Indeed, the foundation of my knowledge of the
ways of the wild creatures was laid when I was a farm boy, quite
unconscious of the natural-history value of my observations.
What, or who, as I grew up, gave my mind its final push in this
direction would not be easy to name. It is quite certain that I
got it through literature, and more especially through the works
of Audubon, when I was twenty-five or twenty-six years of age.
The sentiment of nature is so full and winsome in the best modern
literature that I was no doubt greatly influenced by it. I was
early drawn to Wordsworth and to our own Emerson and Thoreau,
and to the nature articles in the "Atlantic Monthly," and my
natural-history tastes were stimulated by them.
I have a suspicion that "nature-study" as now followed in the
schools--or shall I say in the colleges?--this classroom peeping
and prying into the mechanism of life, dissecting, probing,
tabulating, void of free observation, and shut away from the open
air--would have cured me of my love of nature. For love is the main
thing, the prime thing, and to train the eye and ear and acquaint
one with the spirit of the great-out-of-doors, rather than a lot
of minute facts about nature, is, or should be, the object of
nature-study. Who cares about the anatomy of the frog? But to
know the live frog--his place in the season and the landscape,
and his life-history--is something.
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