerge in more than one country and age? If man,
or any other species of animal, had but one single
line of descent, how could that line have escaped
being broken, throughout the appalling vicissitudes
of geologic time? If each form of life had its centre
or point of emergence, what was doing at other
centres or points on the globe at the same time?
If the Creative Energy worked through all matter
why would it not focus itself at many points? Why
only at one point?

259

FIELD AND STUDY

If at any time during the past history of the globe
there was but one pair of animals through which
man could come, what a wonder that he ever got
here! The conditions that produced a species in one
part of the globe, would they not produce the same
species in some other part? The vital, the physi-
cal laws are universal. Take Eocene times in this
country and in Europe, and in Asia and Africa;
was the progenitor of man in each of them, and
was he the same in each? But all this is a pathless
wood.

Tt is difficult to conceive of life.as a tree with only
one trunk, and starting in one particular part of the
earth. It is easier to think of it under the image of
the grass, at home everywhere. The old seas were
universal; here life had its origin. In one part of that
sea, or in all parts? When it got upon the land, was it
at one point only? Or, to turn the question around
a little, the seal, the whale, the manatee, are de-
scendants of land animals. Did each race originate
in a single pair that first took to the water? How
Nature covers up her footsteps: or wipes out her
missing links! Foolish Nature!

§

I love to dwell upon these different stages of
world growth, and see in imagination how it fared
with our continent during each one of them. The
Cretaceous was evidently an age of low lands,
especially in the southern and western parts of the

260

SCIENCE

continents, of extensive inland seas, of vast calca-
reous deposits, of slow sedimentation, and exten-
sive consumption of carbon dioxide. Most of the
western coal measures were laid down during this
age. With the reélevation of the land, the age of
huge reptiles — the dinosaurs, the mesosaurs, the
gigantic marine lizards — came to an end, and the
period of mammalian life, the Tertiary, came in.
During this period the borders: of the continent,
here and there, were under the ocean, from New
Jersey southward, including the whole of Florida
and a large part of the Gulf States and of Texas,
but the interior of the continent:-was at last stable,
and the sea never again encroached upon it.
§

If the parts of the watch had an attraction for
one another analogous to that of chemical affinity,
or analogous to that which prevails among persons,
it is not incredible that a watch might result; or if
the letters of the alphabet, or if words had attrac-
tions for one another, intelligent sentences might
result. The organs of the living body certainly have
no attraction for one another, yet here they are
working together to a single end. But to make a
watch, even if the different parts attracted one an-
other, must there not be an organizing principle —
something to make the watch a unit?

Chemical affinity results in water, it results in
the nitrates, the carbonates, the hydrates, but no

261

FIELD AND STUDY

conceivable attraction could result in the organiza-
tion of these in a living body.

Chemical affinity builds up the nitrates, the car-
bonates, the hydrates, which in turn build up the
living body, but under the control of something
more than chemical affinity. Life could not result
without chemical affinity, but chemical affinity can-
not beget life; at least, it will not in our hands. We
have to postulate the organizing impulse — the im-
pulse under whose control many units work to-
gether to produce one whole, parts subordinated to
parts and in which metabolism and reproduction
and assimilation take place.

A rock is also built up of parts, but they are parts
without function or purposeful relation. Chemical
affinity plays its part, but brings about no change
in the behavior or combination of the elements,
whereas in a living body a host of new carbon com-
pounds are developed.

§

One of the strangest things in the world is that
though we live all our days in an ocean made up of
nitrogen and oxygen, yet one of the most difficult
things for us to do is to capture and appropriate any
of this nitrogen. We take it into our lungs, it bathes
our bodies, in fact we cannot escape from it, and
yet to seize it, to separate it from the oxygen, and
make it unite chemically with some other body and
fertilize our soil with it, is an Herculean task. It ig

262

SCIENCE

in the soil in the shape of air, but only certain plants
can lay hold of it. Minute organisms can do it, and
Niagara can do it, the thunderbolt can do it, but
what else?

§

After we have divided and subdivided matter
mechanically to the utmost point, and reached the
molecule, science takes the further step and divides
it chemically and reaches the atom. Divide a mole-
cule of water chemically and we get the atoms of
hydrogen and oxygen — two of one to one of the
other. Divide a molecule of common salt chemically
and we get one atom of sodium and one of chlorine.
Divide a molecule of lime chemically, and we get
one atom of calcium and one of oxygen. Oxygen is
one of two main elements in things so diverse as
lime, air, and water — the magic of chemical com-
binations! When we breathe, we take into our lungs
one of the main constituents of the rocks and of the
solid ground under our feet. Our blood is red by
virtue of the element that helps hold the world
together. We eat and burn the stuff of diamonds.

The ring of six carbon atoms that make up the
molecule of the diamond, and that is supposed to
account for its hardness — how imaginary it is!
The molecule of most of the elementary gases con-
sists of two atoms of these elements. The molecules
of oxygen and nitrogen in the air are not combined
chemically, but are only mechanically mixed.

263

FIELD AND STUDY
§

Are we not safe in saying that matter ccrtainly
modifies itself, that its incessant physical and chem-
ical changes are self-produced? At any rate. there
is self-activity in the material universe, perpetual
motion of the whole — a whole without boundarics,
which seems a contradiction. Perpetual motion of
a part is impossible; that is, without drawing upon
sources of energy outside itself. And perpetual mo-
tion where nothing is at rest is another contradic-
tion; the motion of the whole is equivalent lo the
rest of the whole. A balloon drifting in the air is at
rest. with reference to the moving air.

Why the forces of the universe do not. find their
equilibrium — the angle of repose, the stale of a
uniform temperature — who knows? Its energy is
stored in the atom as polential energy; what is it
thal converts it into the energy of motion? Accord-
ing to the principles of mechanics should we not
expect the vast machinery of the universe to run
down, or the motion of matter to ccase or become
only potential? We cannot think of the cnergy of |
the universe as being dissipated out of ilsel!; there
is no out of the universe. Energy can only be trans-
formed, not destroyed; it must persist somewhere.
Archimedes might have moved the world had he
had a place outside the world from which to bring
his power to bear.

We can think of the entities as acling upon one

264

SCIENCE

another, but how can a mechanical force act upon
itself? How can a body fall unless there is some
other body for it to fall to? The earth falls toward
the sun, but never gets there; the sun falls toward
some other greater sun, and that toward some other
centre of forces, but what can the whole universe
fall toward? Is it not like asking, Will the puppy
ever overtake his own tail? The self-activity of the
universe seems to me as impossible as any perpetual
motion machine ever dreamed of. Power moves
down an incline of temperature or gravity or a
gradient of some sort. There must be inequality
and fixed points. The inertia of the gun resists the
explosive power of the powder and hurls the ball;
the resistance of the ground enables us to walk.
Power is available to power. To avail ourselves of
gravity we must first overcome it. We must lift the
lever up before we can ask gravity to pull it down.
We have to pit gravity against gravity.

The low uniform temperature of the ocean holds
enough potential power to drive all the ships on its
surface, and more, if we could only bring it to bear
— create an incline down which it could flow. But
this would require an equal power. Then there is an
incline of temperature from the southern oceans to
the northern that causes the great ocean currents,
but their power is not available, because there are
no stable shores to their rivers upon which to plant
our machinery.

265

FIELD AND STUDY

§

How to connect our psychic life with the physical
is just as hard a problem to science as how to con-
nect physical life with inorganic nature. The breach
of continuity seems the same in both cases. How the
spiritual can arise out of the material, and connect
with it, is beyond the reach of science to explain.
The life of man, the life of the soul, seems as limited
and uncertain, when seen on the vast background
of vegetable and animal life, as does the latter when
contrasted with the volume and permanence of the
inorganic order. Man’s supreme gift of reason was
long in coming to the race, and it is long in coming
to the individual, and it comes in full measure to
one, and in scant measure to another. It is like an
extra and fortuitous gift. The great mass of human
life is merely a complex of animal instincts and in-
heritances; free intelligence plays but a very small
part in the sum total. How easily is the reason de-
throned and the mind reduced to chaos; a fall,
a blow on the head, fear, misfortune, overstrain
of any kind, and reason may be gone.

§

If light is not a substance, or an independent
entity, but only a process or a mode of motion, ina
substance, the effect of which upon the eye we call
light, why may we not think of mind or soul in the
same terms?——a molecular motion in the brain
which gives rise to the phenomena we call mental?

266

SCIENCE

There is no mind apart from mind, as there is no
light apart from the eye; there are only the vi-
brations in the ether which give us the sensation of
light.

The mind turns, so to speak, and regards itself.
Reason looks reason in the eye and judges it — an
impossible feat tried by any physical standard.
The eye can see all things but itself; the body can
move itself, but cannot lift itself; in lifting we press
downward with the force we exert upward.

When a certain molecular motion in the brain
ceases, the mind ceases, and presently another
molecular action in the brain substance, called
dissolution, or putrefaction, sets in. The mind has
not gone somewhere, any more than the flame of the
candle has gone somewhere when we blow it out.
Its elements still exist, but their combinations have
changed. The heat has gone into the great sea of
uniform temperature and has changed it no more
than a drop changes the ocean. So far as I can see
there are no terms in which we can discuss the
reality of the soul except in the terms of physical
bodies. To discuss it in theological or metaphysical
terms is like trying to weigh shadows.

The amount of matter now onthe earth that has
once formed or been through the human brain is
considerable — water, lime, phosphorus, iron, and
so on. This matter has gone through what we call
the psychic world. How it has been impressed by it

267

FIELD AND STUDY

we know not, but I like to think of it as having
acquired some new power or susceptibilities, or as
being more and more ready and available for the
psychic sphere. It ought to be easier to people the
world with great men now than in any earlier time,
though it would be hard to prove that it is. It is
certain that the brains of vertebrate animals have
increased in size in late biologic time, and that the
brains of our forbears steadily increased through
the late Tertiary. The historic period is probably
too short to measure the increase of mind-power.

This is discussing the question in terms that have
a definite meaning to us.

That consciousness, which is as much the result
of the action and reaction of matter as a flame is,
can continue irrespective of matter, is unthinkable.
It is certain that light and electricity cannot exist
apart from matter. Mind seems, and is, very real to
mind, but it is has no reality to our bodily senses.
If we had no capacity for love ourselves, could we
recognize love, or anger, had we no capacity for an-
ger? One cannot get behind himself and see what
his consciousness is like. One can lift another, but
not himself.

Things very real to us utterly cease to be. Things
which have no reality in themselves, like shadows,
and tracks in the mud and snow, impress us like real
things.

268

SCIENCE
§

As the human mind advanced in the study of
natural causes, or in scientific knowledge, the time
was bound to come when it would ask for a scien-
tific explanation of life itself. The old teleological
conceptions could no longer satisfy it. It must find
the reason of things in the things themselves. Its
science reveals to it worlds within worlds, deep
beneath deep, at the same time that it shows the
universe to be one, rounded and'complete in itself,
and that there is nothing more potent or mysterious
than the common elements and forces that are
involved in our daily lives.

Life is a physical phenomenon; is it therefore
capable of a physical explanation? The only expla-
nation science can give must be a physico-chemi-
cal one; it would be transcending its own sphere to
give any other. The only explanation it can give of
death must be a physico-chemical one. For any
other explanation of life or death we must appeal
to our philosophy or to our religion, which is our
philosophy suffused with personal emotion. Science
must and does seek objective proof; philosophy and
religion seek the approbation of the reason and the
intuitions. The question is, have either of the latter
authority over science on such a question as the
nature and origin of life? Many men of science say
“No” with emphasis. Long study of the chemis-
try and mechanism of life convinces such men

269

FIELD AND STUDY

as Haeckel, Verworn, Tyndall, Huxley, Schifer,
Loeb, and others that life is a product of the
material forces, while minds with a philosophical
and religious turn, like Sir Oliver Lodge and Henri
Bergson, and others equally eminent, feel com-
pelled to invoke a psychic or transcendental prin-
ciple to account for life — something in matter but
not of it.

For my own part I can do nothing with such a
question without some sort of philosophy. Science
is convincing as far as it goes; it shows me how
inevitably life is bound up with the physico-chem-
ical forces, but when it has finished its explana-
tion I feel constrained to ask, “Is that all?” Is a
description or analysis of life-processes an adequate
account of life itself? Is a living body only the sum
of its physical and chemical forces? Is a man, for in-
stance, like any other mechanism, only the total of
the parts and elements which a chemical and phys-
ical analysis of him reveals? Does not the unity
of a living body have a significance which a me-
chanical unity does not have?

§

It seems almost paradoxical that deep-sea fishes,
subject to a pressure of thousands of pounds to the
square inch, should have tender and loosely knit
bodies. One would think that such a pressure would
beget very firm and compact bodies. Is it to be in-
ferred that if the atmospheric pressure upon our

270

SCIENCE

own bodies were many times greater than it is, our
muscles, too, would be soft and flabby? We are
entirely unconscious of this pressure and our move-
ments are not at all hampered by it. But if we could
step into a room or an enclosure from which this
pressure were removed, we should probably come
very near exploding, as do the deep-sea fishes when
suddenly brought to the surface. Doubtless under
higher pressure our bodies would be much smaller
than they are, as all the deep-sea fishes are very
small — only a few inches long. Toward the surface
they increase in size, and we find. the whale, an air-
breathing animal, the largest of all. Does it follow
that under a lighter atmosphere our bodies would
be larger and firmer? A low barometer, a condition
of storm, means a light atmosphere, and if we are
conscious of its effect at all, it is a sense of weight;
while a high barometer gives us a sense of buoyancy
and elasticity. The men on Mars, then, other con-
ditions being the same, should be larger than those
upon the earth. But the forms of life on Jupiter,
Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune should be smaller,
because these planets all have very dense at-
mospheres.

_ Nature in the deep sea is the same old equivocal
Nature that we know at the surface — hesitating,
fickle, contradictory. The effect of the darkness in
the abysmal depths upon some forms is to make
the eyes very small, or to obliterate them entirely,

Q71

FIELD AND STUDY

so that scales grow over the places where the eyes
should be. In other cases the effect is precisely the
opposite — the eyes are larger, becoming in a few
species like enormous goggles.

IV
EVOLUTION

VOLUTION has been a hard road to travel,

but are not all roads that lead upward more

or less hard? The downward roads are the easy ones

— the road of degeneration or devolution — no pain,
no struggle, no effort, only placid acquiescence.

The sea squirt begins life as a free, active little
fish, a simple vertebrate with powers of locomotion;
but it soon takes the road of devolution instead of
evolution; it attaches itself to a stone, or a shell, or
other fixed object, loses its special sense organs
and the beginnings of a backbone, and becomes a
“mere rooted bag with a double neck.” The barna-
cle takes the easy downward road in the same way,
degenerating from a free, swimming, six-legged,
compound-eyed creature, like a young crab or a
shrimp, into a mere immovable shellfish attached
to a rock or a ship-bottom.

§

The main factor in the progress of evolution is, of
course, the tendency to variation, and this tend-
ency seems to become more and more pronounced
as life proceeds and becomes more complex. It is
more pronounced in the higher forms than in the
lower. This fact doubtless accounts for the more

273

FIELD AND STUDY

rapid strides of evolution in later geologic time.
The chances to win become greater and greater.
More and more doors are opened, more and more
new ventures are made. Where the invertebrate
had but few chances of becoming a vertebrate in
Silurian time, the variations were so slight and so
slow, the reptile had many more chances of becom-
ing a mammal in Mesozoic time, because the prin-
ciple of variation was so much more active.

As an animal’s wants increase, the more strained
will be its relations with its environment; and, the
more it is out of sympathy with its environment,
the greater will be the variation. The cows along
the St. John’s River in Florida spend much of their
time knee-deep or deeper in the water, grazing on
the grassy bottom. They are out of sympathy with
their environment. Should this continue long
enough, no doubt these cattle will begin to show
some marked variation toward a better understand-
ing between themselves and the St. John’s River.

When we reach man, the tendency to variation
is more pronounced than in any other animal —
mental variation. Had this not been so, man’s prog-
ress had been much slower. The rank and file of
mankind have been led forward by a few minds that
varied vastly from the common type. There have
been favored races and favored states and favored
ages and favored families in this respect — one
brother differing from another as day from night,

Q7T4

EVOLUTION

mediocrity every now and then blossoming into
genius.

The progress of man must have been very slow
even after he got up off from all fours. When he hit
upon a language that went beyond the emotional
language or cries and calls of the lower orders, and
stood for ideas, mental processes, his progress must
have been greatly accelerated. Then when he in-
vented tools and weapons and began to acquire
some mastery over outward nature, he took an-
other tremendous stride forward. Then his social
and family instincts were a great gain. It is true the
lower animals have these and yet do not progress.
In man there is from the first a new capacity —
educability, as Lankester calls it — and this makes
every step forward an incentive to another step.
Something in him invented a language beyond that
of the brutes; this reacted upon him and stimulated
his mental growth. The family and social life reacted
upon him and stimulated his powers of organization
and awakened his spirit of altruism. He differs from
all other animals in the nature of his reactions.
There is something in him that profits by all his
experiences. He learned to think. What a stride was
that! It gave him the use of fire, of the wind, of the
currents. His reaction is a bound upward. He began
to see things external to himself and to consider
his relation to them. In his language he stored up
mental power which the lower animals do not. He

Q75

FIELD AND STUDY

was the first animal to see things as they are apart
from himself. We see this in his first rude drawings
while he was yet a cave-dweller, and in the orna-
mentation of his weapons and tools. He was the
first and only animal to see wholes, as well as parts,
to see the landscape, the sky, the stars. He looked
out and up. Your dog heeds the rain and the snow,
but he does not heed the gathering clouds; he sees
the fox or the rabbit, but not the prospect their
course opens up to him; he profits by experience,
but he does not accumulate a store of knowledge.

When man first developed wonder, awe, rever-
ence, superstition, he had got well launched upon
his career.

How the darkness deepens as we go back into
prehistoric times. Man’s rude stone implements
shed the last ray of light. When we get back into
geologic time all is black night ‘save as the strata
reveal the remains of his forbears.

§

We seem to see life like a traveler on the road
hastening as it nears the goal. Who knows how
many millions of years it lingered with the first low
marine forms, or how many with the first inverte-
brates, or how many more with the fishes, or with
the reptiles, or with the huge mammalian forms?
It seems as if it began to hurry in the middle, or
Mesozoic, period. When the lemurs and baboons
were in sight in the Cenozoic age, it quickened its

276

EVOLUTION

pace still more. From the apelike man of the latter
part of this period it made rapid strides till the first
rude man appears in the Quaternary age. His re-
mains appear so sudderily as to give some color to
the special creation theory.

§

To those persons born and educated during the
last thirty or forty years the idea of evolution and
of our descent from some lower animal form cannot
prove so new and startling a doctrine as it was to
those of us who were born and schooled fifty or
more years ago. These things are in the air now and
go along with the whole progress of physical science.
But prior to Darwin’s time, and long after the pub-
lication of his “Origin of Species,” the idea of our
animal ancestry was simply shocking, and, to the
vast majority of minds, unbelievable. All our creeds
and traditions and most of our science, to say noth-
ing of our instinctive pride of origin, stood in the
way of its acceptance. Our eyes had not yet been
opened to the true wonders of nature and how
divinity hedges us about.

§

All through the early geologic: ages life was dif-
fuse; a steady concentration has taken place as
time has gone on. As life became more complex it
became less broadcast and haphazard. This was
the condition of progress; more organization, more
division of labor, more specialization; from vague,

Q77

FIELD AND STUDY

irresponsible mob-life to the unity of organized and
law-directed life, as in human progress; from
myriads to scores or hundreds; from the chance
of winds and waters to parental care and protection.

The first life multiplied by fission or division;
later the stage of egg-laying was reached. The fish
lays thousands of eggs and trusts to luck; the
higher insects such as the ants and bees lay few eggs
and care for them and nurse the young. The more
intelligence, the more restricted is reproduction.
The element of chance has less play; there is less
waste, more system and less risk. The progress of
nature in this respect suggests the progress from rude
pioneer life to our more specialized and intensive
life. The fish produces thousands of eggs, the am-
phibian hundreds, the reptile tens, the birds five,
the mammals one. Nature is lavish only with her
lower forms; free with her pennies, but stingy with
her dollars.

§

“There is no innate or necessary tendency in each
being to its own advaricement in the scale of organ-
ization,” says Darwin; yet he says there is in all
living forms an inherent tendency to variation —
that is, to push on and out in all directions, an
inherent activity or push of life, just as there is in a
fountain to flow and make itself a channel. Is not
this the necessary tendency that Darwin denies?
The fountain may vary its course every rod by rea-

278

EVOLUTION

son of obstacles in its way, but it would not vary at
all were it not for the push of the water behind it.
The inherent tendency to vary implies an inherent
force or effort. Only living beings struggle; it is the
characteristic of life to struggle, to push on. The
mechanical forces do not struggle, they clash and
seek repose; vital forces struggle and seek ascend-
ancy; the body struggles against disease germs, and
the germs struggle against the body; it is a trial of
strength.
§

What natural cause keeps any species of animal
in check, or accounts for its superabundance, is a
question not easily answered. Take our common
red weasel, for example: it is very hardy and pro-
lific; it has few or no natural enemies; it is active
and fearless; it can climb trees and is nimble on
the ground; it preys upon a great variety of small
rodents and birds, having such power over them
that it overtakes and kills the rabbit, which is much
more fleet of foot; and yet it is one of our rare
animals; one would say there are hundreds of
rats, chipmunks, red squirrels, and rabbits, to one
weasel. Though I live in the country and spend much
time in the fields and woods, I do not see on an
average one weasel in a year. What keeps them in
check? Some, to me, unknown factor. In our coun-
try the flesh-eating animals are rare in comparison
to the non-flesh-eaters, or to the miscellaneous

279

FIELD AND STUDY

feeders. The more varied an animal’s diet, the more
the animal abounds. How vastly more numerous
the crows than the hawks! The crow is an omnivo-
rous feeder. Rats and mice are omnivorous feeders.
Bears have a wider dietary than wolves and cats.
Squirrels are wide feeders. Weasels are very narrow
feeders; they are blood-suckers. The purely insectiv-
orous birds are less numerous than the birds that
feed on both seeds and insects. The English sparrow
is an omnivorous feeder, hence its numbers. Some
birds seem to have a fuller measure of life than
others, — our robin, for instance. What a hustler
— breeding three times during the season!
§

Life to most creatures is both a battle and a festi-
val. The Darwinian struggle for existence is a battle
of varying degrees of intensity, while the breeding-
instinct, which is the central and dominating fact
in all animal life, gives rise to the festival. True it is
that the festival is at times red with battle, and the
battle may have gay and festive moments, but on
the whole the two phases of life:are pretty clearly
defined.

§

How are we going to reconcile the rule of uni-
versal nature, that might makes right, that the
strong do and must prevail over the weak, with the
ethical and individual standards by which we try
to conduct our lives? Is there any ground of recon-

280

EVOLUTION

ciliation? Is the idea as unthinkable as that two and
two make five? or as that a part is greater than the
whole?

The whole tremendous drama. of evolution, from
the first unicellular life up to man, and from the
dawn of history to the present time, illustrates and
confirms the idea that power does prevail and has
prevailed through all time, in the organic and in the
inorganic world. The weak go to the wall, the battle
is to the strong, the race is to the fleet, the wind
is not tempered to the shorn lamb. Inferior races
give way to superior, savage man goes down before
the more civilized, science crushes ignorance and
superstition.

Professor Osborn in his “Men of the Old Stone
Age” shows how race succeeded race in Europe tens
of thousands of years ago, and that a growth in
brain was a growth in power. Do we not sce that in
every community, every neighborhood, the strong
men prevail over the weak — brains, knowledge,
judgment, accumulate the wealth, build up the big
business, shape the policy of the state and the na-
tion? It is as inevitable as are gravity and cohesion.
The ideal in this respect is the man who in the com-
petition of life succeeds by perfectly fair means, —
by superior industry, skill, judgment, economy, —
who not only lifts himself up, but carries the com-
munity up with him. That success is often attained
by unfair means does not invalidate the principle.

281

FIELD AND STUDY

The confusion and contradiction in our minds on
the question of might versus right begins when we
introduce our moral standards into universal prob-
lems. Right is a relative and limited term. Nature
outside of man knows it not; she knows only power,
progress, success. Right and wrong apply to our
conscious human conduct, and not to the processes
of Nature. It is wrong for me consciously to cheat
my neighbor; it is right for me to be a better farmer,
a better mechanic, a better tradesman than he is,
and thus win over him in the competition of life.
Natural right and moral right. are two separate
things. It is not wrong for fire to burn us, or floods
to drown us, or disease to consume us; it is only
natural. Winds and waves are guiltless, no matter
how much we suffer from them. When there is no
conscience, there is neither right nor wrong. Our
natural rights are limited to the use of the means
by which we can make the most of ourselves with-
out hindrance to others.

Where, then, in human affairs are we justified in
saying that might makes right? Only in those cases
where results flow from causes that are over and
above our conscious wills and purpose. Power will
make itself felt. Natural law rules largely in the
human realm.

Shall the meek inherit the earth? Can they? Sup-
pose the law of love, of good-will, of codperation, of
doing to others as you would be done hy, had pre-

282

EVOLUTION

vailed throughout the biological and historical ages,
instead of the rule of the strong, of the dominance
of might over right as we see right; suppose one
species had not preyed upon another, the bird upon
the insect, the cat upon the mouse, the lion upon the
antelope, the carnivorous upon the herbivorous and.
the graminivorous, or one tribe of man upon an in-
ferior tribe; instead of all this, suppose the rule of
justice, of fair play, as we see them, — gentleness,
meekness, pity, the strong giving way to the weak,
the little fishes favored by the big, — what would
have been the probable effects upon the course of
organic development? Could the process of evolu-
tion have resulted in the higher forms? If all Na-
ture’s ways were ways of gentleness and justice
and love, where would the living world be standing
to-day?

Or, if we confine our consideration to man alone,
what would his development have been had the rule
of love and disinterestedness prevailed? Could there
have been any progress? If the Cro-Magnon man,
of which Professor Osborn writes so lucidly, had
not forced to the wall the earlier type of men,
would Europe be what it is to-day?

Does not our supposition strike at the very foun-
dation of development? Would there have been
any superior races, any ascent in the scale of life,
had not the strong prevailed over the weak?

Does the question of right and wrong come into

283

FIELD AND STUDY

the consideration of the matter? Do our human
standards apply in the struggle of ‘organic evolution?
Is it right for the bird to devour the worm or for one
insect to destroy another? or for the big fish to eat
up the little fish? or for the wolf to devour the
lamb? See to what straits our standards of right and
' wrong lead us! In nature that is right which suc-
ceeds; unless might is successful. it is not might —
the other side is might, and therefore right.
§

Start this flame of life going and it goes on. The
world is full of matter that is combustible to it; the
very foundations of the globe are its material. But
how to get the first spark? The Promethean fire we
do not need to steal from heaven; we can kindle it
by mechanical and chemical means any time; but
the fire of life we cannot kindle. We have to evoke
it from heaven, by means of a miracle. And how it
differs from the other! The fire of life burns its own
ashes over and over. Yet Science asks, Is there any
more reality to vitalism than there would be to
igneousism?

§

The need begets the tool and the tool begets the
need. The need begat the saw and hammer. There
was this activity, this push of life, this feeling of
struggle behind it. Man would have had no tools or
weapons or inventions had he not had a ceaseless
and irrepressible feeling or desire to extend himself,

284

EVOLUTION

to subdue and possess the world. Whence this feel-
ing? Is it, too, of mechanical origin? Is it the same
throughout organic nature? The seed does not feel
the need of wings, but something feels it. All seeds
need to be distributed, hence their hooks, and wings,
and springs, and other devices. The nuts need to
be distributed also, and the animals do it in their
own behoof, and Nature gets what drops from their ©
tables. The jays and crows lend wings to many nuts.
The red squirrel lends feet. The push of life again,
the procreant urge and urge of Nature. The expans-
ive forces of inorganic nature are mechanical, but
this push of life is another matter. The necessity
for teeth begat teeth, but there would have been no
necessity had it not been for this expansive or pro-
gressive force of life, this push of development; and
whence this comes, who knows? This push is not in
inorganic matter.
§

When we look at the problem of life through the
eyes of the idealist and visualize its phenomena, we
seem to see life as something incalculable and myste-
rious in nature. It appears like a visitant from an-
other sphere. It seems utterly foreign to all merely
mechanical and chemical processes as we know
them in unorganized matter. These forces go their
unceasing round seeking a stable equilibrium, the
vital forces go through their cycle seeking an un-
stable equilibrium. Life breaks up the old routine

285

FIELD AND STUDY

of the mechanical and chemical forces. It does not
annul them, but it makes use of them for its own
behoof. See these forces careering over the earth’s
surface for untold ages, going their endless and fate-
ful rounds, dissolving and re-forming the rocks,
making the soil, clearing the atmosphere, depositing
the clay-banks, the sand-banks, the gravel-banks,
the marl-banks, the phosphate-banks, scooping out
the valleys, laying the foundations of the hills, col-
lecting the waters into the rivers and lakes and seas,
establishing the weather-system of the globe, pro-
viding for the rains, the snows, the dews, — matter
and energy supreme, knowing no master, the only
activities in matter mechanical and chemical. Then
suddenly, or gradually, as you please, a new activity
appears, the vital, and after long ages a new power,
the mind and soul of man. The mechanical and
chemical forces have found their master. Man turns
them into new channels, or reverses them and takes
all sorts of liberties with them. He makes them do
his work, he combines and codrdinates them in a
way they were never combined before. Psychic
power is the master of the physico-chemical power.
§

Life creeps or swims before it can walk, and it
walks before it can fly. It feels before it can see, and
it sees before it can hear or smell. It has sensation
before it has perception. It has instincts and reflex
actions long before it has consciousness and reason.

286

EVOLUTION

It has nerve-ganglia and a spinal cord long before it
has a brain. It has a notochord before it has a spinal
cord. It feeds before it has a stomach or a mouth; it
moves before it has limbs. It has a body before it
has a head; it multiplies before it has sex.

The muscles of our trunk are inherited from the
tubular body-wall of worms; the shoulder and thigh
muscles were developed by fish to move the fins.
Arms and legs grew stronger through a long series of
generations of amphibians and reptiles. Hands and
fingers were developed by arboreal animals. These
mature in the same order in the human child to-
day. Our muscles grow younger as we pass from the
trunk outward to the fingers or-downward to the
toes. The muscles of the neck are very old, those of
the jaws are younger, those of the tongue and lips
and the muscles of expression are younger still.

“Late in Tertiary times primitive man or his
anthropoid ancestor forsook the trees and lived
upon the ground.”

The gigantic forms in animal and in vegetable life
largely gave place to lesser forms in both spheres.
With the advent of the lesser forms in animal life
came an increase in the size of the brain, muscular
power declined and a new kind of power, nerve
power, came in. Yet not in all forms; the horse went
up from small to large, so did the elephant, so did
man, and a few other forms.

Size and power seem by no means to have been

287

FIELD AND STUDY

the determining factors in the evolution of species.
The early gigantic forms all disappeared, and lesser
forms finally came into possession of the earth.

How the machinery for eating and fighting devel-
oped before the machinery for thought developed!
Behold the size of the under parts of the heads
of the mammals below us — all jaw and mouth.
When the cow or the horse pauses and looks at you,
—no, they do not look, they stare, — when the cow
or the horse pauses and stares at you in that blank
kind of way, one wonders what’ is passing in that
small cupful of brains at the top of their long, bony
heads. Not thought surely, yet some kind of molecu-
lar activity. Yet the bird has a much larger brain,
in proportion to its body, than has man, and the ant
much larger than the bird. Our yea-and-nay meth-
ods are inadequate to deal with nature,

Vv
NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

HE bluebird is a bird without fault. All its

ways and sounds and habits and looks are
pleasing. It neither eats your fruit like the robin,
nor daubs your porch with mud like the pheebe,
nor brings a plague of bird lice as the latter often
does. It is half-domestic like robin and phcebe
without any of their vices. It does not awake you
‘in the early morning, nor tease your ear at any time
of day with its persistently reiterated notes. As an
insect-destroyer it must equal any of them, and as
a harbinger of spring it is the most welcome of them
all. It comes to its nest and young in the hollow of
the limb on the corner of my porch as softly as a
shadow, and when feeding its young it comes about
every minute nearly all day, till the twilight deep-
ens. All its ways are ways of gentleness. It is a bird
without snap or emphasis or sharpness of any kind.
I always visualize its note as blue like its back. Its
wing gestures are as pleasing as its note. The bird
has the quality of the thrush, with a touch of
something cerulean.

Certain of our familiar birds, like the wren, get
on your nerves. Even the darling song sparrow will,
at the height of its season, go through its repertoire

289

FIELD AND STUDY

of five songs before your door till you are fain to
cry out, ‘Oh, do take a rest!” But from first to
last, from April to October, or November, the pres-
ence and the voice of the bluebird has the effect
of harmony and repose — soothing, tranquillizing.
Not a song-bird, strictly speaking, it does not strike
an attitude and lift up its voice in a definite series
of notes, like the song sparrow, yet its every sound
and call is musical, and its every movement har-
monious. Our fine songsters play their parts well,
but their period of song is brief, while the bluebird
— well, is always the bluebird. It keeps its tone
and quality the whole season. How engaging is the
habit it has in late September or October of coming
back to its deserted nesting-places and lingering
fondly about them! One cannot be certain whether
it is the parent birds, or some of the young, that
return. They peep into the cavity, warble softly to
each other, and then take turns entering it briefly.
It is emphatically a home bird. In my bird heaven
the bluebird shall occupy the nearest porch and
shall always comfort me with his gentleness and
composure. I should tire of the Old-World lark and
the nightingale as hourly companions; they are too
sharp and vociferous; but the bluebird is as sooth-
ing as the blue sky itself.
§

The most amusing bluff that I know in wild na-

ture is that put up by the male wasp when ycu seize
290

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

him in your hand and he makes believe sting. He
goes through with an exact series of movements
that ought to cause you to drop him as you would
a red-hot coal. He curves his body and thrusts out
the stinging end right and left most viciously, feel-
ing for a vulnerable place on your flesh and pro-
truding a sort of stinger-scabbard: minus the stinger.
The sight of it all fairly makes one wince. Of course,
he does not know he is bluffing, there is no such
word in his dictionary, but he seems to think he is
punishing you severely. It is as if a soldier in battle
were firing blank cartridges without knowing it.
You may know the male wasp by his yellow face.
Beware of the black-faced ones.

There is a good deal of make-believe in the play
of animals, but I recall nothing analogous to this bit
of serious acting of the stingless wasp. Certain bugs
will feign death and drop to the ground, but I know
of no mammal that will do so. To decoy their ene-
mies away from their nests and young, ground-
building birds will feign lameness and paralysis, but
this is an instinct that serves a different purpose
than that of the stingless sting of the male wasp.

§

As Nature has dowered man with more and
higher gifts than she has any other creature, so it
may be said that she has, on the other hand, been
more cruel with him than with any other animal,
More enemies beset him, more hostile germs prey

291

FIELD AND STUDY

upon him than upon any other creature. His list of
dangerous diseases, from which the lower animals
are practically immune, is a long one. He pays a big
price for his gift of reason. He makes more mistakes
and suffers more accidents than any other creature.
He has invented tools and explosives and he is
maimed or blown to pieces by them. He has in-
vented destructive weapons and he is the victim of
devastating wars; he has conquered the sea at the
risk of shipwrecks and destruction; he has at last
conquered the air and in so doing has opened the
way to new failures and catastrophes. Every advan-
tage has its price; every new conquest has its attend-
ant perils. Human reason takes man out of the safe
round of the uneventful lives of the lower orders;
new enemies, new perils, new anguish, are the prices
paid for new achievements.

§

The cunning of the fox is proverbial, but see how
his wit fails him under absolutely new conditions!
Dan Beard tells, in his delightful “Animal Book,”
of two tame red foxes that he once had and that he
kept chained together. At night they used to prowl
about the neighborhood a good deal and they fre-
quently came to grief in this way; they would each
try to go through separate holes in the fence or
hedge, when, of course, the chain would bring them
up short; and they never learned the trick of one
following the other through the same hole. A mere

292

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

fraction of the cunning and sagacity that they
showed in the line of their inherited instincts would
have led them to do this. But the chain was a new
thing; artificial conditions had been imposed upon
them; there had been no chains and collars in the
fox traditions; hence their inability to extricate
themselves from the conditions in which these
things involved them.

And yet the fox knows pretty well how to deal
with a new thing in the shape of a steel trap. Yes,
because the trap awakens his inborn cunning and
suspicion, while the chain that held Dan Beard’s
foxes got them into difficulties that had no such
effect, and that called for powers of reflection rather
than traits of cunning.

The lower animals do not reflect, do not return
upon themselves and consider the means to an end.
When they use the means it is. from an impulse,
and not from a thought. Do you suppose, for in-
stance, that the oriole has considered the advantage
of strings and horsehairs in the building of its nest?
or the cliff swallows the advantage of clay mud over
muck or other materials? ;

§

Who that has seen trained seals has not been
struck with what appears to be their remarkable
intelligence? Yet the Bering Sea seal commissioners
had this experience with them: At the killing time
they tried to separate the young males or “kill-

293,

FIELD AND STUDY

ables’’ from the old ones of the same band by driv-
ing the herd through a wooden chute or runway,
with two valvelike doors, a small one and a large
one, at the end. The small door would open for the
small seals, and the large door for the large ones.
But the seals persisted in following one another.
The most experienced males would beat their noses
against a closed door through which they had seen
the seal before them just pass. That the door had
been shut, and another, larger, one opened beside it
made no difference.
§

Some friends of mine caught a fish called a sea-
robin and kept it confined in a large pan of water
for a day and a night. The fish continually swam
round and round in a circle in the pan, seeking an
outlet, so that when they finally carried it out in the
bay and let it go, it continued to swim around in a
circle. They carried it farther out, but it was still
confined in the pan to all intents and purposes, and
they left it.

§

Sometimes in confinement an animal, if left
alone, will give us a glimpse of its real mental make-
up. I am thinking of Mr. Beebe’s account of the
wood ibis at the Bronx. The bird would “stand in
a cement-lined pool and for hours patiently tap the
bottom with its foot, trembling with eagerness the
while, as he watches for impossible worms to come

294

NATURE AND NATURAL. HISTORY

to the surface.” The bird at such times is a mere
automaton, impelled by its inherited memory. No
doubt that in the laboratory this habit could be
broken up, and a new habit formed in its place.

§

One autumn morning just at break of day a friend
of mine was sitting in a hemlock-wood beside a little
trout-brook, waiting for partridges to begin to move.
As he sat there he heard something coming up the
stream toward him, splashing in the water and
rattling the stones. Presently he saw a raccoon
coming up the stream, turning over the stones in
the shallow water, and feeding on something be-
neath them. What was surprising, the coon turned
the stones over with his nose, and not with his
paws, as one would have expected. So deft and
handy is the coon with his paws, and yet he rooted
the stones with his nose like a pig.

§

Cowboys tell me that when one of their herd gets
mired, and they have to rope it and drag it out, the
first impulse of the beast is to gore its rescuers. It
has no conception of the service that has been ren-
dered it. The mire and the ropes and the rough
usage enrage it, and it seeks to avenge itself upon
the herdsmen. Just so will a dog or a cat, caught
in a trap try to bite the hand that liberates it.

295

FIELD AND STUDY
§

What an uncertain and accidental thing seems the
gift of long life! It comes to the just and to the in-
just, to the wise and to the foolish. It is as indis-
criminating as the rainfall. I see almost daily a man
walking the street here, going to a saloon for his
glass of grog, who is ninety-three. He never had
much intellect, and it seems to have grown less and
less as the years have passed. In my youth I knew
a man, a very ordinary person, who lived to be
considerably over a hundred; he lived alone in
his last years, and lived much like a beast. The
length of his years was no measure of his worth
to himself or to his fellows. Only recently a man in
Sullivan County, a common laborer, but a worthy
man, is said to have reached the great age of one
hundred and twelve years. I know a sculptor who
went up there and made a bust of him. An old
fellow in my native town lived to be eighty-three,
and was drunk much of the time, often lying out
half the night in cold and storms. I happen to think
of him now because I saw his name recently in the
cemetery. Sir William Temple relates that he had
known two persons who lived to be over one hun-
dred and twelve, a man and a woman — the latter
a servant, the former a common laborer.

On the other hand, how many men of invaluable
service to the world fall by the wayside before they
have lived out half their days.. If, with his tre-

296

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

mendous vitality, Roosevelt had also had the gift
of length of days, our debt to him would doubtless
have been even greater than it is.. Surely the gift of
length of days is neither a wage nor a reward of
merit. You have it, or you do not have it, and the
Eternal is indifferent. It is hard to kill a man who
has it, and it cannot be bestowed upon a man who
has it not. How vain to try to find anything like
our prudence, our economies, our foresight in the
ways of Nature! Nature is a spendthrift and a miser,
both at the same time.
§

Nearly every season, in early fall, after days of
wind and cloud and rain, there comes one of those
still, clear, breathless mornings —the first fall
hush in nature. Every sound by man or beast stands
out on the great background of silence. The distant
barking of a dog, or lowing of kine, or cawing of
crows, carries far. The very air seems resonant. I
hear the clucking or chucking of a chipmunk far off.
Then the call of a solitary robin strikes my ear. A
moment later from the orchard comes the bur-r-r-r-r
of a red squirrel. Then I hear the scream of the
jay in the beech-woods. The slightest sound breaks
the great stillness as a pebble starts the ripples on
a smooth surface of water. The fog in the valley
barely stirs, like a half-awakened sleeper. It has not
energy enough to creep up the hill. A few mornings
ago it wallowed up to our doorstep and lay down

297

FIELD AND STUDY

upon it for half an hour. It was ‘an unwelcome vis-
itor; but this morning the sun is working its magic
upon it and will leave no trace behind. In certain
conditions of the atmosphere the valley fog is slowly
burned up where it lies; at other times it ebbs and
flows, rises and sinks at intervals like the lava in a
crater. It comes up over the hills three or four
hundred feet above its night level, then withdraws,
then returns. It does this several times as if seeking
a way to escape. This ghost of a lake or river is as
uneasy when day comes as any other ghost, but by
or before ten o’clock it seems to pull itself together
and begins to rise upward in scattered flocks or
small clouds, reaching up to its kindred, the first
clouds that are passing over. It is precisely like a
flock of geese rising upward to join other flocks
that are calling down to them from above.

The fog forms in the valley at night, just as water
would accumulate there if Noah’s flood were to
come again, but not for the same reason, or under
the same law. The water seeks its level, and its
level is at the lowest point within reach. The level
of the fog is in the stratum of air where the clouds
float. Hence, after all, one may say the fog seeks its
level also, but it is up and not down. The fog is only
a finer rain. It is white because of the air it holds.
Its minute particles of water become little balloons
inflated with air; it would take thousands of them
to make one raindrop. Both rain and fog are the

298

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

result of a chill or a fall in temperature. In these
mountain valleys, where the sky is clear and the air
still, a fog is pretty sure to form during the night.
The colder air flows down into the valley and its
moisture is condensed into fog.

Now at a quarter after nine o’clock the fog has be-
come a mere wraith. It is forming a thin, frail stra-
tum above the valley beneath which I can see that
the air is clear, save a bluish haze which will linger
a little while after all signs of fog have vanished.

The fog in the valley is only the phenomenon of
the dew on a different scale. There is no dew on a
windy or cloudy night, or during times of drought.
Such things set one to thinking about the circuit
of the waters—how many forms this element
assumes, and how much depends upon it — from
the earth to the clouds, through the agency of the
sun, from the clouds to the earth in the rains and
the dews, from the earth to the sea again through
the channels of streams and rivers. On this round
it figures in the rainbow, frowns or flushes in the
clouds, glances like a diamond in the dewdrop,
courses through the cells of plants and trees, and
through the heart and veins of man, and of all ani-
mal life — terrible in floods and waves, sublime in
the great cataracts, a bridal veil in the mountain
waterfalls, a magic mirror in placid lakes and rivers,
transporting, transforming; a ministering angel at
one time, a destroying demon at.another, the chief

299

FIELD AND STUDY

builder and shaper of the surface of the globe, and _
the key to all life that moves upon it. It has been
through the heavenly circuit; it has been a breath,
a painted cloud, a trembling dewdrop; it has been
the lair of the lightning; it has pulsed in the heart
of the storm; it has fertilized the hills; it has eroded
the rocks; it has been the giver of life and the giver
of death,

With the sun at one side and the earth at the
other, what a tremendous and, on the whole, bene-
ficent elemental machine is set going! Noiseless,
exhaustless, all-powerful, wound up by the primal
impulse that set the worlds in motion, it will not run
down till the worlds become sterile with the lapse of
geologic and astronomic time.

§

Who or what taught the birds, both parents and
nestlings, to practice sanitary measures about their
nests? The young of all kinds that I know of never
defile the nest till they leave it, and the parents
are diligent in waiting upon them before that time.
No more regular is the opening of the mouth of the
young for food than is the movement which indi-
cates to the parent that the refuse of the food is to
be disposed of. These sanitary precautions are a
part of the primal, fundamental paternal and ma-
ternal solicitude over the well-being of living things
that. pervades all nature. This solicitude keeps the
balance of the account on the side of life.

300

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY
§

When we are hard-pressed for an explanation of
natural phenomena we fall back upon the nature of
things. That is the final court of appeal. We can
take no step beyond that. It is a generalization so
vast that all the mysteries of creation may be hid-
den in it. The question of the nature of things is in-
volved in the question of the nature of the human
mind that speculates about the nature of things.
There is the nature of things, and there is the na-
ture of man. How are the two related? How do they
interact? Is not man a part of nature? What is com-
mon between a man and a rock, or a man and a
river, or a man and a tree, or a man and his horse,
or his dog?

The same primary elements and forces are in all,
the same chemistry, the same physics. In all ver-
tebrate animals the metabolism is about the same,
and the ontogeny and philogeny. Protoplasm is
the physical basis of life in both the animal and the
vegetable; the cell is the unit of structure, the tree
breathes or takes in oxygen through its leaves, as
man through his lungs. The sunlight does for the
tree what it does not do for the animal; it enables
it to appropriate the carbon dioxide from the air.
This poisons the animal, but nourishes the plant.
Man must get his carbon through his food. The
vegetable world stands between him and the min-
eral. His only direct hold upon the world of non-

301

FIELD AND STUDY

living matter is upon the air through his lungs, and
upon the water through his digestive tract. Of all
the elements, he gets air alone at first hand; he
gets water at first and also at second hand, through
the tissues of animals and vegetables. He lives in
a sea of nitrogen and he cannot live without this
element, but he is powerless to appropriate it from
the air, as he is to appropriate hydrogen from water,
or iron from the ore.

It is the nature of the oak to produce acorns, of
the apple-tree to produce apples. Each after its
kind. But what makes the kind — that is the mys-
tery. The same chemical elements, more or less, the
same physical processes in an oak and in a maple,
the same water, the same soil, the same air nourish
both; osmosis, endosmosis, oxidation, hydration,
and so on, the same in each; and yet one is an oak,
and the other a maple.

You may bring up a dog on the food of a man, and
yet you cannot make a man of him. The putrid
fungus will grow under the same conditions that
nourish a rose. The secret of life with all its myriad
forms is hidden in the nature of things, and there
we have to leave it. We finally run nearly every
question of nature to hole in the nature of things.
How our mental and spiritual life share in the
nature of things is a hard question.

“Objects gross and the unseen soul are one,”
says Whitman. Matter and mind blend, but how? |

302

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

Nature is so all-inclusive that we cannot say of
anything that it is not natural. It may be out of the
usual course of things, or contrary to some particu-
lar phase of nature, and yet it must be natural. We
may say that it is not natural for a butternut-tree to
produce hickory-nuts, or a peach-tree to yield pears,
yet if such a thing ever happened, it must be natu-
ral, because it would be a part of nature. All the re-
ported miracles would fall into the same category of
the natural. One species of tree grafted upon another
is still a bit of nature, a novelty brought about by
the hand of man, as are all our improved fruits and
grains. Nature accepts them, but does not guarantee
that the seed of the apple will produce a pippin or a
Baldwin. In the animal world inheritance is a much
more certain factor. Rarely is there a reversion to a
more primitive type. Improved grains and flowers
breed true, but improved fruits rarely do. Probably
the former, if left without man’s care, would in time
revert to the wild type; all would drop what man
has given them and degenerate. Man himself degen-
erates toward the savage if long enough removed
from home and civilization. The dog goes back
toward the wolf, and the horse back toward its wild
-ancestors. What we add to Nature is easily peeled
off, but what Nature adds to herself sticks.

§

The atmosphere clothes the earth miles deep with
magic — an invisible, ungraspable presence, bearing
303

FIELD AND STUDY

upon our bodies with a weight ‘of many tons and
running by its weight our machinery of life, yet as
unfelt as any feather. Our relation to it is so deli-
cate, so constant, so harmonious, so all-embracing,
that we are unconscious of it till we turn about and
cross-question it. All our major relations to nature
are of a similar kind. We do have to take thought
about our food and shelter and clothing, but not
about breathing or gravity, or the rain, or the sun-
light. Through the air, through gravity, through
light, through climate, through’ geology, through
astronomy, nature constantly acts upon us. A child
in its mother’s womb is no closer linked to its
mother than we are all our lives to what we call na-
ture. The source of all our strength, namely, gravity,
we are all unconscious of, unless we cross it or
defy it. Mother Nature carries us in her womb and
we know it not till we meet with the new birth of
reason. Then we know our mother and see and feel
our kinship and sonship towards her. Science opens
our eyes to the truth of the facts that the poets and
prophets have sung in all ages. We see with our
reason what men in all ages have felt in their hearts.
§

How contrary to Nature man seems! How he
crosses her and forces her and masters her, and im-
proves upon her, and makes her his slave, and yet he
is also a part of Nature. She is his banker; from her
vaults come all his funds. Whence this apparent

304

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

contradiction? Because in ‘man appears something
that appears nowhere else in Nature — the gift of
reason, or the soul. This turns upon Nature and
judges her, and does with her forces what they can-
not do with one another.

‘Man makes new combinations, he links together
that which Nature has sundered, and he sunders
what Nature has linked together, and gets power
through each process. He adds nothing; he has
nothing to add; his wit is the new factor. It brings
about new situations, it redistributes the natural
forces and elements. It uses Nature’s mechanics to
new ends, it uses Nature’s chemistry to make new
compounds, it ties them together so delicately that
a spark or a blow releases tremendous energy. If
Nature did this herself as man does, the sphere
would have been blown to atoms long ago. Man
controls. He gives the upper hand to one force over
another. Nature lets her dogs fight it out, lets the
fire rage, lets the floods roar, lets the winds destroy.
She has no special end as man has. In the inorganic
world her forces seek a deadlock, ora stalemate, but
her complex of forces is so vast that an equilibrium
is never reached, or is constantly broken up. The
waters seek the sea, but cannot stay there. The laws
of heat tend to reduce all to a uniform temperature
with the death of all life, but this never really comes
about.

305

FIELD AND STUDY
§

One thing is very certain, a certainty that we are
constantly forgetting or overlooking, namely, that
man is a part of nature, of the sum total of things,
and that whatever we affirm or deny of the universe,
we affirm or deny of him.

Only this morning I was saying to myself, ““There
is nothing human in the universe, all is unhuman,”
when I was brought up by the thought that the
whole of humanity is a part of the universe; that
man is as much a product of the earth as are the
trees and the grass, and his genesis must involve,
more or less, all the material forces, geologic and
astronomic.

§

In nature the good and the bad, the beautiful and
the ugly are not separated. They are such only to
man; all is in keeping with the impersonal laws
and forces. We call that evil which thwarts or in-
jures us, but nature is like a cloud that goes through
the cycle of change and remains the same. Good and
bad are irrelevant questions, just as upper and un-
der do not apply to the orbs in space. To our senses
it is all upper, but in reality the terms are meaning-
less away from the earth.

In nature all is good, but, again, the terms “‘ good”
and “bad” are meaningless with the “all.” The
Cosmos is self-repaired, self-balanced, self-sup-
ported, and is all good or all bad, just as you elect.

306

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

We divide and subdivide, and sort, and sift, because
we can use only parts and fragments of nature.
§

One May day on my return from a walk I asked a
friend — quoting a line of Emerson’s, about “the
untaught spring being wise in cowslips and anem-
ones” — which one of our wild flowers showed the
most wisdom, at least something most akin to hu-
man taste, in showing off its own beauty. After a
moment’s reflection she said, “The columbine.”
“Yes, that is it — ‘rock-loving columbine,’ as Em-
erson says.” It is really the child of the rocks; it
must have its rocky throne and background, the
delicate, sculptured, flame-colored flower hanging
its brilliant tremulous bells above the gray, immo-
bile rocks. In my walk through a field I came upon
an inclined rock-stratum cutting up through the
turf, and at the foot of it stood groups of columbine
set off against the gray background. Along the road
in the woods the rocky wall and precipice were fairly
aflame withcolumbine. It came out of narrow seams
like jets of flame. Apparently the less soil, the more
columbine. It seemed as if the old Silurian rock
after millions of years of gestation had hatched out
a soul, and this was the expression of it.

“Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

Wordsworth’s daffodils are coarse and common be-
side our flower, with its throb of color, its five gold-
307

FIELD AND STUDY

rimmed honey-wells, its five-pointed collar, its clus-
ter of golden anthers, and its delicate foliage and
purple stems. It bejewels the rocks; it loves the
rocks as the jewel-weed loves water. Our rock coryd-
alis also loves the rocks, but it is a far less highly
developed flower and has none of the columbine’s
art; and the same is true of saxifrage and rock cress
— all children of the rocks, but not “wildly wise”
and wildly beautiful like the columbine. Aquilegia,
— eaglelike, — but its talons are tipped with honey,
and its crimson is the glow of the cheek of May. It
holds aloft its nectarines like tiny bottles open at
the bottom into which the rains cannot enter. Re-
verse its pendulous character and its grace is gone.

Ah! the world-old rocks with these living jewels in

their ears — how young they look!
§

Emerson in his “Journals” has'a phrase about the
“shortcomings of the universe.” The excesses of the
universe are much more obvious: Nature’s over-
flowing measures, her unloosened forces — the tor-
nado, the avalanche, the earthquake — destroying
with one hand what she builded with the other, the
devastation of flood and fire; in human history,
wars, pestilence, and famine; and, in the history of
the lower forms of life, the failure of natural checks
and balances — locusts, tent-caterpillars, gypsy-
moths, lemmings, and the like. But the shortcomings
of Nature are not so easily pointed out. Of course,

308

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

both her excesses and her shortcomings are only
such from our point of view — the point of view of
the petty economies with which our lives are bound
up. We measure Nature’s excesses and failures by
standards of our own. “Who heaps his measure
spills his wine,” says one of our minor poets, but
Nature’s wine, though spilled, is not lost. Another
cup is ready to catch it. “If my bark sinks ’t is to
another sea,” sings a Concord poet, but only Nature
can say this. Her loss in one sphere is a gain in an-
other. A few years ago the measure of insect-life was
overfull; the tent-caterpillars were fast becoming a
plague, and the larve of other insects were devas-
tating the woods and gardens and fruit-lands. Then
came a wet, cold May and the germs of these pests
were nipped in the egg; they did not hatch, or, if
hatched, they failed to mature; and thus our or-
chards and forests are greatly the gainers. The in-
sect-eating birds have suffered, but vegetation has
profited.
§

The events and characters of history do not ap-
pear in ordered sequence any more than they do in
nature, or in the physical history of the globe. There
are slumps, lapses, delays, waste. The seasons, as we
name them, follow one after another, but there are
set-backs, cruel frosts, or unseasonable heats, or
droughts. Yet the tide of the year sweeps on. The
race of man has progressed through blood and crime

309

FIELD AND STUDY

and wars and pestilence and superstition, but it has
been an ordered sequence only as we make it so.
The creative, ameliorating power is blind, but it is
ceaselessly active, and it finds its goal sooner or
later. Endless variation, with natural selection
working sleeplessly, bring about the new and higher
types in animal life. In human progress there is a
new element not in nature, namely, human reason,
which works in and under the fatality of nature,
which has been a great element in human progress,
but the tendency to progress is older than human
reason.

We might say the steam engine, the cotton-gin,
the telegraph, the phonograph, came when they
were most needed. We do not see that these things
create their own need, that they are a slow evolu-
tion, that they came when the general progress
of the race was ripe for them. They are a part of
our mastery over nature, which is the growth of
ages.

The progress of nature and of the race of man is
well typified by these cat-tail flags growing here in
the ditch in front of my window. The seeds of the
plant grow only in marshes, and they always find
the marshes. How? They look in all directions —
north, south, east, west — and hence are sure,
sooner or later, to blunder on the spot which they
seek. Ten thousand miss the mark to one that hits,
but the one does hit it.

310

NATURE AND NATURAL. HISTORY
§

The great movements of the Cosmos are on such
a scale that we note them not. The sidereal universe
is as fluid and mobile as a meadow brook, but to
human experience it is as fixed as the everlasting
hills. The enormous speed of the revolving earth
registers itself to the eye very slowly in the rising
sun or moon, while the incredible speed of the stars
in their diverse orbits does not register itself to the
human eye at all; to our eyes they are fixed forever
in their places in the sky; as the earliest observers
beheld the constellations, so we behold them, and
so untold future generations will behold them,
though the separate bodies that are thus grouped
are rushing their several ways through space with
a velocity that nothing but light rivals.

§

Think of this huge globe as a living corpuscle in
the veins of the Infinite, gross and inert to our dull
senses, but vibrating and responding to influences
and forces that are too vast for us to take in. Behold
it floating through a sea of energy like a mote in the
air, or a corpuscle in the veins, as insignificant a part
of the Whole as the latter is of the human body, but
under the spell of the Whole, and a vital part of the
Whole. If we could draw far enough away from our
system we should see the sun surrounded by his
little family, filling a space in the heavens the size
of one’s hatbrim, and other suns filling other little

311

FIELD AND STUDY

spaces, and still others without end, like daisies
here and there in the broad meadows — the vacant
spaces are so immense. Or, they are like vessels upon
the sea, with a vast waste of waters between. But
for all the room, collisions do happen at sea, and col-
lisions, no doubt, do happen in the abysses of side-
real space. Astronomers see evidences of them at
times. The meteors that cut through our atmos-
phere, and the meteoric dust, doubtless have their
origin in these collisions; the blazing stars, and the
paling stars, the same. The relative space occupied
by one system is like the palm of one’s hand in one’s
lap compared with the spread of the Western prairie
thousands of miles away. The spaces between the
stars in Orion’s belt, or in the Pleiades, would open
to hundreds of millions of miles, if we could ap-
proach them. Like fruit on the same vine seem many
groups of stars, but the spaces that really separate
them overwhelm the mind that tries to grasp their
magnitude.

Ground-room is cheap in heaven; there are oceans
of it to spare. The grouping of celestial bodies which
we see are as of a flock of birds upon the same
branch.

§

I never tire of contemplating the earth as it swims
through space. As I near the time when I know
these contemplations must cease, it is more and
more in my thoughts —its beauty, its wonder, its

312

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

meaning, and the grandeur of the voyage we are
making on its surface. The imaginary and hoped-
for other world occupies my thoughts very little.
There is so much to know here, so much to enjoy,
so much to engage every faculty of the mind and
develop every power of the body, such beauty, such
sublimity, and such a veil of enchantment and
mystery over all — how can one ever tire of it, or
wish for a better? I am in love with the earth. With
all its hostile forces and forbidding features, — its
deserts, its jungles, its killing heats and frigid zones,
its storms and earthquakes, its wars, and famines,
and contagious diseases, — I am thankful that my
lot was not cast on any other planet. It is the best
possible world, undoubtedly, for such beings as we
are, and is slowly becoming better adapted to human
life — ripening on the vast sidereal tree whose fruit
is worlds and systems. How much it has ripened in
the historic period who can tell? No doubt it has
ripened somewhat in ten thousand years. But every
geologic period has undoubtedly seen some im-
provement, with temporary set-backs during the
ice age, or ice ages. But these ages sculpturing
the surface, pulverizing the rocks, and changing
the rivers — filling up and wearing down — seem
like workmen preparing the landscape for a more
abundant harvest.

313

FIELD AND STUDY
§

When, during a recent cold, wet May, I saw the
delicate wood warblers perishing for want of food,
and, during the dry, hot August that followed, saw
the robins dying for the same reason, I said, ““Dame
Nature takes no thought of her children.” It has
taken her long geologic ages to develop and perfect
them, and then she weans them as a hen weans her
chickens, and leaves them to take their chances in
the great complex or maelstrom of physical forces
that surrounds them. Many are cut off, but enough
survive to serve her purpose — the continuance of
the race. For the individual, we are in the habit of
saying, she cares nothing, her solicitude is only for
the race. Tennyson sings this in a striking manner
in his “In Memoriam.”

“So careful of the type, she seems,
So careless of the single life.”

Is it true? Do not the biological laws favor the
individual as well as the mass of which he is the unit?
In other words, can the race be favored except
through its units? Are there any biological laws that
apply to the many and not to the one? If it were the
mass against the one, the race against the individ-
ual, then one might say yes. The multitude has
advantages that the one does not possess, but in this
case the one is a part of the multitude, as the single
soldier is a part of the army. The wise general, of
314

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

course, cares more for his army as a unit than for
the individual privates that compose it; he is often
obliged to sacrifice many of the soldiers for the
safety and well-being of the army; but the care he
takes to safeguard the whole applies to every sepa-
rate unit. In like manner Nature is as solicitous for
the individual as she is for the race, but, on the whole,
in the battle of life the chances are that the few will
fall while the many escape.

True it is Nature does not make a man or a bird,
and say, “Now I will look after him, or it; I will
temper the wind to the shorn lamb; my special
providences will see that no harm befalls this one,
or that one.”’ Nothing of the kind. The forethought
of what we call God is only the sequence of biolog-
ical laws which brings about the development of
species and leaves them to the fate of the blind
but, on the whole, beneficent forces. We have to
say that there is an intelligence in nature — an all-
pervasive mind that gives rise to the vital order
which we see, and of which we are a part, and that
through the nature of things makes our continuance
possible, but it is in no other sense paternal or
human. But here is the queer thing: it has made
it possible for us to pass this judgment upon it, to
be thus critical toward it, to utter the verdict I have
been uttering. It is no invention or selection of our
own that we are men and have these wonderful
bodies and these capacities.

315

FIELD AND STUDY
§

When one sees the great cosmic processes and the
terrestrial forces going on so irrespective of man,
so indifferent to him, so hostile to him if for a mo-
ment he places himself in wrong relations to them, —
ready to grind him to powder. or engulf him in
the deep, — so infinitely slow in providing a place
for him, and so indifferent to him when all is
done, careering on through countless ages before he
comes, and, we may safely say, careering on through
countless ages after he has gone, the earth given up
to low bestial life for untold exons before man ap-
peared, — when one considers all this, one marvels
why he is here at all. Was his advent a mere acci-
dent, or is it all for him? In our pride we say it is all
for him, and all our theology has been for centuries
trying to explain away this apparent hostility or
indifference of the natural forces, and to reconcile
man’s career of pain and suffering with the idea of
a benevolent God.

When we consider what infinite pains and time
Nature seems to have taken to crown her work with
man, it is staggering to see her apparent indifference
to each individual of us. Not one smallest force in
the universe will make one exception for any of us.
We are borne along by this stream of tendency, or
creative power, and the stream cannot turn back
or be interrupted. Every effect must have its cause,
which refers to another cause, and so on. Men are

316

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

nothing with Nature; man is everything. At least,
so we flatter ourselves.

Unless we think twice and thrice about this mat-
ter, we are likely to exaggerate this apparent in-
difference toward man on the part of Nature. The
inorganic world is certainly indifferent to him and
to all other forms of life. The laws of force and mat-
ter know him not. But the organic world as cer-
tainly favors him; the biologic laws are on his side;
else how would he ever have got here, or remained
here? I do not mean to say that they make excep-
tions for him, any more than fire and flood do,
but I mean that in their inevitable workings they
promote his general welfare. They adapt him to the
universe in which he is placed, they have endowed
him with a brain which gives him dominion over all
animal life and enables him to subdue and use the
inorganic forces. The biological forces favored man
long before he was man. In what large and bold and
striking lines Whitman put this idea in his “Leaves
of Grass”: —

“Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful, and friendly the arms that have help’d me.

“‘ Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing, like cheerful boat-
men,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

“ Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

317

FIELD AND STUDY

“For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
‘Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and depos-
ited it with care.

“ All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight
me,
.Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.”

But we must beware about being too sure about
the friendliness of the biological laws. They fail
to favor us at least in this respect: the micro-
scopical germs that destroy us are as strictly the
work of these laws as we ourselves are. They are
real beings lying in wait upon all sides ready to
pounce upon us and undo the work of the beneficent
germs whenever our guard is down. I do not mean
to say that there is any malevolent intention in Na-
ture toward us, but that we are now and then the
victims of the indiscriminating operation of her
laws, in the organic as well as in the inorganic world.

§

The caterpillar hurriedly crawling about my
porch, going this way and that way, changing its
course every second or two, lifting up its head and
feeling right and left as if searching for some par-
ticular object, crossing and recrossing the porch
floor, feeling into the cracks, climbing up the vines
and creeping to the pendent end of one of the shoots,
and then hanging by the tip of its body, then feeling

318

NATURE AND NATURAL HISTORY

out in all directions, and finally letting go its hold
and falling to the floor, where it again begins to
search till it at last mounts my leg as I sit writing,
and appears upon my knee, furnishes a good sample
of blind, pushing Nature, radiating in all directions
in order to be sure to hit a mark that lies only in one
particular direction — in this case, a suitable place
or corner in which the insect may weave the shroud
in which it is to undergo its metamorphosis, and
emerge a winged creature.

VI
MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

OES your new religion help toward a larger

and freer life, toward more good-will and
tolerance, toward a keener appreciation of the
world in which we are placed, toward a wider out-
look and deeper and saner human relations? It will
help toward these things just in the degree in which
it springs from these things.

§

The lower orders of animals act from impulse,
not from thought. The bird builds its nest from im-
pulse, incubates from impulse or inherited disposi-
tion, migrates from impulse, and weans its young
from impulse. Man acts from both impulse and
thought. He thinks about his acts. Thought in him
governs or controls impulse. He has an impulse to
wed and breed, but he stops to think about it, and
to plan for it. The sexual instinct sometimes masters
him and he assaults the female like a brute animal,
but on the whole he keeps it under control. The
migrating impulse is strong in man as in other ani-
mals, but is more or less controlled. It is strong in
the spring, but judgment often makes him wait
till summer or fall to satisfy it.

The impulse of fear often masters the lower

320

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

animal and he runs away. The impulse of anger and
revenge often masters him. In all these things the
animal lets himself go; there is no restraining influ-
ence of mind or judgment.

§

Was Epictetus logical when he compared logic
to a measure in which we measure corn or other
grain? A bushel measure is an arbitrary standard
agreed upon by the community using it; any other
standard agreed upon would be as fair and just.
But logic is not an arbitrary standard, that we
could change at will; it is based upon the laws of
the human mind. You cannot standardize vital
things, only mechanical things. He is more logical
when he says that to be blind in the reason, which
distinguishes good from evil, is like being blind in
the vision, that distinguishes white from black.

§

What a sneaking admiration. many Americans
have for a monarchical form of government! It is a
nice thing to look at; it is picturesque, — a perma-
nent head to the State, grading. down through vari-
ous ranks to the masses. It appeals to a feeling we all
have. Royalty! What a magic word! Magic because
the race has been so long under its sway. I love to see
the bees in the hive surround the queen and make
obeisance to her. They never turn their backs to her,
they seem loath to touch her except to feed her.
She will not feed herself; and she will fight only

321

FIELD AND STUDY

with royalty. Yet she is in no strict sense a queen.
She is the mother of the hive, and the reverence of
the bees is to motherhood,

A democracy is far less pleasing to look upon
than an autocracy, less artistic, less architectural.
A monarchy is like a cathedral, a democracy like
a country church. Democracy is science; many
illusions are gone. Monarchy is literature; and art,
illusions, and superstitions remain. Science and
Democracy are now in the ascendant. Will they
always remain so? Undoubtedly. human life will
adjust itself to them.

§

_ We know the sparks in the fire are minute parti-
cles of combustible matter, and that this matter is
quickly consumed or transformed into other forms
of energy. The sparks from an electric battery are of
another kind, they are not matter, there is no com-
bustion there. So far as we know. they are pure dis-
carnate energy. The whole material world, visible
and invisible, appears to be charged with this en-
ergy which man can summon forth at will. Is it
transcendental matter?

se

At times I have very serious misgivings about the
outcome of the world war. I fear we are reaping
what we have sown, and that we have sown the
wind to reap the whirlwind. For a hundred years or
more all civilized peoples have. been striving for

322

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

material efficiency, for power to rule the world of
material forces. We have cultivated science as if it
were our salvation; we have builded upon it and
followed it eagerly wherever it has led, and it has
led us to new conquests on all sides. We have all
been part of a world movement for world power.
The gods we have really worshiped have been and
are the gods of material things. In this movement
Germany has led all other nations. Its fullest flower-
ing and fruit have been with her. She has gone soul
and body to efficiency on this low plane. She is
drunk with the wine of her own material prosperity.
The Darwinian principle of the struggle and the sur-
vival of the fittest has become the corner-stone of
Germany’s philosophy of national life. In brute
strength and the will to conquer she leads. And it
has looked at times as if she might dominate the
world and impose her Kultur upon us all. The gods
of science are on her side, but the gods of the moral
law are on the side of the Allies and I cannot believe
they will give world dominion into her hands. If they
should, then good-bye to that spirit that has made
France and Italy and England what they are, and
that has made America what she is, the spirit of
freedom, of justice, of ideal values, — our blended
inheritance from Greece and Judea and the medita-
tive Orient, —the spirit that begat literature, poesy,
art, music. The later generations of Germans have
produced nothing better or higher than Krupp
823

FIELD AND STUDY

guns. If a Germanized world should come, it would
be the result of a movement that we have all been
partners in.

§

A born prophet and leader of men always makes
or finds a following and starts a:new era. When an
age is ripe for a change a leader is sure to appear.
He is begotten by the spirit of the times, Such men
as Washington, Lincoln, Grant, Roosevelt, Wilson,
were evoked by the spirit of the times in which they
lived; they were an evolution.

Human affairs differ from cosmic affairs or the
affairs of nature in this respect: in human affairs
there enters a new element not operative in nature
— the element of reason. Reason cuts across lots,
saves waste, improves the means, and gets there
ahead of nature. Man’s progress has gone on faster
and faster as his reason has developed more and
more. No doubt every age has men that could lead
it to victory if the demand arose. But the age is not
ripe for them. There is more or less latent greatness
in every age, greatness that is never developed;
just as there is a vast amount of Jatent heroism in
the people about us, as is proved when circum-
stances arise to call it out.

§

Lover as I am of the warmth and the light, yet at
times I almost rebel at the glare of midday. How
prosy life seems then compared with the feeling of

324

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

the morning and the evening! The vertical flood of
light is merciless. It kills all illusion. It emphasizes
the hard reality. It strips the landscape of its glam-
our. Romance flees away; the shy spirits seek the
shade; the songbirds become silent; love-making of
both man and beast declines; the pitiless glare halts
even the turtles and the frogs. Have we not been told
of certain French authors who turn day into night
because their imaginations work better by lamp-
light than by sunlight?

Our fears, our superstitions, our disquieting
thoughts are more active by night than by day.
Death seems nearer. Your own illness, or that of one
in your family, seems much more portentous in the
darkness. When the sun comes half your apprehen-
sions flee away. The terrors of a storm by night are
augmented fourfold. Scenes that at such times are
strange and exciting to the imagination are dull
and commonplace enough by daylight. Hobgoblins
never venture abroad except at night. Night is the
land of fable, of myth, of superstition, of evil
thoughts and deeds, of plotting and conspiracies.
If the night were cut out, how would crime diminish!
How much less startling and ominous the knocking
at the gate in “Macbeth” would seem = noon than
at midnight! :

The noonday glare does put the imagination out
of countenance; it puts all the evil spirits to flight,
and our direful apprehensions fade away. Romance

325

FIELD AND STUDY

is shy of it, and many other things. But how it does
ripen the fruit and the grain! How it brings us to
ourselves and the common-sense view of things!
how it favors our practical lives! how it grounds us
in real things!

The best thing about the night is that it gives us
the stars; the best thing about the day is that it
gives us the earth and the sky — all the wealth of
color and all the beauty of form; the bow in the
clouds, the clouds themselves, the lakes, the rivers,
the green earth, the lofty peaks. Night gives us in-
finity, it gives us the awful grandeur and mystery of
the heavens, but the day makes us at home in the
earth and fosters the understanding. We love the
sunlit fields, but we stand in awe of the starlit
heavens. The middle ground, the twilight, favors
sentiment and memory and romance. Why is the
evening twilight more enticing than the morning
twilight?

§

How much more valuable is an instinct for the
truth than any one special gift or talent! One sees
men of superior mental equipment who are yet
lacking in this instinct for the truth: that is, they
do not gravitate naturally, spontaneously, to that
which is true, as distinguished from that which is
merely plausible or specious or expedient. I was
thinking of this recently while reading Darwin.
How single his mind was! In debate most men are

326

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

moore intent on victory than upon the truth. Hence
it is that the truth is so often imperiled by con-
troversy.

§

“What more absurd than to quarrel with a man
because he does not see as you do!”’ I often hear this
remark made in defense or excuse of the nature-
faker. Now the whole question hinges upon what is
meant by the word “see.” If you mean “think,”
then I quite agree with you; all men do not think
alike; they differ as much in this respect as they
do in their complexions, or stature, or dispositions.
But if you refer to the use of the corporeal eye,
actual observation of external objects, then I say
all men must see alike if they are to see accurately.

§ +

St. Augustine says we cannot see darkness, nor
hear silence, but is it not our eyes and ears that
make us aware that such realities exist? There are
many problems and mysteries which our reason
cannot solve, but is it not the reason that discloses
such questions to us? Reason has its limits, and it
is never more triumphant than when it recognizes
these limitations.

§

“What is it that constitutes and makes man what
he is?” asks Huxley, and answers, “What is it but
the power of language?” One may say with equal
confidence that it is man that makes the language.

327

FIELD AND STUDY

Man is first and the language follows. You must
have man before you can have his language. The
lower animals have a rude language. but it does not
develop them, or make men of them.

§

There seems to be the same excess of fear in the
world that there is of pain. How fearful most of the
wild creatures are! and for reasons. Fear is necessary
to their self-preservation, hence Nature heaps the
measure, An animal is as afraid of a harmless thing
as of a dangerous. A horse is as afraid of an auto-
mobile as of a bear. Nature secures her end when
she makes the animal afraid of anything and every-
thing strange and unusual. She wastes no time in
giving the animal the power to discriminate: an ex-
cess of fear can do no harm, and it may do good. To
trim and curtail and economize is not Nature's way.
She sows her seed broadcast, sure that some of
them will take.

Fear in the child is, in our day: for the most part
gratuitous. It is, of course, a survival from our ani-
mal or savage ancestors. There was a time when the
dark concealed a real foe, and when the strange
apparition meant harm or death. The warring of the
male animals over the females is wise; the strongest
propagates the species. but see the pain and suffer-
ing that attend it, often death. What does Nature
care? Her ends are secured. Natural selection is a
painful and expensive process, but it goes.

328

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES

§
We think of this mystery we call life under the

image of a fluid; it may take any or all forms; it is a
stream which is ever and never the same; it begins
and ends every moment; it adapts itself to all con-
ditions, in the air, in the water, in the soil, on the
rocks, in the surf, in the marsh, in the cold, in the
heat — form within form, form nourishing form and
destroying form, life building up, life pulling down,
life changing the face of the earth. The primal laws
of hunger, of feeding and breeding, shape all the
rest. To get food and a place to increase and multi-
ply is the source of all the “red strife” and all the
“white strife” in the world. These are the main-
springs of development. And are they not beneficent
laws or instincts? Do not pleasure and well-being
flow from them?
§

To know one’s own mind on any of the great
questions of life, to know one’s own ignorance, to
understand one’s want of understanding, to know
the part played in one’s mental life by race, family,
training, by “previous condition of servitude” to
creeds and parties and half-views, by the times in
which one lives, by ancestry, by temperament, by
schooling, and by surroundings, is a very great mat-
ter. Each of us is a composite personality; behind
us is an immensely long line of ancestors of all types
and conditions, each of whom has contributed some

329

FIELD AND STUDY

shred of character to our make-up, and each of
whom speaks more or less in all our daily thoughts
and acts. No wonder we are contradictory and in-
consistent. No wonder we do not hold steadily to
one set of views on any great question. Now one
of our ancestors dominates us, now another. Is it
at all likely that all these ancestors held the same
views on all subjects? Did they not burn and hang
and persecute one another for opinion’s sake?

THE END

INDEX

INDEX

Air, mineral elements in, 123, 124;
_ our relation to the, 303, 304.

Air-plants, 123, 124.

Animals, ebb and flow in lives of,
152; specialized and generalized
forms, 162; do not reflect, 293.

Antennaria, 210-13.

Apple-tree, 39, 40.

Aristotle, quoted, 112.

Art, and reality, 236-40.

Astronomy, pleasures of, 190, 191.

Atmospherio pressure, 271.

Atoms, 263.

Autumn morning, 297.

Barnacle, 273.

Beard, Dan, his Animal Book, 292,
293.

Bee, honey, 138.

Bee, mason, 137,

Beebe, C. William, quoted, 294.

Bees, mind in, 137.

Beginnings, 189, 190, 244.

Birches, growing on rocks, 36, 37.

Birds, migration, 3-22; effects of a
late spring upon, 15-17; our in-
terest in, 53, 54; leaving the nest,
61, 62, 72-76; use of white ma-
terials in nest, 71, 72; songs, 89-
101; courtship, 89, 90; opposite
natures of the sexes, 95; affection
for young and mate, 98, 99; eye-
sight, 103, 104; winter waifs, 206-
09, 214-17; sanitation, 300.

Bird’s-nesting, 102-11.

Bluebird, 99, 103; a quarrel with
robins, 66, 67; young leaving
nest, 73, 74, 76; and wrens, 80—-
82; notes and manners, 96; vir-
tues, 289, 290.

Bobolink, 7; decrease and increase,
22; song and the female, 94; nest-
ing, 111; two males and one fe-
male, 111.

Bob-white. See Quail.

Boulders, 180.

Brain, the, 266-68.

Bryant, William Cullen, 6, 222;
quoted, 5, 6.

Burdock, 33-36.

Butterfly; swallow-tailed, transfor-
mation, 44-48.

Buzzard, turkey, 91, 103, 104.

Catalysis, 186.

Catbird, a tame pair, 8.

Caterpillars, transformation and
cocoon-weaving, 44~52, 318, 319.

Cat-tail, 37.

Cattle, grazing in water, 274; gor-
ing rescuers, 295.

Cedar-bird. See Waxwing, cedar. '

Celestial mechanics, 253-55.

Chat, yellow-breasted, a pair with
nest and eggs, 62-64; shyness, 64;
location of nest, 64.

Chemical affinity, 261, 262.

Chemistry, wonders of, 184-88.

Chickadee, nesting, 110.

Childs, John Lewis, 153.

Chipmunk, 158; washing his face,
115; attractiveness, 140; boyhood
recollections, 140, 141; tidiness,
142; friendly ways, 142; provident
habits, 143, 144; robbing one an-
other, 144-50; nest, 148; tunnels,
149; disposal of earth, 150, 151,
197; varying abundance, 152, 153.

Church, the, 246.

Clematis, 38, 39.

Columbine, 307, 308.

Consciousness, 268.

Coon. See Raccoon.

Cordaites costatus, 181.

Corydalis, 308.

Cosmos, the, 254, 255; great move-
ment of, 311.

Cowbird, experiment with a young
one, 59-61.

Creative energy, 259.

Creeper, brown, 216.

Cretaceous period, 260, 261,

Crow, character and manners, 118-
21.

333

INDEX

Cuckoo, 55.
Cuckoo, black-billed, feediug young,
196; nesting-habits, 197.

Darwin, Charles, 129, 277; quoted,
278.

Day, and night, 324-26.

Democracy, 322.

Dickcissel, 154.

Disintegration, 186-88.

Dock, yellow, 35, 36.

Dogs, 114; their capacity for loving,
‘205; companionship, 205, 206;
enjoyments and interests, 206.

Dove, mourning, nest, 14.

Ducks, migrating, 5.

Earth, the, a celestial body, 243;
rotation, 255; growth, 258-61;
‘beauty and wonder of, 312, 313.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17, 113;
-quoted, 27, 28, 215, 224, 235, 246,
248, 250, 307, 308; and natural
history, 221, 222; a poet, prophet,
and critic, not a purely literary
man; his “ Brahma,’ 250.

Energy, 264, 322.

Epictetus, 321.

Everlasting, early, 210-13.

Evolution, a hard road to travel,
273; variation the main factor,
273, 274; speed, 276, 277; belief
in, 277; and ethics, 281-84; the
push of development, 284, 285;
order of development, 286-88.

Eyes, 51.

Fabre, Jean Henri, on a caterpillar
.building its cocoon, 48, 49; his
studies in insect behavior, 129-
39, 202-04.

Fear, 328,

Fern, walking, 39.

Finch, purple, eating cherry-blos-
soms, 25, 26.

Fishes, deep-sea, 270-72.

Flicker, or high-hole, drumming, 19;
call, 19, 20; nesting, 20, 194; color-
ation, 21.

Flycatcher, crested, 168.

Flycatcher, olive-sided, 25.

Fog, 297-99.

Fossil, a, 181.

Fox, red, 31, 32, 197; tracks, 209;
two tame foxes, 292, 293.

Geology, ‘pleasures of, 177-83.
Georgia, granite in, 178-80.
Germany, 323.

Glaciers, local, 182.

God, and: Nature, 241, 247-51; and
evil, 248, 249.

Goldfinch, 152; nest, 105-07; a cu-
rious experience with nest and
young, 106, 107.

Granite, Northern and Southern,
178-80,

Grass, seed-dispersal, 37, 38.

Grosbeak, rose-breasted, 11; with
young, 109.

Grouse, ruffed, 155,

Hawk, marsh, 163, 164.

Hawk, pigeon, 165.

Hawk, red-tailed, 163, 164.

Hawk, sparrow, 165, 166,

Hen-hawk, 163, 164.

Heredity, 329, 330.

High-hole. See Flicker.

History, sequence of events in, 309,
310.

Hummingbird, ruby-throated, 16,
17, 78.

Humphrey, Miss Grace, quoted, 47,
48

Huzley, Thomas H., quoted, 327.

Ibis, wood, 294, 295.

Impulse, 320, 321.

Insects, mind in, 129-39, 204; our
interest in books on, 201-03.

Interesting, the, 196.

Jay, blue, migrating, 18, 19; egging
expeditions, 67.
Junco, with nests, 108, 109.

Kingbird, flight, 25; nest, 102, 103,
106; fly-catching, 102, 103, 195;
contrasted with the crested fly-
catcher, 168.

Kinglet, ruby-crowned, 6.

Language, 327, 328.
Lark, prairie horned, 154.
Leaders, 324.

334

INDEX

Leaf-roller, 188.

Leaves, a large crop of, 40.

Life, infinitely various, 158; hand
in hand with death, 186, 187; be-
ginnings, 189, 190; development,
259, 260; and chemical affinity,
261,> 262; the physico-chemical
and psychic explanations of, 269,
270; a battle and a festival, 280;
the fire of, 284; incalculable and
mysterious, 285, 286; a fluid,
329,

Light, invisible, 256.

Lightning, freaks of, 42-44, 124.

Literature and science, 235; and
reality, 235-40.

Logic, 321.

Longevity, 296, 297.

Loosestrife, purple, 38.

Loveman, Robert, 223.

Lynx, Canada, cry, 125-28.

Man, and the balance of nature,
157; a generalized form of life,
162, 163; origin, 243, 246, 247; a
part of nature, 249-51; less reli-
gious and artistic, more practical
and scientific, than formerly, 257,
258; evolution, 260, 274-76; the
price he pays for his gift of rea-
son, 291, 292; his relation to na-
ture, 304-06; progress of, 309,
310; nature's indifference toward,
316-18.

Micro-organisms, constructive and
destructive, 186-90.

Might, and right, 280-84.

Milton, John, 233.

Mind, and the brain, 266-68.

Molecular action, 256, 257.

Molecules, 263.

Monarchical government, 321, 322.

Moth, Halictus, 189.

Moths, cocoons, 50.

Motion, relativity of, 264, 265.

Mt. Rubidouz, 180.

Mouse, meadow, 41, 115.

Muscles, 287.

Muskrat, carrying dry leaves, 116.

ae

Natural history, interesting and un-
interesting, 193; and the poets,
221-23.

Nature, our interest in, 27-30, 121,
122; uniformity and oapricious-
ness, 40, 42; complete in small
things, 112, 113; “jokes” of, 113,
114, 117; the open book of, 121;
surprises of, 124; ebb and flow in,
152-57; man and the balance of,
157; the approach to, 176; near
home, 218-18; relation to God,
241, 242, 247-51; change of atti-
tude toward, 244-46; and science,
252, 253; of things, 301, 302; all-
inclusive, 303; man’s relation to,
304-06; no good or bad in, 306;
shortcomings and excesses, 308,
309; sequence of events in, 309,
310; her solicitude for the individ-
ual, 314, 315; her apparent indif-
ference toward man, 316-18; push-
ing blindly, 318, 319.

Nature of things, 301, 302.

Need, 284, 285.

Night, and day, 324-26.

Nitrogen, 185, 262, 263.

Nuthatch, red-breasted, a winter
guest, 22-24, 207, 208.

Nuthatch, white-breasted, 208; col-
oration and habits, 216, 217.

Nuthatches, 10, 160; manners, 23,
207; notes, 24, 207.

Ocean, the, 265. .«
Oriole, Baltimore, 9, 17.

Osborn, Henry Fairfield, his Men
of the Old Stone Age, 281, 283.
Oven-bird, with nest and young,

65:
Oxygen, 263.

Peckham, George and Elizabeth,
129.

Pelican, brown, 113, 114.

Pennsylvania, 182, 183.

Perry, Bliss, his Life of Whitman,
225-27.

Pewee, wood, nest, 105, 167; con-
trasted with the pheebe, 166, 167;
notes, 166.

Phebe, and wren, 79; contrasted
with the wood pewee, 166, 167;
notes, 166; nest, 167.

Photography, and painting, 236,

238.

335

INDEX

Physics, reveals the spiritual side
of matter, 191, 192.

Pigeon, passenger, migrating armies,
3-5; last seen, 4.

Poets, and nature, 221-23.

Psychic life, origin of, 266.

Puffin, 113.

Puma, cry, 126.

Quail, or bob-white, 154, 155.

Rabbit, 156,
Raccoon, 30, 197; rooting stones,
295.

Reason, 266, 324, 327.

Redpoll, yellow. See Warbler, yel-
low palm.

Redstart, 15; gymnastics, 8, 9.

Religion, and science, 242, 243; ten-
dency and source, 820.

Reproduction, 277, 278.

Right, and might, 280-84; and
_wrong, 282.

Riverside, Cal., 180.

Robin, 17, 98, 280; a quarrel with
bluebirds, 66, 67; attacking a jay,
67; use of white materials in nest,
71.

Rodents, diversity amid unity
among, 161, 162.

Roosevelt, Theodore, 297.

St. Augustine, 327.

St. Francis of Assisi, 88.

St. John’s River, Florida, 274.

Sapsucker, yellow-bellied, drum-
ming, 97.

Science, pleasure in, 174~77; and
literature, 235; and religion, 242,
243; and love of nature, 252, 253.

Sea-robin, 294.

Sea squirt, 273.

Seals, intelligence, 293, 294.

Seeds, various methods of dispersal,
33-39.

Seeing, 327.

Seton, Ernest Thompson, 31.

Skunk, 31, 156.

Snake, garter, amusing behavior,
116, 117.

Snow, tracks in, 209, 242.

Sparks, 322.

Sparrow, chipping, nest, 106; con-
trasted with the field sparrow,
172, 173; song, 172; nest-building,
194.

Sparrow, English, 280.

Sparrow, field, er bush sparrow, con-
trasted: with the chipping spar-
row, 172, 173; song, 172, 173;
nest, 173.

Sparrow, fox, 18; strange conduct
of a bird in an aviary, 86-88.

Sparrow, Savannah, 60.

Sparrow, song, 7, 92, 93; nests, 55-
58, 104; a fussy mother, 56-58;
contrasted with the vesper spar-
row, 168-72; songs, 169-71, 289;
nest, 172.

Sparrow, vesper, singing, 97; con-
trasted with the song sparrow,
168-72; song, 171; nest, 171, 172.

Sparrow, white-crowned, 18.

Sparrow, white-throated, 18.

Spider, jumping, 51.

Spiders, eyes, 51; cocoons and eggs,
51, 52; wisdom and stupidity, 139.

Spring, a backward, 14-17.

Squirrel, flying, 156.

Squirrel, gray, 156, 159, 195.

Squirrel, red, 156, 157, 159, 195, 197,
198.

Stone Mountain, 179.

Stork, 91.

Style, 233-35.

Swallow, barn, 75; pleasing ways,
198, 199; nesting-habits, 199, 200;
notes, 199, 200; and the cat, 201;
feeding young, 201.

Swallow, cliff, 194.

Swans, in flight, 6.

Symonds, John Addington, on Whit-
man, 227.

Tanager, scarlet, 10, 11, 55; song,
93; rival singers, 100.

Temple, Sir William, 296.

Tennyson, Alfred, quoted, 7, 241,
314,

Tertiary period, 261.

Thoreau, Henry D., his Journal,
193; his description of the battle
of the ants, 193.

Thorn, red, 39, 40,

336

INDEX

Thrush, hermit, 110.

Thrush, wood, a pair and their nest,
68-71; young leaving nest, 74, 75.

Time, future, 253.

Tody, 113.

Tracks, in snow, 209, 242; of the

’ Eternal, 242.

Trowbridge, John Townsend, 167,
222.

Truth, 326, 327.

Universe, the, great movements,
311; vast spaces, 311, 312.

Variation, 273, 274, 278, 279.

Vireo, red-eyed, feeding-habits, 9;
song, 98; and nest, 104, 105.

Vireo, yellow-throated, nest, 71, 72.

Vireos, nev 71, 105.

Virgil, 233.

Vital force, 188, 189.

Vitalism, 284.

Valhune: turkey. See Buzzard, tur-

ey.

War, the world, 322~24.

Warbler, bay-breasted, 15.

Warbler, Blackburnian, 10, 15.

Warbler, black-poll, song, 7.

Warbler, Canadian, 12, 15.

Warbler, golden-winged, a pair and
* their nest, 58-60.

Warbler, Kentucky, feeding: habits,

9.

Warbler, magnolia, 16, |

Warbler, myrtle, 9, 11, 16.

Warbler, Wilson’s, 9

Warbler, yellow palm, or yellow red-
poll, 1, 11.

Warblers, effects of a cold spring
upon, 15-17; migration wave of,
21; the May visitation, 54, 55.

Wasp, Ammophila, 136.

Wasp, Cerceris, 136.

Wasp, Sphez, 136, 204.

Wasps, intelligence of, 131-36, 138,
203, 204; bluffing of the male, 290,
291.

Water, circuit of, 299, 300.

Water-thrush, northern, 6.

Waxwing, cedar, 96; nesting, 104,
105.

Weasel, 155, 279, 280.

West Virginia, 182.

Whirlwinds, 112.

Whitman, Walt, 222, 255; quoted,
29, 94, 226, 229, 230, 254, 317,
318; Bliss Perry's biography, 225-
27; his main characteristics, 225~
28; compared with Wordsworth,
228-32:

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 226.

Woodchuck, 30, 156, 158, 194, 197.

Woodpecker, downy, 24, 50, 160,
208.

Woodpecker,
Sapsucker.

Woodpeckers, drumming, 97.

Wordsworth, William, compared
with Walt Whitman, 228-32;
quoted, 245, 246, 307; attitude
toward Nature, 245.

Wren, house, young leaving nest,
75; restless energy, 77, 78; songs
and other notes, 77-79; cock nests,
78, 83, 86, 117; hostility of other
birds towards, 79; quarrel with
bluebirds, 80-82; sham battles,
83, 84; nesting, 84-86; a tame
pair, 85, 86, 88.

Wren, marsh, cock nests, 117.

Wren, winter, song, 78, 79.

Writing, the secret of good, 223, 224,
240.

yellow-bellied. See

Che Nitergide press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A