156 THe Stupy or Birp LIFE. 
covery of anything interesting or strange or new loses half its 
charm for the discoverer if he has no one to whom he can 
impart it. 
The ornithologist in reality has seldom much to show. He 
cannot talk to the uninitiated about strange things he has met 
with because he will be quietly put down as a “ De Rougemont,’ 
however good his reputation may have been previously to his 
turning ornithologist. He will have to keep his notes and his 
observations and his successes and failures all to himself until he 
meets with some kindred spirit. It may be years before that 
happens, although it is more easy now than some years ago. 
But he can practically have that kindred spirit always near 
him, if he keeps good notes, for as he passes from month to 
month and year to year and compares this one with that and so 
on his notes will serve him as a friend, and a friend too who 
will, without prejudice, criticise him, and who will, without 
complaint, submit to correction or emendation. 
His notes, too, even if he finds by comparing them with the 
notes of other observers that they contain nothing whatever 
new, will give him many a summer day in winter and will call up 
old associations and pleasant places over which he can linger 
with often as great pleasure as he derived from the actual things 
themselves. 
And, perhaps, I may add in reference to this, that it is 
very questionable to me at anyrate whether the majority of 
people ever delight in what they see in nature simply for itself 
and in itself so much as they delight in it on account of the 
associations connected with it. 
“The sensation of pleasure we experience on seeing natural 
objects depends much upon association of ideas with their uses, 
their novelty, or their history,’’ wrote a great naturalist. “ What 
causes the sensations we feel on gazing upon a waving field of 
golden corn? Wot the mere beauty of the sight, but the associa- 
tions we connect with it,’? and so on. But this is too great a 
subject to do more than allude to here and so I pass on. 
To make up then for this want of sympathy the ornithologist 
has his science ever before him, always showing something new, 
in small or great degree. He can pursue it in frost and snow, 
in heat or rain, always expecting, and more often than not, re- 
ceiving something. He has no need to strain after rarities: The 
