208 RIVERBY 



When you go to Nature, bring us good science or 

 else good literature, and not a mere inventory of 

 what you have seen. One demonstrates, the other 

 interprets. 



Observation is selective and detective. A real 

 observation begets warmth and joy in the mind. 

 To see things in detail as they lie about you and 

 enumerate them is not observation; but to see the 

 significant things, to seize the quick movement and 

 gesture, to disentangle the threads of relation, to 

 know the nerves that thrill from the cords that bind, 

 or the typical and vital from the commonplace and 

 mechanical that is to be an observer. In Tho- 

 reau's "Walden" there is observation; in the Jour- 

 nals published since his death there is close and 

 patient scrutiny, but only now and then anything 

 that we care to know. Considering that Thoreau 

 spent half of each day for upward of twenty years 

 in the open air, bent upon spying out Nature's ways 

 and doings, it is remarkable that he made so few 

 real observations. 



Yet how closely he looked! He even saw that 

 mysterious waving line which one may sometimes 

 note in little running brooks. " I see stretched from 

 side to side of this smooth brook where it is three or 

 four feet wide what seems to indicate an invisible 

 waving line, like a cobweb against which the water 

 is heaped up a very little. This line is constantly 

 swayed to and fro, as if by the current or wind, 

 bellying forward here and there. I try repeatedly 

 to catch and break it with my hand and let the 



