ive it back to 'em the next time one of the
Conifer boys comes round." The man of the river and the woods hates a
Latin name, and any stray classic knowledge you have is best hidden
under a napkin. The descriptive terms men use here are crisp and to the
point. The vicious habit of giving birds bad names is one that grows,
and you never know when the scientific have come to a finality. For
instance, little Robin Red-Breast _("the pious bird with scarlet
breast_" whose nest with four eggs the Kid discovered to-day), has
successively lived through three tags, "_Turdus migratorius_,"
"_Planesticus migratorius_," and "_Turdus canadensis_." If he had not
been an especially plucky little beggar he would have died under the
libels long ago. For my own part I cannot conceive how a man with good
red blood in his veins could look a chirky little robin in the eye and
call him to his face a "_Planesticus migratorius_," when as chubby
youngster he had known the bird and loved him as Robin Red-Breast. One
is inclined to ask with suspicion, "Is naming a lost art?" Any new
flower discovered these days, every clever invention in the realm of
machinery, is forthwith saddled with an impossible name. If it had not
been easy to clip the term "automobile" down to the working stub "auto,"
the machine would never have run our streets. Again, the decimal system
is conceded to be far ahead of the asinine "five and one-half yards make
one rod, pole or perch"; the only reason why the commonsense thing does
not supersede the foolish one is that the sensible measurement has the
fool tag on it. Who could imagine ever going into a store and asking for
seven decimetres and nine centimetres of picture-moulding, or dropping
into the corner grocery to buy a hectolitre of green onions? When man
dug gold and iron and tin out of the earth he made things with them. Now
when we discover a new mineral we dub it "molybdenum" and let it rust in
innocuous ease. When man loses the art of nervous speech, his power of
action goes with it. And as we ruminate, the _Bonasa umbellus togata_
drums on.

When we pass the parallel of 55 deg.N. we come into a very wealth of new
words, a vocabulary that has found its way into no dictionary but which
is accepted of all men. The steep bank opposite us is a "cut bank," an
island or sandbar in a river is a "batture." A narrow channel is called
a "she-ny," evidently a corruption of the French _chenal_. When it leads
nowhere and you