10 



1'HE GUIDE TO NATURE 



^l 



WRITE 



W/lftT YOU MftVE- 



SEEM 



, 'THEFONDF ^ 

 fSEEiNGTHINGS 



FOR YOUNG FOLKS 



W/IPVr YOU WF^MT 

 TO KINOW. 



^ch , Conn. 



The Wantonoit Club. 



PROFESSOR HENRY W. BROWN^ COEBY COL- 

 LEGE, WATERVILLE, MAINE. 



"Is tripe a fish?" This query, in all 

 seriousness, was recently asked the writer 

 by a fourteen-year-old boy. "A fool ques- 

 tion," one says, and so it is ; but no more 

 absurd than hvindreds of others — all 



but now ! Then, we had none of the 

 short-cut paths to nature knowledge that 

 we have today. Through those intermin- 

 able keys that formed the bulky appen- 

 dices of Wood's and Gray's botanies, we 

 patiently and laboriously sought for the 

 Latin names of perfectly familiar flowers ; 

 always beirinning. I recall with the ob- 



PROFESSOR BROWX SHOWING THE FL'X OF SEELXd THINGS. 



showing lamentable ignorance concerning 

 the commonest things of life. To Tom, 

 Dick, and Harry, as well as Maud, the 

 wide-open book of nature is simply one 

 vast, incomprehensible mystery- — hardly 

 less undecipherable than some Gilgamesh 

 epic engraved in cuneiform hieroglyphics 

 upon the sun-baked cylinders and tablets 

 of ancient Babylon. 



There may have been a grain of excuse 

 for such ignorance, when I was a lad— 



vious yet fundamental distinction between 

 phgenogamia and cryptogamia. If the 

 specimen in hand was found to belong 

 to the former group, — with what persist- 

 ent analysis we next tried to "tree it" 

 among the orders of either the exogens 

 or the endogens. At last, we arrived at 

 the highly illuminating fact that our dear, 

 modest, sweet-scented, pinklipped arbu- 

 tus is really— £/'?(/aea rcpens. To-day 

 with the help of such a manual as "The 



