THE NATURE LIBRARY 
By JOHN BURROUGHS 
I po NOT propose in these introductory remarks to this 
Nature Library to discuss the merits or the character of the sepa- 
rate volumes further than to say that they are all by competent 
hands and, so far as I can judge, entirely reliable. While accu- 
rate and scientific, | have found them very readable. The treat- 
ment is popular without being sensational. 
This library is free from the scientific dry rot on the one 
hand and from the florid and misleading romanticism of much 
recent nature writing on the other. It is a safe guide to the 
world of animal and plant life that lies about us. And that is all 
the wise reader wants. He should want to explore this world 
for himself. Indeed, nature-study, as it appeals to us in books, 
fails of its chief end if it does not send us to nature itself. What 
we want is not the mere facts about the flowers or the animals— 
we want through them to add to the resources of our lives; and 
I know of nothing better calculated to do this than the study of 
nature at first hand. To add to the resources of one’s life—think 
how much that means! To add to those things that make us 
more at home in the world; that help guard us against ennui 
and stagnation; that invest the country with new interest and 
enticement; that make every walk in the fields or woods an 
excursion into a land of unexhausted treasures; that make the 
returning seasons fill us with expectation and delight; that make 
every rod of ground like the page of a book in which new and 
strange things may be read; in short, those things that help keep 
us fresh and sane and young, and make us immune to the strife 
and fever of the world. 
The main thing is to feel an interest in Nature—an interest 
that leads to a loving unconscious study of her. Not entirely a 
scientific interest, but a human interest as well; science upon the 
one hand and an appreciation of the mystery, the beauty, and 
the bounty of life upon the other. The child feels a human inter- 
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