THE NATURALIST'S VISION 363 



The field in which I have endeavored to awaken 

 interest by pointing out the way seems a fitting- 

 culmination of the others. Obviously, things 

 must be named, and something of their relation- 

 ship to one another known. Hence dictionaries ; 

 and I would liken such work as deals with struc- 

 ture and function in detail to grammar. The study 

 of an individual, his acts, his deportment, his 

 goings and comings, his amusements, his inherit- 

 ance, his dispositions, his leisure, may be com- 

 pared, taking the point of view that I have of the 

 others, to a literature that it would be impossible 

 to create without the fundamental basis afforded 

 by the studies of the scholars who have made 

 the dictionaries and grammars. 



I wish it were in my power to picture with 

 vividness, to give an impression of the conditions 

 that obtain in my tentative laboratory. Imagine a 

 room some twenty feet square, where over a hun- 

 dred birds are enjoying liberty. Here are many 

 robins, wood-thrushes, and bluebirds, the Balti- 

 more and orchard oriole ; bobolinks fly about as 

 gayly as over the grass fields in spring. There 

 are some eight or nine of these last-named birds, 

 most of them males, and for two-thirds of the 

 year, from January until late in August, their 

 song is incessant. Here are thrushes from Eu- 

 rope and the starling that characterizes that re- 

 gion ; a number of kinds of starlings from India, 



