it through his study window. What the writer means is doubtless that the spirit in which the literary naturalist the man who goes to the fields

and woods for material for literature

treats the

facts of natural history differs from the spirit in which the man of pure science treats his. Undoubtedly, but the two alike deal with facts, though with facts of a different order.

The scientist, the artist, the nature-lover, and the like, all look for and find different things in nature, yet there is no contradiction between the different things they find. The truth of one is not the falsehood of another. The field naturalist is interested in the live animal, the laboratory zoölogist in the measuring and dissecting of the dead carcass. What interests one is of little or no interest to the other. So with the field botanist as compared with the mere herbalist. Both are seekers for the truth, but for a different kind of truth. One seeks that kind of truth that appeals to his emotion and to his imagination; the other that kind of truth — truth of structure, relation of parts, family ties - that appeals to his scientific faculties. Does this fact, therefore, give the nature faker warrant to exaggerate or to falsify the things he sees in the fields and woods? Let him make the most of what he sees, embellish it, amplify it, twirl it on the point of his pen like a juggler, but let him beware of adding to it; let him be sure he sees accurately. Let him beware

of letting invention take the place of observation. It is one thing to work your gold or silver up into sparkling ornaments, and quite another to manufacture an imitation gold or silver, and this is what the nature fakers do. Their natural history is for the most part a sham, a counterfeit. No one quarrels with them because they are not scientific, or because they deal in something more than dry facts; the ground of quarrel is that they do not start with facts, that they grossly and absurdly misrepresent the wild lives they claim to portray.

A Wisconsin editor, writing upon this subject, shoots wide of the mark in the same way as does the New England editor. "Knowledge born of scientific curiosity," he says, "has nothing in common with the study of animal individuality which the ‘nature fakers' have fostered and to which the public has proved responsive. There is all the difference in the world between being interested in the length of an animal's skull and being interested in the same animal's ways and personality." True enough, but this is quite beside the mark. (The point at issue is a question of accurate seeing and reporting. The man who is reporting upon an animal's ways and personality is bound by the same obligations of truthfulness as the man who is occupied with the measurements of its skull. By all means let the literary naturalist give us traits instead of measurements. This he is bound to do, and the better

he does it, the better we shall like him. We can get our statistics elsewhere. From him we want pictures, action, incident, and the portrait of the living animal. But we want it all truthfully done. The life history of any of our wild creatures, the daily and hourly course of its life, all its traits and peculiarities, all its adventures and ways of getting on in the world, are of keen interest to every nature student, but if these things are misrepresented, what then? There are readers, I believe, who say they don't care whether the thing is true or not; at any rate it is interesting, and that is enough. What can one say to such readers? Only that they should not complain if they are stuck with paste diamonds, or pinchbeck gold, or shoddy cloth, or counterfeit bills.

The truth of animal life is more interesting than any fiction about it. Can there be any doubt, for instance, that if one knew just how the fur seals find their way back from the vast wilderness of the Pacific Ocean, where there is, apparently, nothing for the eye, or the ear, or the nose to seize upon in guiding them, to the little island in Bering Sea that is their breeding haunt in spring-can there be any doubt, I say, that such knowledge would be vastly more interesting than anything our natural history romancers could invent about it? But it is the way of our romancers to draw upon their invention when their observation fails them. Thus