Of all our birds the robin has life in the fullest measure, or best stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility, adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most diverse of all. Now he is a tree-builder in the fork of a trunk or on a horizontal branch, then a builder in vines or rosebushes around your porch, then on some coign of vantage about your house or barn, or under the shed, or under a bridge, or in the stone wall, or on the ground above a hedge. I have known him to go into a well and build there on a projecting stone. He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days.

He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word—a typical American in his enterprise and versatility. His voice is the first I hear in the morning, and the last at night. Little wonder that there are twenty robins to one bluebird, or wood thrush, or catbird. The song sparrow is probably our next most successful bird, but she is far behind the robin. We could never have a plague of song sparrows or bluebirds, but since the robins are now protected in the South as well as in the North, we are exposed to the danger of a plague of robins. Since they may no longer have robin pot-pies in Mississippi, the time is near at hand when we may no longer have cherry-pies in New York or New England. Yet who does not cherish a deep love for the robin? He is a plebeian bird, but he adds a touch to life in the country that one would not like to miss.

The robin is neither a walker nor a hopper; he is doomed always to be a runner. Go slow he cannot; his engine is always "in high"—it starts "in high" and stops "in high."

In wild life the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. For instance, the weasel catches the rabbit and the red squirrel, both of which are much more fleet of foot than is he. The red squirrel can fairly fly through the tops of the trees, where the weasel would be entirely out of its element, and the rabbit can easily leave him behind, and yet the weasel captures and sucks the blood of both. Recently, when the ground was covered with our first snow, some men at work in a field near me heard a rabbit cry on the slope below them. Their dog rushed down and found a weasel holding a rabbit, which it released on the approach of the dog and took to the cover of a near-by stone wall. The whole story was written there on the snow. The bloodsucker had pursued the rabbit, pulling out tufts of fur for many yards and then had pulled it down.

Two neighbors of mine were hunting in the woods when they came upon a weasel chasing a red squirrel around the trunk of a big oak; round and round they went in a fury of flight and pursuit. The men stood and looked on. It soon became apparent that the weasel was going to get the squirrel, so they watched their chance and shot the bloodsucker. Why the squirrel did not take to the tree-tops, where the weasel probably would not have followed him, and thus make his escape—who knows? One of my neighbors, however, says he has seen where a weasel went up a tree and took a gray squirrel out of its nest and dropped it on the snow, then dragged it to cover and left it dead. The weasel seems to inspire such terror in its victim that it becomes fairly paralyzed and falls an easy prey. Those cruel, blazing, beadlike eyes, that gliding snakelike form, that fearless, fatelike pursuit and tenacity of purpose, all put a spell upon the pursued that soon renders it helpless. A weasel once pursued a hen to my very feet and seized it and would not let it go until I put my foot upon it and gripped it by the back of the neck with my hand. Its methods are a kind of Schrecklichkeit in the animal world. It is the incarnation of the devil among our lesser animals.

We are bound to misinterpret Nature if we start with the assumption that her methods are at all like our methods. We pick out our favorites among plants and animals, those that best suit our purposes. If we want wool from the sheep, we select the best-fleeced animals to breed from. If we want mutton, we act accordingly. If we want cows for quantity of milk, irrespective of quality, we select with that end in view; if we want butter-fat, we breed for that end, and so on. With our fruits and grains and vegetables we follow the same course. We go straight to our object with as little waste and delay as possible.

Not so with Nature. She is only solicitous of those qualities in her fruits and grains which best enable them to survive. In like manner she subordinates her wool and fur and milk to the same general purpose. Her one end is to increase and multiply. In a herd of wild cattle there will be no great milchers. In a band of mountain sheep there will be no prize fleeces. The wild fowl do not lay eggs for market.

Those powers and qualities are dominant in the wild creatures that are necessary for the survival of the species—strength, speed, sharpness of eye and ear, keenness of scent; all wait upon their survival value.

Our hawks could not survive without wing-power or great speed, but the crow survives without this power, because he is an omnivorous feeder and can thrive where the hawk would starve, and also because no bird of prey wants him, and, more than that, because he is dependent upon nothing that requires speed to secure. He is cunning and suspicious for reasons that are not obvious. The fox in this country requires both speed and cunning, but in South America Darwin saw a fox so indifferent and unafraid that he walked up to it and killed it with his geologist's hammer. Has it no enemies in that country?

Nature's course is always a roundabout one. Our petty economies are no concern of hers. Man wants specific results at once. Nature works slowly to general results. Her army is drilled only in battle. Her tools grow sharper in the using. The strength of her species is the strength of the obstacles they overcome. We misinterpret Darwin when we assume that Nature selects as man selects. Nature selects solely upon the principle of power of survival. Man selects upon the principle of utility. He wants some particular good—a race-horse, a draft-horse—better quality or greater quantity of this or that. Nature aims to fill the world with her progeny. Only power to win in the competition of life counts with her. As I have so often said, she plays one hand against the other. The stakes are hers whichever wins. Wheat and tares are all one to her. She pits one species of plant or animal against another—heads I win, tails you lose. Some plants spread both by seed and runners, this doubles their chances; they are kept in check because certain localities are unfavorable to them. I know a section of the country where a species of mint has completely usurped the pastures. It makes good bee pasturage, but poor cattle pasturage. Quack grass will run out other grass because it travels under ground in the root as well as above ground in the seed.

We may say that all the forms in the non-living world come by chance, or by the action of the undirected irrational physical forces, mechanical or mechanico-chemical. There are not two kinds of forces shaping the earth's surface, but the same forces are doing two kinds of work, piling up and pulling down—aggregating and accumulating, and separating and disintegrating.

It is to me an interesting fact that the striking and beautiful forms in inorganic nature are not as a rule the result of a building-up process, but of a pulling-down or degradation process. A natural bridge, an obelisk, caves, canals, the profile in the rocks, the architectural and monumental rock forms, such as those in the Grand Cañon and in the Garden of the Gods, are all the result of erosion. Water and other aerial forces are the builders and sculptors, and the nature and structure of the material determine the form. It is as if these striking forms were inherent in the rocks, waiting for the erosive forces to liberate them. The stratified rocks out of which they are carved were not laid down in forms that appeal to us, but layer upon layer, like the leaves of a book; neither has the crumpling and deformation of the earth's crust piled them up and folded them in a manner artistic and suggestive. Yet behold what the invisible workmen have carved out of them in the Grand Cañon! It looks as though titanic architects and sculptors had been busy here for ages. But only little grains of sand and a vast multitude of little drops of water, active through geologic ages, were the agents that wrought this stupendous spectacle. If the river could have builded something equally grand and beautiful with the material it took out of this chasm! But it could not—poetry at one end of the series and dull prose at the other. The deposition took the form of broad, featureless, uninteresting plains—material for a new series of stratified rocks, out of which other future Grand Cañons may be carved. Thus the gods of erosion are the artists, while the builders of the mountains are only ordinary workmen.

This bit of nature which I call myself, and which I habitually think of as entirely apart from the nature by which I am surrounded, going its own way, crossing or defeating or using the forces of the nature external to it, is yet as strictly a part of the total energy we call nature as is each wave in the ocean, no matter how high it raises its crest, a part of the ocean. Our wills, our activities, go but a little way in separating us from the totality of things. Outside of the very limited sphere of what we call our spontaneous activities, we too are things and are shaped and ruled by forces that we know not of.

It is only in action, or in the act of living, that we view ourselves as distinct from nature. When we think, we see that we are a part of the world in which we live, as much so as the trees and the other animals are a part. Intellect unites what life separates. Our whole civilization is the separating of one thing from another and classifying and organizing them. We work ourselves away from rude Nature while we are absolutely dependent upon her for health and strength. We cease to be savages while we strive to retain the savage health and virility. We improve Nature while we make war upon her. We improve her for our own purposes. All the forces we use—wind, water, gravity, electricity—are still those of rude Nature. Is it not by gravity that the water rises to the top stories of our houses? Is it not by gravity that the aeroplane soars to the clouds? When the mammoth guns hurl a ton of iron twenty miles they pit the greater weight against the lesser. The lighter projectile goes, and the heavier gun stays. So the athlete hurls the hammer because he greatly outweighs it.

Marcus Aurelius speaks of death as "nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every human being is composed." May we say it is like a redistribution of the type after the page is printed? The type is unchanged, only the order of arrangement is broken up. In the death of the body the component elements—water, lime, iron, phosphorus, magnesia, and so on—remain the same, but their organization is changed. Is that all? Is this a true analogy? The meaning of the printed page, the idea embodied, is the main matter. Can this idea be said to exist independent of the type? Only in the mind that reads the page, and then not permanently. Then it is only an arrangement of molecules of matter in the brain, which is certainly only temporary. On the printed page it is a certain combination of white and black that moves the cells of the brain through the eye to create the idea. So the conception in our minds of our neighbor or friend—his character, his personality—exists after he is dead, but when our own brain ceases to function, where is it then?

We rather resent being summed up in this way in terms of physics, or even of psychology. Can you reconstruct the flower or the fruit from its ashes? Physics and biochemistry and psychology describe all men in the same terms; our component parts are all the same; but character, personality, mentality—do not these escape your analysis? and are they not also real?

Emerson quotes Bacon as saying that man is the minister and interpreter of Nature. But man has been very slow to see that he is a part of that same Nature of which he is the minister and interpreter. His interpretation is not complete until he has learned to interpret himself also. This he has done all unconsciously through his art, his literature, his religion, his philosophy. Painting interprets one phase of him, music another, poetry another, sculpture another, his civic orders another, his creeds and beliefs and superstitions another, so that at this day and age of the world he has been pretty well interpreted. But the final interpretation is as far off as ever, because the condition of man is not static, but dynamic. He is forever born anew into the world and experiences new wonder, new joy, new loves, new enthusiasms. Nature is infinite, and the soul of man is infinite, and the action and reaction between the two which gives us our culture and our civilization can never cease. When man thinks he is interpreting Nature, he is really interpreting himself—reading his own heart and mind through the forms and movements that surround him. In his art and his literature he bodies forth his own ideals; in his religion he gives the measure of his awe and reverence and his aspirations toward the perfect good; in his science he illustrates his capacity for logical order and for weighing evidence. There is no astronomy to the night prowler, there is no geology to the woodchuck or the ground mole, there is no biology to the dog or to the wolf, there is no botany to the cows and the sheep. All these sciences are creations of the mind of man; they are the order and the logic which he reads into Nature. Nature interprets man to himself. Her beauty, her sublimity, her harmony, her terror, are names which he gives to the emotions he experiences in her presence. The midnight skies sound the depths of his capacity for the emotion of grandeur and immensity, the summer landscape reveals to him his susceptibility to beauty.

It is considered sound rhetoric to speak of the statue as existing in the block of marble before the sculptor touches it. How easy to fall into such false analogies! Can we say that the music existed in the flute or in the violin before the musician touches them? The statue in the form of an idea or a conception exists in the mind of the sculptor, and he fashions the marble accordingly. Does the book exist in the pot of printer's ink? Living things exist in the germ, the oak in the acorn, the chick in the egg, but from the world of dead matter there is no resurrection or evolution. Life alone puts a particular stamp upon it. We may say that the snowflake exists in the cloud vapor because of the laws of crystallization, but the house does not exist in a thousand of brick in the same sense. It exists in the mind of the builder.

The sculptor does not interpret the marble; he interprets his own soul through the medium of the marble—the picture is not in the painter's color tubes waiting to be developed as the flower is in the bud; it is in the artist's imagination. The apple and the peach and the wheat and the corn exist in the soil potentially; life working through the laws of physics and chemistry draws their materials out and builds up the perfect fruit. To decipher, to interpret, to translate, are terms that apply to human things, and not to universal nature. We do not interpret the stars when we form the constellations. The grouping of the stars in the heavens is accidental—the chair, the dipper, the harp, the huntsman, are our fabrications. Does Shelley interpret the skylark, or Wordsworth the cuckoo, or Bryant the bobolink, or Whitman the mockingbird and the thrush? Each interprets his own heart. Each poet's mind is the die or seal that gives the impression to this wax.

All the so-called laws of Nature are of our own creation. Out of an unfailing sequence of events we frame laws—the law of gravity, of chemical affinity, of magnetism, of electricity—and refer to them as if they had an objective reality, when they are only concepts in our own minds. Nature has no statute books and no legislators, though we habitually think of her processes under these symbols. Human laws can be annulled, but Nature's laws cannot. Her ways are irrevocable, though theology revokes or suspends them in its own behalf. It was Joshua's mind that stopped while he conquered his enemies, and not the sun.

The winds and the tides do not heed our prayers; fire and flood, famine and pestilence, are deaf to our appeals. One of the cardinal doctrines of Emerson was that all true prayers are self-answered—the spirit which the act of prayer begets in the suppliant is the answer. A heartfelt prayer for faith or courage or humility is already answered in the attitude of soul that devoutly asks it. We know that the official prayers in the churches for victory to the armies in the field are of no avail—and how absurd to expect them to be—but who shall say that the prayer of the soldier on the eve of battle may not steady his hand and clinch his courage? But the prayer for rain or for heat or cold, or for the stay of an epidemic, or for any material good, is as vain as to reach one's hands for the moon.

The writers who go directly to life and Nature for their material are, in every age, few compared with the great number that go to the libraries and lecture-halls, and sustain only a second-hand relation to the primary sources of inspiration. They cannot go directly to the fountain-head, but depend upon those who can and do. They are like those forms of vegetation, the mushrooms, that have no chlorophyll, and hence cannot get their food from the primary sources, the carbonic acid in the air; they must draw it from the remains of plants that did get it at first-hand from Nature. Chlorophyll is the miracle-worker of the vegetable world; it makes the solar power available for life. It is in direct and original relation to the sun. It also makes animal life possible. The plant can go to inorganic nature and through its chlorophyll can draw the sustenance from it. We must go to the plant, or to the animal that went to the plant, for our sustenance.

The secondary men go to books and creeds and institutions for their religion, but the original men, having the divine chlorophyll, go to Nature herself. The stars in their courses teach them. The earth inspires them.

The order and the harmony of the Cosmos is not like that which man produces or aims to produce in his work—the order and harmony that will give him the best and the quickest results; but it is an astronomic order and harmony which flows inevitably from the circular movements and circular forms to which the Cosmos tends. Revolution and evolution are the two feet upon which creation goes. All natural forms strive for the spherical. The waves on the beach curve and roll and make the pebbles round. From the drops of rain and dew to the mighty celestial orbs one law prevails. Nature works to no special ends; she works to all ends; and her harmony results from her universality. The comets are apparently celestial outlaws, but they all have their periodic movements, and make their rounds on time. Collisions in the abysses of space, which undoubtedly take place, look like disharmonies and failures of order, as they undoubtedly are. What else can we call them? When a new star suddenly appears in the heavens, or an old one blazes up, and from a star of the tenth magnitude becomes one of the first, and then slowly grows dim again, there has been a celestial catastrophe, an astronomic accident on a cosmic scale. Had such things occurred frequently enough, would not the whole solar system have been finally wrecked, or could it even have begun? For the disharmonies in Nature we must look to the world of the living things, but even here the defeats and failures are the exception—else there would be no living world. Organic evolution reaches its goal despite the delays and suffering and its devious course. The inland stream finds its way to the sea at last, though its course double and redouble upon itself scores of times, and it travels ten miles to advance one. A drought that destroys animal and vegetable life, or a flood that sweeps it away, or a thunderbolt that shatters a living tree, are all disharmonies of Nature. In fact, one may say that disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the orderly development of life.

The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she diminishes her girth. If there is not food enough for her creatures, she lessens the number of mouths to be fed. A surplus of food, on the other hand, tends to multiply the mouths.

Man often introduces an element of disorder into Nature. His work in deforesting the land brings on floods and the opposite conditions of drought. He destroys the natural checks and compensations.

The swells that beat upon the shores of the ocean are not merely the result of a local agitation of the waters. The pulse of the earth is in them. The pulse of the sun and the moon is in them. They are more cosmic than terrestrial. The earth wears her seas like a loose garment which the sun and moon constantly pluck at and shift from side to side. Only the ocean feels the tidal impulse, the heavenly influences. The great inland bodies of water are unresponsive to them—they are too small for the meshes of the solar and lunar net. Is it not equally true that only great souls are moved by the great fundamental questions of life? What a puzzle the tides must have been to early man! What proof they afford of the cosmic forces that play upon us at all times and hold us in their net! Without the proof they afford, we should not know how we are tied to the solar system. The lazy, reluctant waters—how they follow the sun and moon, "with fluid step," as Whitman says, "round the world"! The land feels the pull also and would follow if it could. But the mobile clouds go their way, and the aerial ocean makes no sign. The pull of the sun and the moon is upon you and me also, but we are all unconscious of it. We are bodies too slight to affect the beam of the huge scale.

It is remarkable, I think, that Professor Osborn, in his "Origin and Evolution of Life," makes no account of the micro-organisms or unicellular lives that are older than the continents, older than the Cambrian rocks, and that have survived unchanged even to our times. I saw in the Grand Cañon of the Colorado where they were laid down horizontally on the old Azoic or original rocks, as if by the hand of a mason building the foundation of a superstructure. All the vast series of limestone rocks are made up from the skeletons of minute living bodies. Other strata of rocks are made up of the skeletons of diatoms. Some of our polishing powders are made from these rocks. Formed of pure silex, these rocks are made up of the skeletons of organisms of many exquisite forms, Foraminiferæ. The Pyramids are said to be built of rocks formed by these organisms. "No single group of the animal kingdom," says Mr. W. B. Carpenter, "has contributed, or is at present contributing, so largely as has the Foraminiferæ to the formation of the earth's crust." In the face of these facts, how unsatisfactory seem Professor Osborn's statements that life probably originated on the continents, either in the moist crevices of rocks or soils, in the fresh waters of continental pools, or in the slightly saline waters of the "bordering primordial seas." This last suggestion comes nearer the mark. There is no variation during geologic time of these primordial living organisms. All conceivable changes of environment have passed over them, but they change not. Bacteria struggle together, one form devouring another form. Unicellular life long precedes multicellular. Biologists usually begin with the latter; the former are fixed; with the latter begins development or evolution, and the peopling of the world with myriads of animal forms.

Emerson says, "Nature is a spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends." She is like ourselves, she is ourselves written large—written in animal, in tree, in fruit, in flower. She is lavish of that of which she has the most. She is lavish of her leaves, but less so of her flowers, still less of her fruit, and less yet of her germinal parts. The production of seed is a costly process to the plant. Many trees yield fruit only every other year.

I say that Nature is a spendthrift only of what she has the most. Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts—butternuts, hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them. She offers them the wage of the sweet kernel, and knows that they will scatter more than they eat. To all creatures that will sow the seeds of her berries she offers the delectable pulp: "Do this chore for me, and you will find the service its own reward." All the wild fruits of the fields and woods hold seeds that must be distributed by animal agency. Even the fiery arum or Indian turnip, tempts some birds to feast upon its red berries, and thus scatter the undigested seeds. The mice and the squirrels doubtless give them a wide berth, but in the crop of the fowl the seeds have the sting taken out of them. You cannot poison a hen with strychnine.

We ourselves are covetous of those things of which we have but few, extravagant with those of which we have an abundance. When the Western farmer burns corn in place of coal, be assured he sees his own account in it. We husband our white pine, and are free with our hemlock; we are stingy with our hickory, and open-handed with our beech and chestnut.

As I saunter through the fields and woods I discover new acts in Nature's drama. They are, however, the old acts, played again and again, which have hitherto escaped my notice, so absorbed have I been in the rise and fall of the curtain, and in the entrances and exits of the more familiar players. I count myself fortunate if, during each season, I detect a few new acts on the vast stage; and as long as I live I expect to cogitate and speculate on the old acts, and keep up my interest in the whole performance.

The most impressive moment of the day here in the Catskills is the rising of the sun. From my cot on the porch I see the first flash of his coming. Before that I see his rays glint here and there through the forest trees which give a mane to the mountain crest. The dawn comes very gently. I am usually watching for it. As I gaze I gradually become conscious of a faint luminousness in the eastern sky. This slowly increases and changes to a deep saffron, and then in eight or ten minutes that fades into a light bluish tinge—the gold turns to silver. After some minutes the sky, just at the point where the sun is to appear, begins to glow again, as if the silver were getting warm; a minute or two more and the brow of the great god is above the horizon line. His mere brow, as I try to fix my eye upon it, fairly smites me blind. The brow is magnified by the eye into the whole face. One realizes in these few seconds how rapidly the old earth turns on its axis. You witness the miracle of the transition of the dawn into day. The day is born in a twinkling. Is it Browning who uses the word "boil" to describe this moment?—"Day boils at last." Gilder, I think, speaks of it as a scimitar flashing on the brim of the world. At any rate, I watch for it each morning as if I were seeing it for the first time. It is the critical moment of the day. You actually see the earth turning. Later in the day one does not note in the same way the sun climbing the heavens. The setting sun does not impress one, because it is usually enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down. His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.

Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms; her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models. There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term. She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.

The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic time, as is that of the animal species.

The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and, while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.

We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things. The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels; they teach us what to shun.

How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.

Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.

What a powerful right fore limb Nature has given to the shovel-footed mole, while the chipmunk, who also burrows in the ground, has no special tool to aid him in building his mound of earth; he is compelled to use his soft, tender little nose as a pusher. When the soil which his feet have loosened has accumulated at the entrance to his hole, he shoves it back with his nose.

Even to some of her thistles Nature is partial. The Canada thistle sows its seeds upon the wind like the common native thistle; then in addition it sends a big root underground parallel with its surface, and just beyond the reach of the plough, which sends up shoots every six or seven inches, so that, like some other noxious weeds, it carries on its conquests like a powerful besieging army, both below ground and above.

A bachelor of laws in Michigan writes me in a rather peremptory manner, demanding an answer by return mail as to why robins are evenly distributed over the country instead of collected in large numbers in one locality; and if they breed in the South; and he insists that my answer be explicit, and not the mere statement "that it is natural law." I wonder that he did not put a special-delivery stamp on his letter. He is probably wondering why I am so dilatory in answering.

There seems to be an inherent tendency in nearly all living things to scatter, to seek new fields. They are obeying the first command—to increase and multiply. Then it is also a question of food, which is limited in every locality. Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs. Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the robin—in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers—may and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.

The struggle of which we have heard so much since Darwin's time is mainly a natural sifting and distributing process, such as that going on all about us by the winds and the waters. The seeds carried by the winds do not thrive unless they chance to fall on suitable ground. All may be "fit" to survive and yet fail unless they are also lucky. What so frail as a spider's web, and yet how the spiders thrive! Nature gives the weak many advantages.

There is a slow, bloodless struggle of one species with another—the fleet with the slow, the cunning with the stupid, the sharp-eyed and sharp-eared with the dull of eye and ear, the keen of scent with the blunt of scent—which we call natural competition; but the slow, the stupid, the dull-eyed, dull-eared, and dull-scented find their place and thrive for all that. They are dull and slow because they do not need to be otherwise; the conditions of their lives do not require speed and sharpness. The porcupine has its barbed quills, the skunk its pungent secretion. All parts of nature dovetail together. The deer and the antelope kind have speed and sharp senses because their enemies have speed and sharp senses. The small birds are keen-eyed and watchful because the hawks are so, too. The red squirrel dominates the gray squirrel, which is above him in size and strength, and the chipmunk below him, but he does not exterminate either. The chipmunk burrows in the ground where the red cannot follow him, and he lays up a store of nuts and seeds which the red does not. The weasel easily dominates the rat, but the rat prospers in spite of cats and traps and weasels.

The sifting of species is done largely by environment, the wet, the cold, the heat—the fittest, or those best adapted to their environment, survive. For some obscure reason they have a fuller measure of life than those who fall by the way.

I have heard a story of a young artist who, after painting a picture of a horse facing a storm, was not satisfied with it, and, feeling that something was wrong, asked Landseer to look at it. Instantly the great artist said to him, "Turn the horse around."

The cow turns her head to the storm, the horse turns his tail. Why this difference? Because each adopts the plan best suited to its needs and its anatomy. How much better suited is the broad, square head of the cow, with its heavy coating of hair and its ridge of bone that supports its horns, to face the storm than is the smooth, more nervous and sensitive head of the horse! What a contrast between their noses and their mode of grazing! The cow has no upper front teeth; she reaps the grass with the scythe of her tongue, while the horse bites it off and loves to bite the turf with it. The lip of the horse is mobile and sensitive. Then the bovine animals fight with their heads, and the equine with their heels. The horse is a hard and high kicker, the cow a feeble one in comparison. The horse will kick with both hind feet, the cow with only one. In fact, there is not much "kick" in her kind. The tail of the cow is of less protection to her than is that of the horse to him. Her great need of it is to fight flies, and, if attacked in the rear, it furnishes a good hold for her enemies. Then her bony stern, with its ridges and depressions and thin flanks, is less fit in any encounter with storm or with beast than is her head. On the other hand, the round, smooth, solid buttocks of the horse, with their huge masses of muscles, his smooth flanks, and his tail—an apron of long, straight, strong hair—are well designed to resist storm and cold. What animal is it in Job whose neck is clothed with thunder? With the horse, it is the hips that are so clothed. His tremendous drive is in his hips.

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, I suppose the breath of the obscene fungus by any other name would smell as rank. The defensive weapon of our black-and-white wood pussy would probably not be less offensive if we called him by that name alone, instead of the common one by which he is universally known.

While in southern California last winter I heard of one that took up his abode in the basement of a house that stood on the side of a hill in the edge of the country. It was in a sort of lumber-room where all sorts of odds and ends had accumulated. On some shelves was a box of miscellaneous articles, such as lids to tin cans, bed castors, old toothbrushes, bits of broken crockery, pieces of wire, chips of wood, and the dried foot and leg of a hen. One morning, on opening the door of the basement, the mistress of the house was surprised to see the whole collection of trash laid out in a line across the floor. The articles were placed with some degree of regularity covering a space about fifteen inches wide and ten feet in length. There were sixty-one articles in the row.

Having such an unsavory creature in the basement of one's house is rather ticklish business; not so perilous as a stick of dynamite, yet fraught with unpleasant possibilities. They cleared away the exhibit and left the door open, hoping their uninvited guest would take his departure. But he did not. A few nights later he began another collection, finding a lot of new material—among other things a box with old atomizer bulbs, four of which bulbs he arranged here and there, in the row—a motley array.

What is his object? I confess I do not know. No one has seen him do it, as he works at night, but there is little doubt that it is his work.3 The Western skunk is a small creature, not much bigger than a gray squirrel. He can hide behind a dustpan.

I wish some one would tell me why this night prowler so often seems to spray the midnight air with his essence which leaves no trace by day. He never taints his own fur with it. In the wilds our Eastern species is as free from odor as a squirrel or a woodchuck. Kill or disturb one by day or night in his haunts, and he leaves an odor on the ground that lasts for months. While at a friend's house in the Catskills last August a wood pussy came up behind the kitchen and dug in the garbage-heap. We saw him from the window in the early evening, and we smelled him. For some reason he betrayed his presence. Late that night I was awakened by a wave of his pungent odor; it fairly made my nose smart, yet in the morning no odor could be detected anywhere about the place. Of course the smell is much more pronounced in the damp night air than by day, yet this does not seem an adequate explanation. Does he signal at night to his fellows by his odor? He has no voice, so far as I know. I have never heard him make a vocal sound. When caught in a trap, or besieged by dogs in a stone wall, he manifests his displeasure by stamping his feet. He is the one American who does not hurry through life. I have no proof that he ever moves faster than a walk, or that by any sign, he ever experiences the feeling of fear, so common to nearly all our smaller animals. His track upon the snow is that of a creature at peace with all the world.

Chance plays a much larger part in the lives of some animals than of others. The frog and the toad lay hundreds of eggs, the fishes spawn thousands, but most birds lay only five or six eggs.

A spendthrift with one hand, Nature is often a miser with the other. She lets loose an army of worms upon the forests, and then sends an ichneumon-fly to check them. She wastes no perfume or color upon the flowers which depend upon the wind to scatter their pollen. Cross-fertilization is dear to her, and she invents many ingenious ways to bring it about, as in certain orchids. She will rob the bones of the fowl of their lime to perfect the shell of the egg. She wastes no wit or cunning on the porcupine or on the skunk, because she has already endowed each of them with a perfect means of defense.

Two things Nature is not chary of—fear and pain. She heaps the measure here because fear puts her creatures on the safe side; it saves them from many real dangers. What dangers have lurked for man and for most wild things in the dark! How silly seems the fear of the horse! a fluttering piece of paper may throw him in a panic. Pain, too, safeguards us; it shields us against real dangers. The pains of childbirth are probably no check upon offspring, because the ecstasy of procreation, especially on the part of the male, overcomes all other considerations.