The Nature Library 
doors or windows; it affords no mental satisfaction, or illumin- 
ation, or esthetic pleasure ; it is mainly pottering with dry, unim- 
portant facts and details. Do you know the edelweiss of our 
own matchless arbutus after you have merely analyzed and 
classified them? No more than you know a man after having 
weighed and measured him. The function of things is always 
interesting. What do they do? How do they pay their way in 
the rigid economy of nature? How do they survive r How does 
the bulb of the common fawn-lily* get deeper and deeper into the 
ground each year P Why does the wild ginger hide its blossom 
when nearly all other plants flaunt theirs? Why are the plants of 
the common mouse-ear (anfennaria)? always in groups, one sex 
here, another there, as if prohibited from mingling by some 
moral code in nature? Why do nearly all our trees have a twist 
to the right or the left—hard woods one way, and soft woods the 
otherr Why do the roots of trees flow through the ground like 
‘‘runnels of molten metal,” often separating and uniting again, 
while the branches are thrust out in right lines or curves? Why 
is our common yellow birch more often than any other tree 
planted upon arock? Why do oaks or chestnuts so often spring 
up where a pine or hemlock forest has been cleared away? Why 
does lightning so commonly strike a hemlock tree or a pine or an 
oak, and rarely or never a beech? Why does the bolt sometimes 
scatter the tree about, and at others only plow a channel down 
its trunk? Why does the bumblebee complain so loudly when 
working upon certain flowers? Why does the honey-bee lose the 
sting when it stings a person, while the wasp, the hornet, and 
the bumblebee do not? How does the chimney-swallow get the 
twigs it builds its nest with? From what does the hornet make 
its paper? 
One of Herbert Spencer’s questions was, Why do animals 
and birds of prey have their eyes in front, and others, as sheep 
and domestic fowl, on the side of the head? Man, then, by the 
position of his eyes belongs to the predaceous animals. | have 
never been greatly interested in spiders, but I have always 
wanted to know how a certain spider managed to stretch her 
cable squarely across the road in the woods about my height from 
the ground? Why are mud turtles so wild? Why is the excre- 
1 The adder’s topgue. 
2 Everlasting. 
