o reap
our reward--

Heads without names, no more remembered.

Let us look this matter squarely in the face. We are the inheritors of
these domains. It is one of the most precious assets of posterity. Here,
year by year, in steadily increasing proportion, as wisdom more
prevails, will men take comfort; and as the comprehension of nature's
charms penetrates their minds will they find content. One chief
satisfaction that every American feels from the mere fact of his
nationality is the full assurance in his heart that any measure founded
on sound reason and prompted by generous impulse will receive, if not
immediate acceptance, at all events eventual recognition. In the end
justice will prevail. Thus, in this matter before us, it will naturally
take a few years for Congress to realize that a genuine demand exists
for the creation of these refuges in every State, East as well as West,
but the interest in wild creatures, and the desire for their protection,
if not a clamorous demand, is one almost universally felt. All men,
except a meager few of the dwarfed and strictly city-bred, partake of
this, and it is so much a sign of the times that no Sunday edition is
complete without its column devoted to wild creatures, their traits,
their habits, or their eccentricities. One could hardly name, outside of
money-making and politics, an interest which all men more generally
share.

Every lad is a born naturalist, and the true wisdom, as all sensible
people know, is to carry unfatigued through life the boy's power of
enjoyment, his freshness of perception, his alertness and zest. Where
the child's capacity for close observation survives into manhood,
supplemented by man's power of sustained attention, we have the typical
temperament of the lover of the woods, the mountains, and the wild--of
the naturalist in the sense that Thoreau was a naturalist, and many
another whose memory is cherished.

It is not impossible for a man to be deeply learned and still to lack
the power of awakening enthusiasm in others; as a matter of fact, to be
so heavily freighted with information that he forgets to nourish his own
finer faculties, his intuition, his sympathy, and his insight. One must
have lived for a time in the California mountains to realize how great
is the service to the men of his own and to succeeding generations of
him who more than any one else has illuminated the study of the Sierras
and of all our forest-clad mountains, our gl