d life about us, see more or see less
than the truth. We see less when our minds are dull, or preoccupied,
or blunted by want of interest. This is true of most country people.
We see more when we read the lives of the wild creatures about us in
the light of our human experience, and impute to the birds and beasts
human motives and methods. This is too often true of the eager city
man or woman who sallies out into the country to study nature.

The tendency to sentimentalize nature has, in our time, largely taken
the place of the old tendency to demonize and spiritize it. It is
anthropomorphism in another form, less fraught with evil to us, but
equally in the way of a clear understanding of the life about us.

VII

DEVIOUS PATHS

There is no better type or epitome of wild nature than the
bird's-nest--something built, and yet as if it grew, a part of the
ground, or of the rock, or of the branch upon which it is placed;
beginning so coarsely, so irregularly, and ending so finely and
symmetrically; so unlike the work of hands, and yet the result of a
skill beyond hands; and when it holds its complement of eggs, how
pleasing, how suggestive!

The bird adapts means to an end, and yet so differently from the way
of man,--an end of which it does not know the value or the purpose. We
know it is prompted to it by the instinct of reproduction. When the
woodpecker in the fall excavates a lodge in a dry limb, we know he is
prompted to it by the instinct of self-preservation, but the birds
themselves obey the behests of nature without knowledge.

A bird's-nest suggests design, and yet it seems almost haphazard; the
result of a kind of madness, yet with method in it. The hole the
woodpecker drills for its cell is to the eye a perfect circle, and
the rim of most nests is as true as that of a cup. The circle and the
sphere exist in nature; they are mother forms and hold all other
forms. They are easily attained; they are spontaneous and inevitable.
The bird models her nest about her own breast; she turns round and
round in it, and its circular character results as a matter of course.
Angles, right lines, measured precision, so characteristic of the
works of man, are rarely met with in organic nature.

Nature reaches her ends by devious paths; she loiters, she meanders,
she plays by the way; she surely "arrives," but it is always in a
blind, hesitating, experim