14 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE FARM 
seeds, studied in the field, will be very desirable. You wilf 
want to take another look at them after you get back; so 
prepare to take them home, where you can sit at a table and 
work with them. A bag ora basket will hold, besides tools, a 
lot of stout envelopes, for keeping things apart, with labels 
and necessary data written on the outside. 
7. As to reference books: ‘Study nature, not books’, 
said the great naturalist and teacher, Louis Agassiz. By all 
means, get the answers to the questions involved in your 
records of these studies direct from natureand not from books. 
But while you are in the field, you will meet with many things 
about which you will wish to know. Ask your instructors 
freely. Get acquainted, also, with some of the standard 
reference books, which will help you when instructors fail. 
Only a few of the more generally useful can be mentioned 
here. 
There are three classical manuals for use in tlfe eastern 
United States and Canada, that have helped the naturalists 
of several generations. These are Gray’s Manual of Botany, 
Jordan’s Manual of the Vertebrates and Comstock’s Manual 
for the Study of Insects. There are two great cyclopedias, 
both edited by Professor L. H. Bailey—The American 
Cyclopedias of Horticulture and of Agriculture. There are 
many books of nature-study, but most useful of them all is 
Mrs. Comstock’s Handbook of Nature-Study. The best 
single bird book is Chapman’s Handbook of North American 
Birds. A new book that will help toward acquaintance 
with aquatic plants and animals is Needham and Lloyd’s 
Life of Inland Waters. All these should be accessible on 
reference shelves. 
Notre—At Cornell University the field tool that is fur- 
nished to classes for individual use is a sharp brick-layer’s 
hammer weighing about a pound. It is not heavy enough 
to be burdensome, and it is adaptable to a great variety of 
uses, such as digging roots, cracking nuts, stripping bark, 
splitting and splintering kindling, planting seedlings, etc. A 
light hatchet will serve many, but not all of these uses. 
