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 temperamentally 

 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- 

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