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Nature, and Books about it

Often, during a long and dusty walk in midsummer, I have chanced suddenly upon a wayside spring, and stooping drank directly from the bosom of Mother Earth. Filled with the pleasant recollections of such moments, how tame is all other tipple, even though the crystal is a marvel of art, with “beady bubbles winking at the brim”!

So, too, I find it with matters of graver import. I would that no one should aid me in gathering my stores, but with my own hands I would delve at the fountain-head. The spirit of such an aim is a spur to youth, but becomes a source of amusement rather than a more serious matter in our maturer years. I am more than willing now to take nature at second hand. But is this safe? How far can we trust another’s eyes, ears, and sense of touch and smell? There are critics scattered as thickly as motes in a sunbeam, veritable know-alls, who shriek “Beware!” when nature is reported; but, for all this, outdoor books are very tempting to a host of people, and in the long run educate rather than misinform. That ever two naturalists should wholly agree, after careful study of an animal, is not probable. There will be the same differences as exist between two translations of the same book. What a crow, a mouse, or a gorgeous cluster of blooming lotus is to me, these will never be to another; but, because of this, do not persist that your neighbor is blind, deaf, or stupid. I recently had a horse ask me to let down the bars; to another it would have been merely the meaningless fact that the horse neighed.

Having an outdoor book in hand, when and how should it be read? It is no doubt very tempting to think of a shady nook, or babbling brook, or both, in connection with the latest outdoor volume. Possibly, as you start out for a quiet day, you string together a bit of rhyme concerning the book, as Leigh Hunt did and others have done since. It is a common practice to carry a book into the fields, but not a logical one. How can a book, even one of outdoor topics, compete with Nature? Certainly if Nature is to the reader but a convenient room, a lighter and more airy one than any at home, does it not signify a serious lack in the mind of that person? From a notice of a recent publication I clip the following: “A capital book to slip into one’s pocket when taking an outing.” If, because of its size, it could be readily slipped into one’s pocket, then it was a capital way of getting rid of it. What sort of an outing can one have who reads all the while? Is not the cloud-flecked sky something more than a ceiling, the surrounding hills more than mere walls, the grass and flowers more than carpet? There is one pleasure even greater than that of reading, and that is being out of doors. To read at such a time seems to imply one of two things: either that the reader knows Nature thoroughly, or is indifferent to such knowledge. The former phenomenon the world has never seen; the latter, to speak mildly, deserves our pity. To escape ridicule, which is something, to insure happiness, which is more, to avoid great dangers, which is of even greater importance, one must know something of Nature. In one sense she is our persistent foe. She mantles with inviting cover of rank grass her treacherous quicksands; she paints in tempting colors her most poisonous fruits; she spreads unheralded the insidious miasma from the meadow and the swamp; but neither the quicksand, the unwholesome fruit, nor noxious vapors is an unmixed evil. Let us take them as they are, see them as parts and parcels of a complete whole, and each hour of every outing is an unclouded joy. Nature never excuses our ignorance.

Whatever one’s position in life, does a knowledge of Nature prove unneeded? Should we not know that potatoes grow beneath the sod, as well as apples grow upon trees? Gather a crowd at random on the streets, or corner a half-dozen at some social gathering, and how many can tell you the life-history of a mushroom or a truffle? “Do potatoes grow upon bushes?” was asked not long since. This was positively painful, but worse things have happened. A young lady, from a city renowned for its schools, startled her country cousins by asking, while toying with an ear of corn, “Which end, when you plant, do you put in the ground, the blunt or the pointed one?” If botany is impracticable in the curriculum of the public schools, ought not, at least, the natural history of our common articles of food to be taught? Can not such ignorance as this implied be banished from the land?

But I have wandered; let us come back to books. If books, even those descriptive of nature, are out of place in the woods, meadows, or by the brook-side, when should they be read? Clearly, when the scenes they treat of are not accessible. Why should we be entertained with a description of a bird or flower, when they are both before us? It seems incredible that any one should be better pleased with another’s impressions, however cunningly told, than with those of his own senses. It is a strange mental condition that can delight in the story of a bird, and yet have no desire to see the creature; to be a witness to all the marvelous cunning that this bird exhibits. Few are those among us whose outings cover a lifetime; and when the happy days of freedom come to us, let books be kept behind, and with untrammeled eyes and ears let us drink in the knowledge that comes to us at no other time. Summer is all too short a season for other occupation than enthusiastic sight-seeing and sound-hearing.

Long before autumn most of us must be back to the busy town. Business demands our work-day hours; and now, during the leisure of long winter evenings, with what delight one may recall vacation-days, reading outdoor books! The library now becomes the mountain, lake, or river. With Thoreau, Burroughs, or Jeffries at hand, one can hear the summer birds in the shrill whistle of the wind, and the babbling of summer brooks in the rattle of icy rain.

For permission to reprint, in this collected form, the brief essays here brought together, the author is indebted to Messrs. Harper & Bros., D. Appleton & Co., the editors of the Christian Union, Christian at Work, and of Garden and Forest, of New York; and to the editor of the American, of Philadelphia Pa.

C. C. A.

Trenton, New Jersey, September 1, 1890.