PREFACE 



but the word "natural" to me implies more than 

 mere chemistry and physics. The birth of a baby, 

 and the blooming of a flower, are natural events, 

 but the laboratory methods forever fail to give us 

 the key to the secret of either. 



I am forced to conclude that my passion for nature 

 and for all open-air life, though tinged and stimu- 

 lated by science, is not a passion for pure science, 

 but for literature and philosophy. My imagination 

 and ingrained humanism are appealed to by the 

 facts and methods of natural history. I find some- 

 thing akin to poetry and religion (using the latter 

 word in its non-mythological sense, as indicating the 

 sum of mystery and reverence we feel in the pres- 

 ence of the great facts of life and death) in the shows 

 of day and night, and in my excursions to fields and 

 woods. The love of nature is a different thing from 

 the love of science, though the two may go together. 

 The Wordsworth ian sense in nature, of "something 

 far more deeply interfused" than the principles of 

 exact science, is probably the source of nearly if not 

 quite all that this volume holds. To the rigid man 

 of science this is frank mysticism; but without a 

 sense of the unknown and unknowable, life is flat 

 and barren. Without the emotion of the beautiful, 

 the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no reli- 

 gion, no literature. How to get from the clod under- 

 foot to the brain and consciousness of man without 

 invoking something outside of, and superior to, 



vu 



