CHAPTER XVII 
OUTDOOR AND INDOOR ORNITHOLOGY 
THE amateur ornithologist should study birds in 
every way that is open to him. A specialist whose 
life is devoted to classification and who takes notice 
only of the points that are important for this purpose, 
is doing work that must be done, and which requires 
a good man to do it. But after a time a bird may 
no longer be to him a living creature with wonderful 
powers and habits and character. He may come to 
look upon it as existing only to be put in its exact 
place in a system of classification. The outdoor 
ornithologist who knows nothing about birds but 
what he can learn by observation in the open, 
though he is, perhaps, the most to be envied of all 
specialists, yet has missed a great deal. He may 
not know that the most active and ethereal of all 
vertebrate animals is nearly related to a lizard. How 
the reptilian bones have been adapted to purposes 
of flight, how a cold-blooded torpid creature has 
become warm-blooded and full of life, is altogether 
out of the field of his observation. To another man 
