PREFACE 



but the word "natural" to me implies more than 

 mere chemistry and physics. The birth of a baby, 

 and the blooming of a flower, are natural events, 

 but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us 

 the key to the secret of either. 



I am forced to conclude that my passion for nature 

 and for all open-air life, though tinged and stimu- 

 lated by science, is not a passion for pure science, 

 but for literature and philosophy. My imagination 

 and ingrained humanism are appealed to by the 

 facts and methods of natural history. I find some- 

 thing akin to poetry and religion (using the latter 

 word in its non-mythological sense, as indicating the 

 sum of mystery and reverence we feel in the pres- 

 ence of the great facts of life and death) in the shows 

 of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and 

 woods. The love of nature is a different thing from 

 the love of science, though the two may go together. 

 The Wordsworthian sense in nature, of " something 

 far more deeply interfused'* than the principles of 

 exact science, is probably the source of nearly if not 

 quite all that this volume holds. To the rigid man 

 of science this is frank mysticism; but without a 

 sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat 

 and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, 

 the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no reli- 

 gion, no literature. How to get from the clod under- 

 foot to the brain and consciousness of man without 

 invoking something outside of, and superior to, 

 vii 



