x 
A PINCH OF SALT 
ROBABLY I have become unusually cautious 
of late about accepting offhand all I read in 
print on subjects of natural history. I take much of 
it with a liberal pinch of salt. Newspaper reading 
tends to make one cautious — and who does not 
read newspapers in these days? One of my critics 
says, apropos of certain recent strictures of mine 
upon some current nature writers, that I discredit 
whatever I have not myself seen; that I belong to 
that class of observers “whose view-point is nar- 
rowed to the limit of their own personal experience.” 
This were a grievous fault if it were true, so much 
we have to take upon trust in natural history as well 
as in other history, and in life in general. “Mr. 
Burroughs might have remembered,” says another 
critic discussing the same subject, “that nobody 
has seen quite so many things as everybody.” How 
true! If I have ever been guilty of denying the truth 
of what everybody has seen, my critic has just 
ground for complaint. I was conscious, in the paper 
referred to,! of denying only the truth of certain 
1 Atlantic Monthly, March, 1908. 
173 
