WAYS OF NATURE 
natural history, any more than he does with the facts 
of human history in his novels. 
Unadulterated, unsweetened observations are 
what the real nature-lover craves. No man can 
invent incidents and traits as interesting as the 
reality. Then, to know that a thing is true gives it 
such a savor! The truth — how we do crave the 
truth! We cannot feed our minds on simulacra any 
more than we can our bodies. Do assure us that the 
thing you tell is true. If you must counterfeit the 
truth, do it so deftly that we shall never detect you. 
But in natural history there is no need to counter- 
feit the truth; the reality always suffices, if you 
have eyes to see it and ears to hear it. Behold what 
Maeterlinck makes out of the life of the bee, sim- 
ply by getting at and portraying the facts — a true 
wonder-book, the enchantment of poetry wedded 
to the authority of science. 
Works on animal intelligence, such as Romanes’s, 
abound in incidents that show in the animals reason 
and forethought in their simpler forms; but in many 
cases the incidents related in these works are not 
well authenticated, nor told by trained observers. 
The observations of the great majority of people 
have no scientific value whatever. Romanes quotes 
from some person who alleges that he saw a pair of 
nightingales, during a flood in the river near which 
their nest was placed, pick up the nest bodily and 
carry it to a place of safety. This is incredible. If 
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