woods at all? Why not sit in
your study and invent your facts to suit your fancyings?

My sole objection to the nature books that are the outcome of this
proceeding is that they are put forth as veritable natural history,
and thus mislead their readers. They are the result of a successful
"struggle against fact and law" in a field where fact and law should
be supreme. No doubt that, in the practical affairs of life, one often
has a struggle with the fact. If one's bank balance gets on the
negative side of the account, he must struggle to get it back where it
belongs; he may even have the help of the bank's attorney to get it
there. If one has a besetting sin of any kind, he has to struggle
against that. Life is a struggle anyhow, and we are all
strugglers--struggling to put the facts upon our side. But the only
struggle the real nature student has with facts is to see them as they
are, and to read them aright. He is just as zealous for the truth as
is the man of science. In fact, nature study is only science out of
school, happy in the fields and woods, loving the flower and the
animal which it observes, and finding in them something for the
sentiments and the emotions as well as for the understanding.

With the nature student, the human interest in the wild creatures--by
which I mean our interest in them as living, struggling
beings--dominates the scientific interest, or our interest in them
merely as subjects for comparison and classification.

Gilbert White was a rare combination of the nature student and the man
of science, and his book is one of the minor English classics. Richard
Jefferies was a true nature lover, but his interests rarely take a
scientific turn. Our Thoreau was in love with the natural, but still
more in love with the supernatural; yet he prized the fact, and his
books abound in delightful natural history observations. We have a
host of nature students in our own day, bent on plucking out the heart
of every mystery in the fields and woods. Some are dryly scientific,
some are dull and prosy, some are sentimental, some are sensational,
and a few are altogether admirable. Mr. Thompson Seton, as an artist
and _raconteur_, ranks by far the highest in this field, but in
reading his works as natural history, one has to be constantly on
guard against his romantic tendencies.

The structure of animals, their colors, their ornaments, their
distribution, their migrations, all have a significance that sc