no 



THE GUIDE TO NATURE 



THE FARMHOUSE AT MERRIBROOKE HAS BEEN HALLOWED BY "TO-MORROW'S TOPICS." 

 The elevated sleepng porch is shown at the left of the illustration. Here Dr. Morris is lulled to sleep 

 by the melody of the Mianus River in its rapids at the foot of the garden only about two rods away. He 

 is awakened by the music of the birds in the edge of the forest. 



plains because he has difificulty in finding 

 it. Agree with all that he says? No. 

 And the author evidently does not intend 

 that you shall. This is the charming 

 part. Complete acquiescence will not 

 arouse thought as these chapters arouse 

 it. Some reader will spring from his 

 chair and walk the floor exclaiming, 

 "That man makes me think as I never 

 thought before," and some mystics, some 

 morbid musicians and painters, will be 

 disposed to swing the battle ax and let 

 loose the dogs of war. But the books will 

 be read more ten years form now 

 than they will be this year. They are 

 not passing books like popular novels 

 but something that will go into perma- 

 nent literature. The point of view is not 

 merely for the present but literally of 

 "to-morrow's topics." The thinker in 

 advance of his day will especially enjoy 

 them. 



But how did he do it all? Why so 

 astonishing, literally so extraordinary an 

 explosion of a series of mines loaded 

 with so many incongruous subjects? 

 These never came from a Madison Ave- 

 nue office, nor an easy chair, nor from 



the haunts of busy men. They come 

 from wild nature. The author's philos- 

 ophy makes us think not of medication 

 but of meditation. Only in its incisive- 

 ness is it surgical, but true to the sur- 

 geon it is curative of manv of humanitv's 

 ills. 



Like Thoreau at Walden he has lived 

 alone with nature and much of his phil- 

 osophy is similarly or even more radi- 

 cally iconoclastic. 



The topics lead naturally from one to 

 another as do those in a lively conversa- 

 tion. The author seems to have talked 

 with himself as he was busy among his 

 beloved trees and shrubs. The books 

 are concrete pent up soliloquies. The 

 pressure on the author's mind, the men- 

 tal tide so surged and swirled that two 

 vacations were spent in dictating to a 

 stenographer at the nut farm, and these 

 books are the result. In them we are 

 not concerned with trees and shrubs al- 

 though they show us where in what at- 

 titiKles he did the thinking. Hence the 

 accompanying photographs, taken since 

 the arrival of the books. 



Even a naturalist must admit tliat tlie 



