The Birds’ Calendar 
ing with the dead, and not with the living— 
brainy but juiceless. Field botany is vital, 
abounding in the spirit and atmosphere of out- 
door excursion ; instinct with sentiment, poetic, 
restful; an unfailing source of humanizing in- 
fluences, even as the deeper springs of life are 
not of the head but of the heart. 
The purely scientific side of ornithology (and 
of botany, too, it must be confessed) is as yet 
too much of a makeshift to be very captivating, 
even to those whose predilections are of an in- 
tellectual rather than of a sentimental sort. Its 
principles of classification are not yet very pro- 
foundly established, and by the highest author- 
ities upon the subject are confessedly tentative. 
In counting the number of feathers in the 
wing, and in examining the anatomy of a bird’s 
foot, for tests of relationship, we hardly pene- 
trate deep enough into the real nature of a bird 
to feel any intense glow of enthusiasm. Swal- 
lows, warblers, and finches are ¢emperamentally 
different ;—a difference by no means accounted 
for by existing criteria of classification. And 
botany is not in advance of ornithology in this 
respect. 
But it is aside from our present purpose to 
quarrel with the scientists. In field ornithol- 
6 
