The Nature Library 



est in nature: when the schoolgirls come to school with their 

 hands full of wild flowers, or the boys make excursions to the 

 woods in May for wintergreens, or black birch, or crinkle root, 

 they are all moved by an interest that is old and deep-seated in 

 the race. Now, if to this interest and curiosity we can add a 

 little science, just enough to guide them, we lift these feelings to 

 another plane and give them a longer lease of life. The boy will 

 not be so likely to rob birds' nests after the savage in him has 

 been humanized by a touch of real knowledge and he has come 

 to look upon the bird as something worthy of naming and 

 studying and that ihas its place in the economy of the fields 

 and woods. 



A touch of real knowledge — how humanizing and elevating 

 it is! Simply to learn that all the plants have been studied and 

 named, even the humblest ; that they all have vital relations with 

 one another — family ties; that the great biological laws are 

 operative in them also; that the deep, mysterious principle of 

 variation, which is at the bottom of Darwin's theory of the origin 

 of the species, is working in the lowliest plant we tread upon ; to 

 know that the chain of cause and effect runs through the whole 

 organic world, binding together its remotest parts; that every- 

 where is plan, development, evolution — to know these and kin- 

 dred things — a few of the fundamentals of science — is a joy to 

 the spirit and a light to the mind. 



Science in the world is like the surveyor and the engineer in 

 a new country; it opens up highways for the mind; it bridges 

 the chasms and marshes; it gives us dominion over the wild; it 

 brings order out of chaos. What a maze, what a tangle the 

 world is till we come to look upon it with the clews and solu- 

 tions in mind which science affords! The heavens seem a 

 haphazard spatter of stars, the earth a wild jumble of plants, and 

 animals, and blind forces all struggling with one another — con- 

 fusion, contradiction, failure everywhere. And so it was to the 

 early men, and so it still is to those who have not the light of 

 science, but so it need not remain to the child born into the world 

 to-day. The great mysteries of life and death, of final causes 

 and ultimate ends, still remain and will continue, but nature now, 

 compared with the nature of a few centuries ago, is like a land 

 subdued and peopled and cultivated compared with a pathless 

 wilderness. 



