348 



THE GUIDE TO NATURE. 



terest of a scholar," he said, "whether 

 one studies life or death, a man or a 

 blackbird, a creed or a political plat- 

 form. And truth, by the way, is sel- 

 dom found upon the surface of things. 

 When one writes, however, interest 

 must be added to accuracy, and what- 

 ever virtue appears first is merely a 

 matter of emphasis. In my natural- 

 history studies, though the work is all 

 plav, it takes far more time and effort 

 to verify an observation than to search 

 out original sources in literature. To 

 illustrate the matter specifically; a 

 professor of literature wrote me that I 



or how a muskrat opens unio shells 

 without breaking them; and this, 

 though good fun, is neither easy nor 

 simple. It requires skill, patience, 

 stoicism, a knowledge of animals, and, 

 most of all. good luck before one can 

 be either interesting or accurate. 

 When 1 write of such things, 1 leave 

 out all the difficulties and give you 

 only the fact, and the fun I had in 

 getting it. And some hard-headed fel- 

 lows doubt the interesting observation 

 simply because they do not appreciate 

 the time and effort spent in making it 

 accurate." 



WILLIAM J. LONG MEASURING A WOLF'S JUMP UPWARDS FROM TAKE TO BANK. 

 From fourteen feet below to ten feet up on the hank. 



had made a mistake in the title of Bax- 

 ter's famous work. "Saints' Rest." 

 savin-' that it should be singular, not 

 plural. The matter was of small eon- 

 sequence, but I searched the libraries 

 of Boston and New York, and hired an 

 English scholar to go through the 

 British Museum in the effort to get 

 the title right. All of which was 

 simple and easy. But 1 have watched 

 for hours at a stretch, on a hundred 

 different lakes and streams of the 

 wilderness, trying to find out how a 

 beaver puts the dome over his lodge, 



This explains both the naturalist 

 and the literary man perfectly. Dr. 

 Long goes to nature for the kind of 

 play that interests him most after 

 scholarly work. In the woods he lets 

 himself loose from the routine of 

 scholarship, and tries to make his 

 record as interesting to the reader as 

 the observation was to the naturalist. 

 But behind that record are the long 

 hours of watching alone in the wilder- 

 ness ; and the facts as he sees them are 

 never misrepresented. 



One can write or read statements of 



