INTRODUCTION 



THERE are three serious charges brought 

 against nature books of the present time, 

 namely, that they are either so dull as to be 

 unreadable, or so fanciful as to be misleading, or so 

 insincere as to be positively harmful. There is a real 

 bottom to each of these charges. 



Dull nature-writing is the circumstantial, the de- 

 tailed, the cataloguing, the semi-scientific sort, dried 

 up like old Rameses and cured for all time with the 

 fine-ground spice of measurements, dates, conditions 

 — observations, so called. For literary purposes, one 

 observation of this kind is better than two. Rarely 

 does the watcher in the woods see anything so new 

 that for itself it is worth recording. It is not what 

 one sees, so much as the manner of the seeing, not 

 the observation but its suggestions that count for in- 

 terest to the reader. Science wants the exact observa- 

 tion ; nature-writing wants the observation exact and 

 the heart of the observer along with it. We want 

 plenty of facts in our nature books, but they have all 

 been set down in order before ; what has not been set 

 down before are the author's thoughts and emotions. 

 These should be new, personal, and are pretty sure 

 therefore to be interesting. 



