THE ANIMAL AND THE PUZZLE-BOX 



can the field naturalist; he takes a short cut, he gets 

 the bare fact, shorn of its picturesque details. But 

 how much he misses! I sometimes think of him 

 under the parable of a man dining on capsules that 

 contain the chemical equivalents of the food we eat 

 — a short cut, surely, but the pleasure and satis- 

 faction of the dinner-table, social and gustatory, 

 the taste of fruit and milk and meat and grain, are 

 not his. Live natural history in the field and woods 

 and on the shore, the uncontrolled animal going 

 its free, picturesque ways, solving its life-problems 

 as they come to it in the revolving seasons, using 

 such mind as it has, without constraint or arbitrary 

 direction, threading only the labyrinth which Na- 

 ture prepares for it, stimulated only by the sights and 

 sounds and odors of its natural habitat, perplexed 

 with no puzzles but how to get its food, avoid its 

 enemies, rear its young, hide its nest or den, and get 

 out of life what there is in it — how much more en- 

 gaging and stimulating an animal under such con- 

 ditions than the same creature being put through its 

 paces under controlled conditions in the laboratory. 

 So far as an exact science of animal conduct is 

 possible, the experimentalist has the advantage over 

 the free observer; so far as natural history is a joy, 

 and of educational value, and an introduction to the 

 whole field of animal life, he is not to be named the 

 slame day with the outdoor observer. Welcome, 

 thrice welcome, all the light the laboratory method 

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