536 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



knowledge he must roam far and wide, and to do this with safety 

 he must learn the physical geography and topography of the 

 country ; he must know the trend of the coast, the course of the 

 rivers, the valleys, and the mountains, and the extent of the dif- 

 ferent water-sheds ; he must discover the location and character 

 of all the varieties of vegetation upon which animals feed ; he 

 must learn all their methods of capture and escape in all cases 

 where they feed upon each other ; he must become an expert in 

 the study of all their tracks and the traces of their movements. 

 The broken twig, the cropped grass, the grazed log, the pressed 

 or upturned leaf must each reveal to him a whole series of facts 

 in which a determination of the lapse of time is always most 

 difficult; he must study the movements of the sun and moon and 

 planets, and the position of the stars ; he must learn to determine 

 direction by the growth of mosses, the leaning of trees and the 

 appearance of the foliage, and many other things equally im- 

 portant. 



It is true that some part of this vast amount and variety of 

 information may be communicated and so handed down from one 

 generation to another, but the larger part must be acquired in 

 the field and by each individual for himself. Much of it to be of 

 practical use must be accompanied by the most wonderful skill 

 and adroitness in its application. A practiced eye, an acute sense 

 of hearing, deftness in movement, promptness in decision, cool- 

 ness in execution are indispensable, and can not be taught orally 

 or communicated. No civilized mian could equal a savage hunter 

 in this whole department of knowledge. 



But comparisons of this sort are unsatisfactory to the last de- 

 gree, because the probability of deriving a reasonable and fair 

 conclusion from them depends more upon the ability of the mind 

 to grasp and value details, to weigh justly many considerations, 

 and to deal fairly and wisely with the facts, than it does upon the 

 facts themselves. One thing is certain, however, that the savage 

 would exercise the same amount of mental activity in obtaining 

 all this knowledge for the purpose of getting a living by it, that 

 a student of natural history would exercise in obtaining it for 

 the purposes of a scientific classification. Moreover, the strength 

 of motive, depth of desire, and intensity of emotion of the savage 

 in his work would be as much greater than that of the student as 

 it is more important to sustain life than it is to make a scientific 

 classification ; for the student, admitting that he works for bread 

 or for fame or for gratification, may find many other ways if he 

 fails in this to obtain either, while the savage must succeed in this 

 one way or die in the attempt. Lastly, the savage obtains and 

 applies his knowledge by the Baconian method of experience and 

 experiment, while the student obtains his largely from books, and 



