LEAF AND TENDRIL 



The nature fakers take just this kind of liberties 

 with the facts of our natural history. The young 

 reader finds it entertaining, no doubt, but is this 

 sufficient justification ? 



Again, I am told that the extravagant stories of 

 our wild life are or may be true from the writer's 

 point of view. One of our publishing houses once 

 took me to task for criticising the statements of one 

 of its authors by charging that I had not consid- 

 ered his point of view. The fact is, I had considered 

 it too well ; his point of view was that of the man 

 who tells what is not so. As if there could be more 

 than one legitimate' point of view in natural history 

 observation — the point of view of fact ! 



There is a great deal of loose thinking upon this 

 subject in the public mind. 



An editorial writer in a New England newspaper, 

 defending this school of writers, says : — 



"Their point of view is that of the great out-of- 

 doors, and comes from loving sympathy with the 

 life they study, and is as difPerent from that of the 

 sportsman and the laboratory zoologist as a note- 

 book differs from a rifle or a microscope." 



Now how the point of view of the " great out-of- 

 doors " can differ from the point of view of the little 

 indoors in regard to matters of fact is hard to see. 

 A man who watches the ways of an animal in the 

 wilderness, or from the mountain-top, is bound by 

 the same laws of truthfulness as the man who sees 

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