PREFACE 



The purpose of this book is a very 

 humble one. The writer makes no claim 

 to scientific discovery or to remarkable 

 insight into Nature. But the woods, the 

 hills, the stream, the beach, with their ani- 

 mals and plants, have been his chosen 

 study and his constant companions through 

 many years. He has tried at the same 

 time to keep abreast, through both labora- 

 tory and library, with the modern move- 

 ments in biology. During much of this 

 time he has been a teacher of teachers and 

 a lecturer on these subjects in their untech- 

 nical aspects. 



His aim, then, is to help people who are 

 feeling in themselves the quickening modern 

 longing for contact with, and understand- 

 ing of, Nature in her simpler manifesta- 

 tions. It is these he would send out-doors, 

 with the alphabet of nature lore in their 

 possession, that they may themselves spell 



