The Nature Library 
est in nature: when the schoolgirls come to school with their 
hands full of wild flowers, or the boys make excursions to the 
woods in May for wintergreens, or black birch, or crinkle root, 
they are all moved by an interest that is old and deep-seated in 
the race. Now, if to this interest and curiosity we can add a 
little science, just enough to guide them, we lift these feelings to 
another plane and give them a longer lease of life. The boy will 
not be so likely to rob birds’ nests after the savage in him has 
been humanized by a touch of real knowledge and he has come 
to look upon the bird as something worthy of naming and 
studying and that has its place in the economy of the fields 
and woods. 
A touch of real knowledge—how humanizing and elevating 
itis! Simply to learn that all the plants have been studied and 
named, even the humblest ; that they all have vital relations with 
one another —family ties; that the great biological laws are 
operative in them also; that the deep, mysterious principle of 
variation, which is at the bottom of Darwin's theory of the origin 
of the species, is working in the lowliest plant we tread upon; to 
know that the chain of cause and effect runs through the whole 
organic world, binding together its remotest parts; that every- 
where is plan, development, evolution—to know these and kin- 
dred things—a few of the fundamentals of science—is a joy to 
the spirit and a light to the mind. 
Science in the world is like the surveyor and the engineer in 
a new country; it opens up highways for the mind; it bridges 
the chasms and marshes; it gives us dominion over the wild; it 
brings order out of chaos. What a maze, what a tangle the 
world is till we come to look upon it with the clews and solu- 
tions in mind which science affords! The heavens seem a 
haphazard spatter of stars, the earth a wild jumble of plants, and 
animals, and blind forces all struggling with one another—con- 
fusion, contradiction, failure everywhere. And so it was to the 
early men, and so it still is to those who have not the light of 
science, but so it need not remain to the child born into the world 
to-day. The great mysteries of life and death, of final causes 
and ultimate ends, still remain and will continue, but nature now, 
compared with the nature of a few centuries ago, is like a land 
subdued and peopled and cultivated compared with a pathless 
wilderness. 
iy 
