764 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 489. 



necessary amount of killing which generally 

 accompanies their investigation. They deal 

 with species and general habits, and their 

 work, so far, covers little more than the sur- 

 face of bird life. Meanwhile the individual 

 bird, with his own thoughts and feelings, his 

 own life to live and his own problems to solve, 

 has remained almost unknown till a few na- 

 ture lovers and students entered the field and, 

 leaving behind the gun and the egg-case and 

 the ' identification of species ' as the one thing 

 to seek after, have hidden and watched and 

 followed and loved the bird, and have under- 

 stood exactly in proportion as they have loved 

 him. The derisive cry of ' interested ob- 

 server ' raised against them by certain pro- 

 fessed scientists has no reasonable foundation. 

 No man watches and no man records in any 

 field except he be interested. His observations 

 are valuable exactly in proportion as love im- 

 pels him to find out about things. Scientist 

 and nature student are both seeking truth, 

 and finding the particular manifestations of 

 truth that they seek after. The difference is 

 something like this, that the ornithologist 

 loves specimens and the identification of spe- 

 cies and other superficial things, while the 

 nature student loves birds and the life that 

 is akin to our own. The latter may prove, in 

 the end, to be more scientific than the former. 

 At present the nature student is simply 

 trying, without prejudice, to understand and 

 record life as he sees it, and asks no scientific 

 consideration beyond that suggested by com- 

 mon honesty and courtesy. When his record 

 is written, his facts may be collected, and the 

 comparative-psychologist, who now knows al- 

 most nothing of the life of the wild bird or 

 animal, will then be able to finish the work 

 which the ornithologist only began. Not till 

 then shall we have anything like an edequate 

 picture of bird life; and till then it may be 

 well for critics to remember that truth is a 

 large proposition and, like honesty, is not 

 subject to monopoly. 



Since the above article was written, another 

 attack in the same spirit has appeared in 

 Science, by Mr. William Harper Davis, a 

 psychologist, who adds the name of Columbia 



University to support his claims. My first 

 care, after reading the long article carefully, 

 is to cut out from it all the personal abuse, 

 the gratuitous insults to myself and to certain 

 literary men, the repeated sneers at an hon- 

 ored body of some millions of young people, 

 the satire, the ridicule, the sophomoric ego- 

 isms and several other things which have no 

 bearing on the subject in hand, and which 

 ought not to have been permitted to appear 

 in a magazine under the great name of 

 Science. What remains of the article con- 

 sists, as do the other criticisms, of a few para- 

 graphs of dogmatic assertions, denials and 

 accusations, without a shred of evidence to 

 support them. 



Two things, however, may be profitably 

 considered by the readers of Science who 

 have seen this new attack, which is extremely 

 characteristic of all the others: 



1. Mr. Davis assures us that his article has 

 no personal or unworthy bias. ' No personal 

 feeling of any sort whatever prompts or ac- 

 companies this letter,' he assures us. Now 

 here are a few, out of many such, words and 

 epithets which he applies to certain gentle 

 books and their author, and which, since no 

 personal feeling is involved, are supposed by 

 this scientific critic to be purely scientific and 

 impersonal descriptions : ' Sham, crass, crude, 

 aimless, pitiful, preposterous, ludicrous, false, 

 meretricious, unintelligible, distortions, preju- 

 dices, farce, abominations, menace, prostitu- 

 tion, hocus-pocus, ignoranpe, arrogance, erotic 

 effusion, general incapacity, vicious notions, 

 crass misrepresentations, hopeless confusion, 

 inordinate guUihility , a facile fabricator, an 

 influence for evil, chief of a trihe, hopeless 

 romancer, incapable of reform, type of his 

 species, intellectual anarchist, wild ass, a sad 

 case ' — all these for me. And I pass over as 

 irrelevant, ' nuisance, hlatancies, higotries and 

 cochsureness ' as applied to popular education. 



Such is the language of this ' impersonal ' 

 criticism by a scientist. One can not help 

 wondering what would happen to the unfor- 

 tunate man who should really stir Mr. Davis 

 out of his scientific calm and cause him to 

 write personalities. Certainly even the pres- 

 ent language and style are somewhat different 



