FACTORS IN ANIMAL LIFE 
making us more considerate and merciful toward 
our brute neighbors; its bad side is seen in the 
degree to which it leads to a false interpretation of 
their lives. The tendency to which I refer is no 
doubt partly the result of our growing humanitari- 
anism and feeling of kinship with all the lower orders 
of creation, and partly due to the fact that we live in 
a time of impromptu nature study, when birds and 
plants and trees are fast becoming a fad with half 
the population, and when the “yellow” reporter is 
abroad in the fields and woods. Never before in my 
time have so many exaggerations and misconcep- 
tions of the wild life about us been current in the 
popular mind. It is becoming the fashion to ascribe 
to the lower animals nearly all our human motives 
and attributes, and often to credit them with plans 
and devices that imply reason and a fair amount of 
mechanical knowledge. An illustration of this is the 
account of the nest of a pair of orioles, as described 
in the “ North American Review” for May, 1903, by 
a writer of popular nature books. These orioles built 
a nest so extraordinary that it can be accounted for 
only on the theory that there is a school of the woods, 
and that these two birds had been pupils there and 
had taken an advanced course in Strings. Among 
other things impossible for birds to do, these orioles 
tied a knot in the end of a string to prevent its fray- 
ing in the wind! If the whole idea were not too pre- 
posterous for even a half-witted child to believe, one 
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