664 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and when four years old explained to me that she did not mind 

 them because she knew they didn't really happen." 



It appears to me to be incontestable that in this spontaneous 

 outgoing of fellow-feeling toward others, human and animal, the 



child manifests something of a truly moral quality. C 's 



stout and persistent advocacy of the rights of London horses 

 against the oppression of the bearing-rein had in it something 

 of righteous indigation. The way in which his mind was at 

 this period preoccupied with animal suffering suggests that his 

 sympathies with animals were rousing the first fierce protest 

 against the wicked injustice of the world. The boy De Quincey 

 got this first feeling of moral evil in another way through his 

 sympathy with a sister who, rumor said, had been brutally treated 

 by a servant. He could not, he tells us, bear to look on the 

 woman. It was not anger. " The feeling which fell upon me was 

 a shuddering horror, as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I 

 was in a world of evil and strife." * 



-- 



THE STUDY OF BIRDS OUT-OF-DOORS.f 



By FRANK M. CHAPMAN. 



WHETHER your object be to study birds as a scientist or 

 simply as a lover of Nature, the first step is the same you 

 must learn to know them. This problem of identification has 

 been given up in despair by many would-be ornithologists. We 

 can neither pick, press, net, nor impale birds ; and here the bota- 

 nist and the entomologist have a distinct advantage. Even if we 

 have the desire to resort to a gun its use is not always possible. 

 But with patience and practice the identification of birds is a 

 comparatively easy matter, and in the end you will name them 

 with surprising ease and certainty. There is generally more 

 character in the flight of a bird than there is in the gait of a 

 man. Both are frequently indescribable but perfectly diagnostic, 

 and you learn to recognize bird friends as you do human ones 

 by experience. 



If you confine your studies to one locality, probably not more 

 than one third of the species described in this volume will come 

 within the field of your observation. To aid you in learning 

 which species should be included in this third, the paragraphs on 

 range are followed by a statement of the bird's standing at Wash- 



* Autobiographical Sketches, chap. i. 



\ Being part of a chapter from the author's illustrated Handbook of Birds of Eastern 

 North America recently issued by Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. 



