WRITE OUT YOUR NOTES! 45 
is clear now will grow obscure; what is found will be lost. 
Write down everything while it is fresh in your mind; write 
it out in full—time so spent now will be time saved in the end, 
when you offer your researches to the discriminating public. 
Don’t be satisfied with a dry-as-dust item; clothe a skeleton 
fact, and breathe life into it with thoughts that glow; let the 
paper smell of the woods. There’s a pulse in a new fact; 
catch the rhythm before it dies. Keep off the quicksands of 
mere memorandum—that means something “to be remem- 
bered,” which is just what you cannot do. Shun abbrevia- 
tions; such keys rust with disuse, and may fail in after times 
to unlock the secret that should have been laid bare in the 
beginning. Use no signs* intelligible only to yourself; your 
note-books may come to be overhauled by others whom you 
would not wish to disappoint. Be sparing of sentiment, a 
delicate thing, easily degraded to drivel; crude enthusiasm 
always hacks instead of hewing. Beware of literary infe- 
licities; ‘‘the written word remains,” it may be, after you 
have passed away; put down nothing for your friend’s blush, 
or your enemy’s sneer; write as if a stranger were looking 
over your shoulder. 
§28. ORNITHOLOGICAL BOOK-KEEPING may be left to your 
discretion and good taste in the details of execution. Each 
may consult his preferences for rulings, headings, and blank 
forms of all sorts, as well as particular modes of entry. But 
my experience has been that the entries it is advisable to 
make are too multifarious to be accommodated by the most 
ingenious formal ruling; unless, indeed, you make the con- 
ventional heading ‘‘ Remarks” disproportionately wide, and 
commit to it everything not otherwise provided for. My pref- 
erence is decidedly for a plain page. Iuse a strongly bound 
blank book, cap size, containing at least six or eight quires of 

* This direction does not apply to a regular code of signs, which may be found 
extremely convenient. The Messrs. A. & E. Newton have, for example, perfected 
a system of symbols that leaves little if anything to be desired. See Am. Nat. 
1872, p. 360. 
