136 SOME EYOID HINTS. 



enthusiastically or praised more cordially by 

 intelligent students of natural history than 

 Picus has been, unless we must except the 

 kingfisher. The American ornithologists, es- 

 pecially, have been generous in the time and 

 labor given to a loving study of the life, 

 habits, and specific traits of our many and 

 beautiful woodpeckers. If Wilson's and Au- 

 dubon's noble works could have gone early 

 into the hands of the people, they would have 

 been of incalculable benefit in uprooting and 

 destroying much of the popular, quasi-legen- 

 dary prejudice of which I have spoken, but 

 those works were necessarily expensive and 

 beyond the reach of all but the rich few. It 

 is only within the last twenty years that pop- 

 ular science has been serving its true purpose 

 by taking the cheapest and farthest-reaching 

 channels of self -distribution, and this great 

 factor in the progress of common intelligence 

 and universal culture has. perhaps, come too 

 late to do its whole work. Still the time has 

 arrived, no doubt, when one may put into 

 popular form even a study of woodpecker 

 life, and be sure of a wide and sympathetic 

 audience. Possibly a mere guarded and tech- 

 nically severe sketch of some anatomical and 

 physiological facts of woodpecker biology 

 would hardly be so secure of popular atten- 

 tion, and yet the number of persons who 

 would greedily go through many pages of the 

 dryest and most abstruse phraseology to get 

 one grain of new knowledge in any field of sci- 

 ence is by no means small. In fact, the strong- 

 est trend of the world's forces to-day is toward 

 the popularization and the simplification of 

 scientific methods of acquiring knowledge in 

 every field of inquiry. It is this trend which 

 is fast bringing us to see that no knowledge (no 

 matter of how apparently trivial facts in na- 

 ture) is unprofitable or without its place in the 



