388 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 479. 



No matter how great his learning up to a cer- 

 tain point, he is continually in peril of making 

 irrational ventures beyond that point, lured for- 

 ward by pure imagination. This has come out 

 in his preaching. Eccentricities and extremely 

 radical outbursts have had a disturbing effect 

 upon his audiences and have limited his success. 

 It is just this sort of thing that has made him the 

 prey of Mr. Burroughs. I well remember an 

 utterance of Mr. Long's in a class-room in An- 

 dover when he took issue with the professor, be- 

 ginning by saying: 'I always love to think' — 

 to which the professor replied, ' Mr. Long, we are 

 not concerned with what we love to think, but 

 with what we ought to think.' Here was the 

 whole situation in a nutshell. What he has loved 

 to think and not what he ought to think has 

 colored whatever has met his eyes in the theolog- 

 ical as well as the biological world. 



Honest, absolutely honest, and yet not quite 

 telling the truth — that is a seeming paradox, but 

 a real paradox only as many a poetic tempera- 

 ment is itself a paradox, and any poetic tempera- 

 ment, any temperament to which imagination is 

 all but reality, and to which the thing loved and, 

 therefore, the thing sought, is by a natural con- 

 sequence the thing believed — any such tempera- 

 ment will prepare bitter grief for itself when it 

 enters the world of natural science. Scientists 

 have always to guard against the personal equa- 

 tion. This is well illustrated in the disappearance 

 from scientific use of the pencil sketch and its re- 

 placement by the photograph. Let me draw the 

 strata in yonder rocks, and nine chances in ten 

 I shall unconsciously draw into them the theory 

 which I intend them to illustrate. The camera, 

 on the other hand, tells no lies, and very plainly 

 Mr. Long is some other thing than a camera. 

 His finished product is art, not science; it is the 

 forest plus Mr. Long; it is the woodland folk 

 introduced, interpreted, beloved — I had almost said 

 at the first, created by Mr. Long. And I wonder 

 whether, after all, Mr. Burroughs is not equally 

 writing his own delightful personality into his 

 own charming pages. The world-wide difference 

 comes in at one point only. Mr. Burroughs is 

 temperamentally fitted to interpret nature through 

 the forms of literature; Mr. Long is not so fitted. 



Evidently the author of these illuminating 

 paragraphs knew whereof he wrote, and his 

 delineation of Mr. Long's peculiar character- 

 istics appears to explain satisfactorily that 

 gentleman's ability to make more startling 

 discoveries in one short lifetime than have 



fallen to the lot of naturalists in preceding 

 centuries. Additional light is thrown on Mr. 

 Long's methods and their results by his con- 

 fession that he has ' never studied nature con- 

 sciously, but only loved it,' and has found out 

 many of its ' ways long ago, guided solely by 

 a boy's instinct ' (' Ways of Wood Folk,' 

 preface) ; while the dedication of ' Fowls of 

 the Air ' is a surprising avowal of its author's 

 point of view. It reads : 



To the Teachers of America who are striving 

 to make nature study more vital and attractive 

 by revealing a vast realm of nature outside the 

 realm of Science, and a world of ideas above and 

 beyond the world of facts, these studies from 

 nature are dedicated. 



To the naturalist further comment will be 

 unnecessary, but it doubtless will be inquired 

 why make all this disturbance about one of 

 scores of inaccurate producers of so-called 

 ' nature ' books ? Chiefly, it may be replied, 

 because of the magnitude of Mr. Long's of- 

 fenses, of the audience which he has won 

 through his marked literary gifts in descrip- 

 tive writing, and of the prominence injudi- 

 cious criticism has brought him. 



In a well-meant but somewhat ill-considered 

 attempt to stamp out the fire, Mr. Burroughs 

 merely scattered it. From an insignificant 

 smudge, it has become a roaring blaze and its 

 sparks are kindling throughout the land. 



It requires the briefest consideration of the 

 fact that tens of thousands of Mr. Long's 

 books have been sold for supplementary read- 

 ing in the schools — where, judged only by 

 their literary charm, they are almost uni- 

 formly commended by teachers — to realize 

 their far-reaching influence for evil. As I 

 write, a prominent educational journal is re- 

 ceived containing a review of Mr. Long's 

 latest book, which the reviewer says, is ' by 

 one who knows whereof he speaks, and who has 

 studied so carefully and lovingly that he will 

 make revelations that will hold us breathless.' 

 This is a fair indication of the esteem in 

 which Mr. Long and his works are held by 

 the average teacher. 



Is it not, then, the duty of naturalists to 

 enlighten the general public, and especially 

 those entrusted with the education of children. 



