SEC. Ill SUGGESTIONS AND DIRECTIONS FOR FIELD-WORK 15 



what "to heel" means, and make him obey this command. A 

 riotous brute is simply unendurable under any circumstances. 



§ 3.— VAEIOUS SUGGESTIONS AND DIEECTIONS FOE 

 FIELD-WOEK 



To be a good CoUeetor, and nothing more, is a small 

 affair ; great skill may be acquired in the art, without a single 

 quality commanding respect. One of the most vulgar, brutal, and 

 ignorant men I ever knew was a sharp collector and an excellent 

 taxidermist. Collecting stands much in the same relation to orni- 

 thology that the useful and indispensable office of an apothecary 

 bears to the duties of a physician. A field-naturalist is always 

 more or less of a collector ; the latter is sometimes found to know 

 almost nothing of natural history worth knowing. The true orni- 

 thologist goes out to study birds alive and destroys some of them 

 simply because that is the only way of learning their structure and 

 technical characters. There is much more about a bird than can 

 be discovered in its dead body, — how much more, then, than can be 

 found out from its stuffed skin ! In my humble opinion the man 

 who only gathers birds, as a miser money, to swell his cabinet, and 

 that other man who gloats, as miser-like, over the same hoard, both 

 work on a plane far beneath where the enlightened naturalist stands. 

 One looks at Nature, and never knows that she is beautiful ; the 

 other knows she is beautiful, as even a corpse may be ; the 

 naturalist catches her sentient expression, and knows how beautiful 

 she is ! I would have you to know and love her ; for fairer mis- 

 tress never swayed the heart of man. Aim high ! — press on, and 

 leave the half-way house of mere coUectorship far behind in your 

 pursuit of a delightful study, nor fancy the closet its goal. 



Birds may be sought anywhere, at any time; they should 

 be sought everywhere, at all times. Some come about your door- 

 step to tell their stories unasked. Others spring up before you as 

 you stroll in the field, like the flowers that enticed the feet of 

 Proserpine. Birds flit by as you measure the tired roadside, lend- 

 ing a tithe of their life to quicken your dusty steps. They disport 

 overhead at hide-and-seek with the foliage as you loiter in the shade 

 of the forest, and their music now answers the sigh of the tree-tops, 

 now ripples an echo to the voice of the brook. But you will not 

 always so pluck a thornless rose. Birds hedge themselves about 

 with a bristling girdle of brier and bramble you cannot break; 

 they build their tiny castles in the air surrounded by impassable 

 moats, and the drawbridges are never down. They crown the 



