STUDIES IN NATURE 



long spell of wet weather ? And again, we 

 may ask ourselves whether the gravel is red 

 or yellow or gray, and what sort of earth we 

 are treading under foot. If we can answer 

 all these questions fairly correctly, and can 

 draw a tolerable map of our house and the 

 roads about us, and know which window the 

 sun shines in at in the morning, and where we 

 can best see the sunsets at different times of 

 the year, we may feel pretty sure there is 

 nothing much wrong with our powers of ob- 

 servation, and that we have only to go on 

 looking about us to get a great deal of pleasure 

 and information. 



This question of where the sun is to be 

 found is very important, much more so than 

 people, who have not considered the matter, 

 are apt to think. The whole of life on this 

 globe really depends on the sun ; the plants 

 grow because of the warmth and light they get 

 from it, they store up the radiation in a different 

 form of energy, and we get some of it back 

 from them again when we use them as firewood, 

 or when we dig out the remains of trees that 

 grew many thousand years ago and burn them 

 as coal. It makes a real difference whether a 

 house or a piece of ground gets a little more or 

 less sunshine, especially in the British Isles, 

 where we have a great deal of cloudy weather. 

 Let us look in the shady parts of a garden, or 

 behind a wall, where the sun's rays never reach 



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