74 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



' Kentucky Cardinal/ an illustration of the influence of literature in 

 idealizing a thing and making it a part of one's emotional assets. 



We have nothing in America that quite takes the place of the Eng- 

 lish skylark and the nightingale. The mockingbird, the thrasher, the 

 bobolink, the wood thrush, the hermit thrush, and the veery are so 

 entirely different in their songs and their surroundings that comparison 

 of any one of them with either of the foreign birds is impossible. Why 

 our great stalking meadow lark ever became a ' lark,' and not a ' starl- 

 ing ' as it should be called, is hard to see, unless its liquid spring notes 

 and its nesting in fields appealed to the early settlers in lieu of any 

 other bird better fitted to bear this glorious name. It seems to be a 

 clear case of name transfer for the sake of the name itself. The cat- 

 bird is damned by such a title. His summer mewings have played an 

 ugly trick on him, for he is a songster of no mean ability. William 

 Bartram quaintly speaks of his endeavors at imitation, ' even in rehears- 

 ing the songs, which he attentively listens to, from the shepherdess and 

 rural swain ' — words that call up an Arcadian scene that even Theoc- 

 ritus might have loved; a haunt of Pan in days before the smoke and 

 noise of modern industry sullied the sweet air of fields and groves. 



The reader may ask — Why all this pother about names? A name 

 is a name, and, though its history be of passing interest, what need 

 further to talk about it? If literature is the reflection of a people's 

 life the words which give it form and substance are a part of the life 

 itself, at least of its emotional and intellectual reactions. Our appre- 

 ciation of nature comes so largely through literature, and literature has 

 so greatly extended our sympathy toward things natural, both animate 

 and inanimate, that in this world of words we may be said almost to 

 live and move and have our being. This is the plea that is made for 

 the interest in a name; for the better understanding of the really vital 

 part that it plays in human life. 



The past fifty years have seen the growth in America of a remark- 

 able interest in nature, not only in its scientific aspects, but in its 

 esthetic appeal as well. The modern cult of l nature study ' is an ex- 

 pression of this interest and as such is altogether salutary. How much 

 this attitude toward nature is fostered by literature is apparent in the 

 mass of matter that has been and is being written upon the subject. 

 Where one person has reached this state of mind through a sort of 

 primitive instinct that takes him out into direct contact with nature, 

 fifty persons have been led into the same happy state through some 

 appreciative writer like Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, Thoreau or 

 Burroughs. A truly good book, one that makes its appeal to the heart, 

 calls us into the open where the whole man is refreshed by nature at 

 first hand. In order to read understanding^ and sympathetically, one 

 must know the real thing itself, must have had his senses quickened 

 by the thousand influences of wood and field. Then a name will have 



