172 Outlook to Nature 



boy knows what the squirrel does day by day, 

 where it lives, when it goes and comes, what 

 it eats, what it says. He knows the fields and 

 the woods and the fishing-hole, without know- 

 ing that he knows them. If we could have the 

 intimate unconscious boy kind of knowledge 

 put into books, it would almost make a new 

 natural history. It would give us the life-story 

 of the animal or the plant the whole year 

 round. Such an author would give us the 

 animal squirrel, not the species squirrel. This 

 kind of knowledge is not yet in books to any 

 great extent. Consult your authorities, and see 

 how little explicit knowledge you find in them. 

 One reason why the nature-studies are so 

 difficult to establish is because there are almost 

 no books to serve as guides to the intimate and 

 particular life histories. We need a new type 

 of monographs, written directly from the field, 

 without reference to the museums or to the 

 kind of information that we have read about. 

 These will contain the least possible contamina- 

 tion of the author and the greatest possible 

 content of crow or frog. 



