The Lay of He Band 
the pioneers and colonists to study but the out-of- 
doors ? and what else was half as wonderful? They 
came from an old urban world into this new country 
world, where all was strange, unnamed, and unex- 
plored. Their chief business was observing nature, 
not as dull savages, nor as children born to a dead 
familiarity with their surroundings, but as interested 
men and women, with a need and a desire to know. 
Their coming was the real beginning of our nature 
movement; their observing has developed into our 
nature study habit. 
Our nature literature also began with them. There 
is scarcely a journal, a diary, or a set of letters of 
this early time in which we do not find that careful 
seeing, and often that imaginative interpretation, so 
characteristic of the present day. Even the modern 
animal romancer is represented among these early 
writers in John Josselyn and his delicious book, 
“ New England’s Rarities Discovered.” 
It was not until the time of Emerson and Bryant 
and Thoreau, however, that our interest in nature 
became general and grew into something deeper 
than mere curiosity. There had been naturalists such 
as Audubon (he was a poet, also), but they went 
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