samples of the former method; read Thoreau's description of the wood thrush's song or the bobolink's song, or his account of wild apples, or of his life at Walden Pond, or almost any other bit of his writing, for a sample of the latter. In his best work he uses language in the imaginative way of the poet.

Literature and science do not differ in matters of fact, but in spirit and method. There is no live' literature without a play of personality, and there is no exact science without the clear, white light of the understanding.) What we want, and have a right to expect, of the literary naturalist is that his statement shall have both truth and charm, but we do not want the charm at the expense of the truth. I may invest the commonest fact I observe in the fields or by the roadside with the air of romance, if I can, but I am not to put the romance in place of the fact. If you romance about the animals, you must do so unequivocally, as Kipling does and as Æsop did; the fiction must declare itself at once, or the work is vicious. To make literature out of natural history observation is not to pervert or distort the facts, or to draw the long bow at all; it is to see the facts in their true relations and proportions and with honest emotion.

Truth of seeing and truth of feeling are the main requisite: add truth of style, and the thing is done.

VII

HUMAN TRAITS IN THE ANIMALS

TH

HAT there is a deal of human nature in the lower animals is a very obvious fact; or we may turn the proposition around and say, with equal truth, that there is a deal of animal nature in us humans. If man is of animal origin, as we are now all coming to believe, how could this be otherwise? We are all made of one stuff, the functions of our bodies are practically the same, and the workings of our instincts and our emotional and involuntary natures are in many ways identical. I am not now thinking of any part or lot which the lower orders may have in our intellectual or moral life, a point upon which, as my reader may know, I diverge from the popular conception of these matters, but of the extent in which they share with us the ground or basement story of the house of life - certain fundamental traits, instincts, and blind gropings.

Man is a bundle of instincts, impulses, predilections, race and family affinities, and antagonisms, supplemented by the gift of reason — a gift of which he sometimes makes use. The animal is

a bundle of instincts, impulses, affinities, appetites, and race traits, without the extra gift of reason.

The animal has sensation, perception, and power of association, and these suffice it. Man has sensation, perception, memory, comparison, ideality, judgment, and the like, which suffice him.

There can be no dispute, I suppose, as to certain emotions and impulses being exclusively human, such as awe, veneration, humility, reverence, selfsacrifice, shame, modesty, and many others that are characteristic of what we call our moral nature. Then there are certain others that we share with our dumb neighbors - curiosity, jealousy, joy, anger, sex love, the maternal and paternal instinct, the instinct of fear, of self-preservation, and so forth.

There is at least one instinct or faculty that the animals have far more fully developed than we have the homing instinct, which seems to imply a sense of direction that we have not. We have lost it because we have other faculties to take its place, just as we have lost that acute sense of smell that is so marvelously developed in many of the fourfooted creatures. It has long been a contention of mine that the animals all possess the knowledge and intelligence which is necessary to their selfpreservation and the perpetuity of the species, and that is about all. This homing instinct seems to be one of the special powers that the animals cannot get along without. If the solitary wasp, for instance,

could not find her way back to that minute spot in the field where her nest is made, a feat quite impossible to you or me, so indistinguishable to our eye is that square inch of ground in which her hole is made; or if the fur seal could not in spring retrace its course to the islands upon which it breeds, through a thousand leagues of pathless sea water, how soon the tribe of each would perish!

The animal is, like the skater, a marvel of skill in one field or element, or in certain fixed conditions, while man's varied but less specialized powers make him at home in many fields. Some of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him, outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has the resourcefulness of reason, and is at home in many different fields. The condor "houses herself with the sky" that she may have a high point of observation for the exercise of that marvelous power of vision. An object in the landscape beneath that would escape the human eye is revealed to the soaring buzzard. It stands these birds in hand to see thus sharply; their dinner depends upon it. If mine depended upon such powers of vision, in the course of time I might come to possess it. I am not certain but that we have lost another power that I suspect the lower animals possess-something analogous to, or identical with, what we call telepathy — power to