er,
specimens for his herbarium. The former would enlist your sympathies
and arouse your enthusiasm; the latter would add to your store of
exact knowledge. The one is just as shy of over-coloring or
falsifying his facts as the other, only he gives more than facts,--he
gives impressions and analogies, and, as far as possible, shows you
the live bird on the bough.

The literary and the scientific treatment of the dog, for instance,
will differ widely, not to say radically, but they will not differ in
one being true and the other false. Each will be true in its own way.
One will be suggestive and the other exact; one will be strictly
objective, but literature is always more or less subjective.
Literature aims to invest its subject with a human interest, and to
this end stirs our sympathies and emotions. Pure science aims to
convince the reason and the understanding alone. Note Maeterlinck's
treatment of the dog in a late magazine article, probably the best
thing on our four-footed comrade that English literature has to show.
It gives one pleasure, not because it is all true as science is true,
but because it is so tender, human, and sympathetic, without being
false to the essential dog nature; it does not make the dog _do_
impossible things. It is not natural history, it is literature; it is
not a record of observations upon the manners and habits of the dog,
but reflections upon him and his relations to man, and upon the many
problems, from the human point of view, that the dog must master in a
brief time: the distinctions he must figure out, the mistakes he must
avoid, the riddles of life he must read in his dumb dog way. Of
course, as a matter of fact, the dog is not compelled "in less than
five or six weeks to get into his mind, taking shape within it, an
image and a satisfactory conception of the universe." No, nor in five
or six years. Strictly speaking, he is not capable of conceptions at
all, but only of sense impressions; his sure guide is instinct--not
blundering reason. The dog starts with a fund of knowledge, which man
acquires slowly and painfully. But all this does not trouble one in
reading of Maeterlinck's dog. Our interest is awakened, and our
sympathies are moved, by seeing the world presented to the dog as it
presents itself to us, or by putting ourselves in the dog's place. It
is not false natural history, it is a fund of true human sentiment
awakened by the contemplation of the dog's life and characte