and they become
interesting the moment you relate them in any way to our lives, or
make them suggestive of what we know to be true in other fields and in
our own experience. Thoreau made his battle of the ants interesting
because he made it illustrate all the human traits of courage,
fortitude, heroism, self-sacrifice. Burns's mouse at once strikes a
sympathetic chord in us without ceasing to be a mouse; we see
ourselves in it. To attribute human motives and faculties to the
animals is to caricature them; but to put us in such relation with
them that we feel their kinship, that we see their lives embosomed in
the same iron necessity as our own, that we see in their minds a
humbler manifestation of the same psychic power and intelligence that
culminates and is conscious of itself in man,--that, I take it, is the
true humanization.

We like to see ourselves in the nature around us. We want in some way
to translate these facts and laws of outward nature into our own
experiences; to relate our observations of bird or beast to our own
lives. Unless they beget some human emotion in me,--the emotion of the
beautiful, the sublime,--or appeal to my sense of the fit, the
permanent,--unless what you learn in the fields and the woods
corresponds in some way with what I know of my fellows, I shall not
long be deeply interested in it. I do not want the animals humanized
in any other sense. They all have human traits and ways; let those be
brought out--their mirth, their joy, their curiosity, their cunning,
their thrift, their relations, their wars, their loves--and all the
springs of their actions laid bare as far as possible; but I do not
expect my natural history to back up the Ten Commandments, or to be an
illustration of the value of training-schools and kindergartens, or to
afford a commentary upon the vanity of human wishes. Humanize your
facts to the extent of making them interesting, if you have the art to
do it, but leave the dog a dog, and the straddle-bug a straddle-bug.

Interpretation is a favorite word with some recent nature writers. It
is claimed for the literary naturalist that he interprets natural
history. The ways and doings of the wild creatures are exaggerated and
misread under the plea of interpretation. Now, if by interpretation we
mean an answer to the question, "What does this mean?" or, "What is
the exact truth about it?" then there is but one interpretation of
nature, and that is the scientific. What is