John Burroughs

“ How different from the manners of the robins are the manners of a pair of catbirds that have a nest in the honeysuckle against the side of the first-floor sleeping-porch! Nothing seems farther from the nature of the catbird than the hue and cry which the robin at times sets up. The catbird is sly and dislikes publicity. An appealing feline mew is her characteristic note. She never raises her voice like the town-crier, as the robin does, perched in the mean time where all eyes may behold him. The catbird peers and utters her soft protest from her hiding-place in the bushes. ”

“ Now I read in a work of George Darwin's (son of the great naturalist) on the tides that the earth in many ways behaves more like a living organism170 than like a rigid insensate sphere. Its surface throbs and palpitates and quivers and yields to pressure as only living organisms do. The tides can hardly be regarded as evidences of its breathing, as Kepler thought they could, but they are proof of how closely it is held in the clasp of the heavenly forces. It is like an apple on the vast sidereal tree, that has mellowed and ripened with age. Our moon is no doubt as dead as matter can be. ”

“ As I sit here of a midsummer day, in front of the wide-open doors of a big hay-barn, busy with my pen, and look out upon broad meadows where my farmer neighbor is busy with his haymaking, I idly contrast his harvest with mine. I have to admit that he succeeds with his better than I do with mine, though he can make hay only while the sun shines, while I can reap and cure my light fancies nearly as well in the shade as in the sun. Yet his crop is the surer and of more certain value to mankind. ”

“ The thrush never has the air of a culprit, while the catbird seldom has any other air. But I welcome them both. One shall stand for the harmony and repose of bird life, and the other for its restlessness and curiosity. The songs and the manners of birds correspond. The catbird, the brown thrasher, and the mockingbird are all theatrical in their manners—full of gestures of tail and wings, and their songs all imply an audience, while the serene melody of the thrushes is in keeping with the grace and poise of their behavior. ”

“ The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped some food into an open mouth and disappeared.
Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery, brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. ”

“ Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air—all arrest your attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings. They fly around the world.
The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity from danger from birds of prey are theirs. ”

“ How one hesitates to soil it! The summer robes of the groves and the forests—more than robes, a vital part of themselves, the myriad living nets with which they have captured, and through which they have absorbed, the energy of the solar rays. What a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. ”

“ 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 drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens—a screen of leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have! The drama of wild life is played rapidly ”

“ 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. ”

“ How curious it is that the air should seem heavy to us when it is light, and light when it is heavy! On those sultry, muggy days when it is an effort to move, and the grasshopper is a burden, the air is light, and we are in the trough of the vast atmospheric wave; while we are on its crest, and are buoyed up both in mind and in body, on the crisp, bright days when the air seems to offer us no resistance. ”

“ Haying in this pastoral region is the first act in the drama of the harvest, and one likes to see it well staged, as it is to-day—the high blue dome,74 the rank, dark foliage of the trees, the daisies still white in the sun, the buttercups gilding the pastures and hill-slopes, the clover shedding its perfume, the timothy shaking out its little clouds of pollen as the sickle-bar strikes it, most of the song-birds still vocal, and the tide of summer standing poised at its full. ”

“ So infantile, so helpless and awkward upon the earth, so graceful and masterful on the wing, the child and darling of the summer air, reaping its invisible harvest in the fields of space as if it dined on the sunbeams, touching no earthly food, drinking and bathing and mating on the wing, swiftly, tirelessly coursing the long day through, a thought on wings, a lyric in the shape of a bird! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To what widely different use birds put their power of flight! To the great mass of them it is simply a means of locomotion, of getting from one point to another. A small minority put their wing-power to more ideal uses, as the lark when he claps his wings at heaven's gate, and the ruffed grouse when he drums; even the woodcock has some other use for his wings than to get from one point to another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we think of a Creator and the thing created as two, we are in trouble at once. They are one, as fire and light are one, as soul and body are one. Darwin said he could not look upon the world as the result of chance, and yet his theory of the origin of species ushers us into a chance world. But when he said, speaking of the infinite variety of living forms about us, that they "have all been produced by laws acting around us," he spoke as a great philosopher. These laws are not fortuitous, or the result of the blind grouping of irrational forces. ”

“ The two sides of our great sprawling continent, the East and West, differ from each other almost as much as day differs from night. On the coast of southern California the dominant impression made upon one is of a world made up of three elements—sun, sea, and sky. The Pacific stretches away to the horizon like a vast, shining, gently undulating floor. Its waves are longer and come in more languidly than they do upon the Atlantic coast. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While they are singing they are busy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down to the ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut up to ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal flowering when they become spheres of fragile silver down.
Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called a dandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bring the sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss to decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days as well as on fair. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely placed in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of Canada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few square yards, the grazing is very poor. ”

“ In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, but viewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a song of praise and thanksgiving—joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mate and brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, a voice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving for the universal beneficence without which you and I and the little bird would not be here? ”

“ In fact, of the origin of species we know absolutely nothing, no more than we do about the origin of life itself.
Of the development of species we know some of the factors that play a part, as the influence of environment, the struggle for existence, and the competitions of life. But do we not have to assume an inherent tendency to development, an original impulse as the key to evolution? Accidental conditions and circumstances modify, but do not originate species. The fortuitous plays a part in retarding or hastening a species, and in its extinction, but not in its origin. ”