UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
When a Cooper’s hawk makes a dash among them, 
their mirth turns to terror, but they are usually 
equal to the emergency, and by darting through the 
vines they manage to escape him. 
It is said that when a flock of mallards, or of black 
ducks, while feeding upon the water, see an eagle, or 
a certain large hawk coming, they take to wing, 
knowing that they can outdistance their enemy, but 
that when they see a duck hawk coming, they hug 
the water the closer, knowing well that their safety 
is not in flight, but in diving beneath the surface. 
What ages upon ages of schooling in the fierce 
struggle for existence it must have taken the wild 
creatures to get their wisdom into their very blood 
and bones! Yet we cannot think of them as existing 
without it; we cannot go back in thought to the time 
when they did not have it; to be without it would be 
to cease to exist. What, then, is its genesis? We 
cannot think of man as existing without his reason, 
his tools, his artificial aids of one kind and another; 
yet there was a time when he did exist without them, 
just as the monkeys and anthropoid apes exist with- 
out them. Sufficient for the day is the wisdom there- 
of. Every stage and phase of animal life is wise in 
those things necessary for its continuance, but 
whether that wisdom comes from experience or in- 
heritance, or is one phase of the wisdom that per- 
vades the whole economy of nature, — that makes 
the heart beat and the eye sce, and that adapts 
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