382 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [11:8— Nov., 1915 



pages have asserted betore, that both in national life and in 

 individual, fine character is the gift of the limitless ocean, the 

 rugged mountain, the mighty river, the quiet valley with the cloud- 

 flecked blue brooding over all. 



Even more seems true, namely, that familiarity with nature is 

 essential to its expression in literature and art, to its permanent 

 embodiment as a force for righteousness. How much of language 

 depends on the multitudinous sensory impressions of nature for its 

 significance. The stately poetry of the Hebrew is full of sensory 

 imagery. Shakespeare is saturated with it. Hardly a chapter of 

 your favorite masterpiece of fiction, or an essay that is classic but 

 would be a jumble of meaningless hieroglyphics without a stock of 

 sensory images to suggest and elucidate their meaning, images 

 gathered in large measure out-of-doors. Childhood must have a 

 wealth of experience in the open to read intelligently unless it be 

 doomed to the market reports and the humdrum happenings the 

 daily paper reports. It must know nature to enjoy art. 



These sensory images are essential to the imagination, that delight 

 of childhood, that distinctive resource of creative minds. They 

 furnish the rough materials which under the touch of genius are 

 transmuted by dissociation and reconstruction into the master- 

 pieces of art and literature and which in the experience of medioc- 

 rity are the essential elements in appreciation and intellectual 

 pleasure. 



News and Notes 



With farm help so hard to get and the fast-growing weeds such 

 prolific producers, The Liberty Bell Bird Club of The Farm Journal, 

 Philadelphia, calls the attention of the farmer to the wage earners 

 on his place that he usually regards as pillagers and thieves. It 

 has the Government report for its statement that the American 

 sparrow family saved the sum of $89,260,000 to the farmers in 1910 

 in consuming weed seeds. 



The song sparrow's diet consists of three-fourths weed seeds, 

 while the tree-sparrow consumes one-fourth of an ounce of noxious 

 weed seeds a day. Half the food of the qua'd is undesirable weed 

 seeds. Several thousand pig-weed seeds have been found in the 

 stomach of a single quail. The crop of a ring-necked pheasant 

 from Washington contained 8,000 chickweed seeds and a dandelion 



