SOME POPULAR ERRORS 



a whole school of " Nature-study " advocates has 

 arisen, mainly encouraged by certain books of 

 fairy stories about animals, whose aims and ideals 

 are not only unscientific, but deliberately anti- 

 scientific. Although the plain unvarnished facts 

 of nature, truly told in simple language, can be 

 made to possess a satisfying interest such as these 

 romances must always lack, it is easier for a skilled 

 writer with a limited supply of facts, to make a 

 thrilling story, full of human emotions, about a 

 hedgehog or a lynx or a wild duck. Yet the effect 

 upon the minds of readers is that they look upon 

 nature through so distorting a medium that every 

 step of inquiry thereafter leads them blundering 

 into quagmires of doubt. 



Now " nature-study " must be undertaken in 

 the scientific spirit of the searcher after truth, 

 or it is of no value whatever ; and it is not possible 

 to calculate the harm which these fairy-stories 

 about animals are doing. A child or a grown-up 

 person who reads these tragedies or comedies of 

 animal life, told with infinite skill and invested with 

 a false halo of human sentiment, becomes almost 

 mentally incapable of understanding any truth of 

 nature with which he may be confronted. 



Accustomed always to regard animals as actu- 

 ated by human motives, they cannot understand 

 to take an instance that the shamefacedness of a 

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