THe Mature Movement 
nal solitude. He could write a Natural History of the 
Maurice River Marshes. 
These are not rare cases. The nature books, the 
nature magazines, the nature teachers, are directing 
us all to the out-of-doors. I subscribe to a farm jour- 
nal (club rates, twenty-five cents a year !) in which an 
entire page is devoted to “ nature studies,” while the 
whole paper is remarkably fresh and odorous of 
the real fields, In the city, on my way to and from 
the station, I pass three large bookstores, and from 
March until July each of these shops has a big window 
given over almost continuously to “nature books,” I 
have before me from one of these shops a little cata- 
logue of nature books — “a select list” — for 1907, 
containing 233 titles, varying in kind all the way from 
“The Tramp’s Handbook ” to one (to a dozen) on the 
very stable subject of “The Farmstead.” These are 
all distinctively “nature books,” books with an appeal 
to sentiment as well as to sense, and very unlike the 
earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises. 
There are a multitude of other signs that show as 
clearly as the nature books how full and strong is 
this tide that sets toward the open fields and woods. 
There are as many and as good evidences, too, of the 
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