MOTHER EARTH ii 



now one may live without knowing anjrthing useful, if he only 

 possess a few coins of the realm and have access to a depart- 

 ment store. 



"Back to nature" has therefore become the popular cry, 

 and vacations are devoted to camping out, and to "foraging 

 off to the country" as a means of restoration. But for- 

 tunately it is not necessary to go to the mountains or to the 

 frontier in order to get back to nature ; for nature is ever with 

 us at home. She raises our crops with her sunshine and soil 

 and air and rain, and ttuns not aside the while from raising 

 her own. While we are engrossed with , "developing" our 

 clearings and are planting farms and cities and shops, she 

 goes on serenely raising her ancient products in the bits of 

 land left over : in swamp and bog, in gulch and dune, on the 

 rocky hillside, by the stream and in the fence row. There 

 she plants and tends her cereals and fruits and roots and 

 there she feeds her flocks. Wherever we leave her an opening 

 she slips in a few seeds of her own choosing, and when we 

 abandon a field, she quickly populates it again with wild 

 things. They begin again the same old lusty struggle for 

 place and food, and of our feeble and transient interference, 

 soon there is hardly a sign. 



As for the wild things, therefore, — the things that so largely 

 made up the environment of the pioneer and the red man, we 

 need but step out to the borders of our clearing to find most of 

 them. But if any one would share in the experience of prime- 

 val times he must work at these things with his own hands. 

 To gain an acquaintance he must apply first his senses and 

 then his wits. He must test them to find out what they are 

 good for, and try them to find out what they are like: he 

 must sense the qualities that have made them factors in the 

 struggle for a place in the world of life. Thus, one may get 

 back to nature. Thus, one may reacquire some of that 

 ancient fund of real knowledge that was once necessary to 



