more youthful and plastic, when the seething and
fermenting of the vital fluids were at a high pitch in the far past,
and it was high tide with the creative impulse. The world is aging,
and, no doubt, the power of initiative in Nature is becoming less and
less. I think it safe to say that the worm no longer aspires to be man.

X

A PINCH OF SALT

Probably I have become unusually cautious of late about accepting
offhand all I read in print on subjects of natural history. I take
much of it with a liberal pinch of salt. Newspaper reading tends to
make one cautious--and who does not read newspapers in these days? One
of my critics says, apropos of certain recent strictures of mine upon
some current nature writers, that I discredit whatever I have not
myself seen; that I belong to that class of observers "whose
view-point is narrowed to the limit of their own personal experience."
This were a grievous fault if it were true, so much we have to take
upon trust in natural history as well as in other history, and in life
in general. "Mr. Burroughs might have remembered," says another critic
discussing the same subject, "that nobody has seen quite so many
things as everybody." How true! If I have ever been guilty of denying
the truth of what everybody has seen, my critic has just ground for
complaint. I was conscious, in the paper referred to,[4] of denying
only the truth of certain things that one man alone had reported
having seen,--things so at variance not only with my own observations,
but with those of all other observers and with the fundamental
principles of animal psychology, that my "will to believe," always
easy to move, balked and refused to take a step.

[4] _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1903.

In matters of belief in any field, it is certain that the scientific
method, the method of proof, is not of equal favor with all minds.
Some persons believe what they can or must, others what they would.
One person accepts what agrees with his reason and experience, another
what is agreeable to his or her fancy. The grounds of probability
count much with me; the tone and quality of the witness count for
much. Does he ring true? Is his eye single? Does he see out of the
back of his head?--that is, does he see on more than one side of a
thing? Is he in love with the truth, or with the strange, the bizarre?
Last of all, my own experience comes in to corr