t y\/' ®lje ^. ^, pll pkarg QH81 mi '5 rnitiTiTiTitra Date Due 4 f. 27 I \ ft ;■! ^ >ss B 1 i.r T oup^h s , Johr. 12i o^ 9^ 19 Unr^er the a^^")le-tree8, i2nn7 DATE 4 f'2? ^ ISSUED TO > {< ^oofeg ip 3ol)n ^urrottafftfi WORKS, ig vols., uniform, i6mo, with frontispiece, gill top. Wake-Robin. Winter Sunshine. Locusts and Wild Honey. Fresh Fields. Indoor Studies. Birds and Poets, with Other Papers. Pepacton, and Other Sketches. Signs and Seasons. RiVERBY. Whitman : A Study. The Light of Day. Literary Values. Far and Near. Ways of Nature. Leaf and Tendril. Time and Change. The Summit of the Years. The Breath of Life. Under the Applh-Trees. Field and Study. FIELD AND STUDY, i? iverside Edition. UNDER THE APPLE-TREES. Riverside Edition. THE BREATH OF LIFE. Riverside Edition. THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS. Riverside Edition. TIME AND CHANGE. Riverside Edition, LEAF AND TENDRIL. Riverside Edition. WAYS OF NATURE. Riverside Edition. FAR AND NEAR. Riverside Edition. L IT E R A RY VALUES. Riverside Edition. THE LIGHT OF DAY. Riverside Edition. WHITMAN: A Study. Riverside Edition. A YEAR IN THE FIELDS. Selections appropriate to each season of the year, from the writings of John Burroughs. Illustrated from Photographs by Clif- ton Johnson. IN THE CATSKILLS. Illustrated from Photographs by Clifton Johnson. CAMPING AND TRAMP.NG WITH ROOSEVELT. Illustrated from Photographs. BIRD AND BOUGH. Poems. WINTER SUNSHINE. Cambridge Classics Series. WAKE- ROBIN. Riverside A Idine Series. SQUIRRELS AND OTHER FUR-BEARERS. Illus- trated. BIRD STORIES FROM BURROUGHS. Illustrated. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston and New York UNDER THE APPLE-TREES JOHN BURROUGHS From a statuette by C. S. Pietro UNDER THE APPLE-TREES BY JOHN BURROUGHS ,lic^tWMtWreftS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ♦ . "COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY JOHN BURROUGHS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published May rgrd FIFTH IMPRESSION, APRIL, I922 r ^-^"^ ^^S^ W-^i*-©"^^" PREFACE I AM quite certain that the majority of my read- ers would have me always stick to natural his- tory themes. I sympathize with them. I am myself never so well pleased as when I can bring them a fresh bit of natural history, or give them a day with me in the fields and woods or along the murmuring streams. Birds and squirrels come home to us all in a way that speculative ideas do not. While writ- ing my more philosophical dissertations, my mind often turns longingly toward the simple outdoor subjects which have engaged me so many years, and doubtless the mind of my reader does also when he is perusing them. But one cannot always choose at such times. Natural history is a matter of obser- vation; it is a harvest which you gather when and where you find it growing. Birds and squirrels and flowers are not always in season, but philosophy we have always with us. It is a crop which we can grow and reap at all times and in all places, and it has its own value and brings its own satisfaction. We are all philosophers, we all delight in finding the reason of things and in tracing the relation of things, and to know, for instance, what part chance plays in our lives, and what part is played by rigid law, is a worthy and engaging problem. I do not V 1269? PREFACE flatter myself that I can resolve it, or any other similar question, but I find the effort stimulating, and now and then I get a gleam of light. We live in a wonderful world, and the wonders of the world without us are matched and more than matched by the wonders of the world within us. This interior world has its natural history also, and to observe and record any of its facts and incidents, or trace any of its natural processes, is well worthy of our best moments. I have given the name of the initial chapter, "Under the Apple-Trees," to the whole collection, because most of the essays were written in my camp under the trees, in the old orchard where I gathered apples as a farm-boy. The wild life about me ap- pealed to my love of natural history, while thoughts and suggestions from beyond the horizon occupied my more philosophical meditations. John Burroughs. CONTENTS *' I. Under the Apple-Trees . . . . , 1 t II. The Friendly Rocks 40 ni. The Master Instinct 65 IV. Dame Nature and her Children . . 82 > V. Old Friends in New Places . « . . 90 VI. The Still Small Voice 105 VII. Nature Leaves 112 I. IN WARBLER TIME 112 II. A SHORT WALK 116 III. IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA . . , , .117 IV. ARE THERE COUNTERFEITS IN NATURE? . .121 VIII. The Primal Mind 125 IX. "Fated to be Free" 142 X. Scientific Faith Once More . . .159 XI. Literature and Science 176 XII. "A Prophet of the Soul" .... 197 XIII. Life and Chance 228 XIV. Life the Traveler 262 vu CONTENTS XV. Great Questions in Littu: . . , » 289 I. THE ETHER ........ 289 n. NATURAL SELECTION 291 III. SPECULATION AND EXPERIMENT . . . 293 IV. EARLY MAN 295 V. ASTRONOMIC GRANDEUR 297 VI. WHY AND HOW .... - . 300 VII. LIMITATIONS OF SCIENCE 301 VIII. BEGINNINGS 303 EX. EVOLUTION . 306 X. AN UNKNOWN FACTOR ..... 308 Index ... o ..... . 309 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES I UNDER THE APPLE-TREES Part I THERE are few places on the farm where there is so much live natural history to be gathered as in the orchard. All the wild creatures seem to feel the friendly and congenial atmosphere of the or- chard. The trees bear a crop of birds, if not of apples, every season. Few are the winged visitors from distant climes that do not, sooner or later, tarry a bit in the orchard. Many birds, such as the robin, the chippy, the hummingbird, the cedar-bird, the goldfinch, and some of the flycatchers, nest there. The great crested flycatcher loves the old hollow limbs, and the little red owl often lives in a cavity in the trunk. The jays visit the orchard on their piratical excursions in quest of birds' eggs, and now and then they discover the owl in his retreat and set up a great hue and cry over their discovery. On such occasions they will take turns in looking into the dim cavity and crying, "Thief, thief!" most vociferously, the culprit meanwhile, appar- ently, sitting wrapped in utter oblivion. In May and June the cuckoo comes to the orchard for tent caterpillars, and the woodpeckers come at 1 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES all seasons — the downy and the hair>^ to the good of the trees, the yellow-bellied often to their injury. The two former search for the eggs and the larvae of the insects that infest the trees, as do the nut- hatches and the chickadees, which come quite as regularly; but the yellow-bellied comes for the life- blood of the trees themselves. He is popularly known as the "sapsucker," and a sapsucker he is. Many apple-trees in everj" orchard are pock-marked by his bill, and occasionally a branch is evidently killed by his many and broad drillings. As I write these lines, on September the 26th, in my bush tent in one of the home orchards, a sapsucker is busy on a veteran apple-tree whose fruit has often gone to school with me in my pockets during my boyhood days on the farm. He goes about his work systematically, \'isiting now one of the large branches and then a portion of the tnmk, and drilling his holes in rows about a quarter of an inch apart. Every square foot of the trunk contains from three hundred to four hundred holes, new and old, cut through into the inner, vital cambium layer. The holes are about the size of the end of a ly^e-straw, and run in rings around the tree, the rings being about a half an inch apart. The newly cut ones quickly fill with sap, which, to my tongue, has a rather insipid taste, but which is evidently relished by the woodp>ecker. He drills two or three holes, then pauses a moment, and when they are filled 2 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES sips his apple-tree tipple leisurely. The drain upon the vitality of the tree at any one time, by this tap- ping, cannot be very serious, but in the course of years must certainly affect its vigor considerably. I have seen it stated in print, by a writer who evi- dently draws upon his fancy for his facts, that in making these holes the bird is settmg a trap for in- sects, and that these are what it feeds upon. But the bird is a sapsucker; there are no insects at his wells to-day; he visits them very regularly, and is con- stantly drilling new ones. His mate, or at least a female, comes, and I over- hear the two in soft, gentle conversation. "\Mien I appear upon the scene, the female scurries away in alarm, calling as she retreats, as if for the male to follow; but he does not. He eyes me for a moment, and then sidles round behind the trunk of the tree, and as I go back to my table I hear his hammer again. YeTV soon the female is back and I hear their conversation cjoing; on as before. Dav after dav the male is here tapping the trees. His blows are soft and can be heard onlv a few vards awav. He evi- dently has his favorites. In this orchard of twenty or more trees, only two are worked now, and only three have ever been worked much. The two favor- ites bear hard, sour fruit. The bark of a sweet apple- tree does not show a single hole. A grafted tree shows no holes on the original stock, but many punctures on the graft. One day I saw the bird 3 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES frequently leave his drilling on one tree and go to another, drilling into a small red apple which had lodged among some twigs on a horizontal branch; he ate the pulp, and had made quite a large hole in the apple, when it became dislodged and fell to the ground. It is plain, therefore, that the sapsucker likes the juice of the apple, and of the tree that bears the apple. He is the only orchard bird who is a tippler. Among the forest trees, he sucks the sap of the sugar maples in spring, and I have seen evi- dence of his having drilled into small white pines, cutting out an oblong section from the bark, appar- ently to get at the soft cambium layer. It is a pleasant experience to sit in my orchard camp of a still morning and hear an apple drop here and there — " indolent ripe," as Whitman says, in the fullness of time, or prematurely ripe from a worm at its heart. The worm finds its account in getting down to the ground where it can pupate, and in both cases the tree has finished a bit of its work and is getting ready for its winter sleep ; and in both cases the squirrels and the woodchucks profit by the fall. But September woodchucks are few; most of them retire to their holes for the long winter sleep during this month; the harvest apples that fall in August hit them at the right moment; but the red squirrels are alert for the apple-seeds during both months, and they chip up many apples for these delicate morsels. They also love the hollow branches and 4 \- UNDER THE APPLE-TREES trunks of the trees, in which they make their homes. Little currents of wild life hourly flow about me. Yesterday, amid the slow rain and mist and general obscurity, there was suddenly an influx of birds in all the old apple-trees about me. Robins appeared by twos and threes in some choke-cherry bushes a few yards below me, and with much cackling and flutter- ing helped themselves to the fruit. A hermit thrush perched on a dry limb in front of my tent and in many different postures surveyed me in my canvas cavern, uttering a low note which I took to be his comments upon me. You may always know the hermit thrush from the other thrushes by that peculiar, soft, breathing motion of its tail. A male redstart came and flitted and flashed about the apple-branches without heeding me at all. Whitman asks : — " Do you take it I would astonish? Does the dayUght astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods? Do I astonish more than they? " The redstart, with his black-and-orange suit, and his quick, lively motions, does not astonish, but few birds give the eye more pleasure. How gay and festive he looks, darting and flashing amid the gnarled and scaly branches of the decaying apple- trees! It seems as if aU his motions were designed to show off his plumage to the best advantage. 5 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES With tail slightly raised and spread, and wings a little drooping, he springs and swoops here and there in the trees — a bit of black holding and momentarily revealing a flame of orange. Redstart is a good name for him, as we see his colors only when he is in motion. Note our other black-and- orange bird, the Baltimore oriole; its color is con- spicuous while the bird is at rest. Another bril- liantly colored bird, the scarlet tanager, is seen from afar when quietly perched. He shows amid the green leaves like a burning coal; and his mo- tions are all slow and deliberate when contrasted with those of the redstart. The latter is a fly-catcher, or insect-catcher, and his movements are neces- sarily sudden and rapid. The birds are quite likely to go in troops in late summer or early fall, different species apparently being drawn along by a common impulse. While the robins and the hermit thrush are among the choke-cherries, a family of indigo-birds, five or six of them, all of the brown color of the mother bird, are grouped around the mother on a flat stone for half a minute, being fed. It is a pretty little tableau. The father bird with his bright plumage is not in evidence. In one of the trees another warbler which I cannot identify, with an olive back and a yellow front, is in a great hurry about its own business. One little olive-green warbler, doubtless a young bird, comes and perches on the 6 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES edge of my table, and, quite oblivious of my pres- ence, looks my papers and books over for the insect tidbit which he does not find. How round and bril- liant and eager are his eyes! If he is looking for a bookworm, he fails to find it. A phoebe-bird perches here and there and makes sudden swoops to the ground for the insects which she cannot find on the wing. Phoebe hunts by sight at long range. Her eye seems telescopic, rather than microscopic like the warbler's. She ex- plores the air and the ground and sees her game from afar. At all hours of the day she perches on the broTsm dead branches of the apple-trees, and waits for her prey to appear, her straight, stiff tail hingeing up and down at her rump. At present my favorite denizen of the orchard is the chipmunk. He, too, likes the apple-seeds, but he is not given to chipping up the apples as much as is the red squirrel. He waits till the apples are ripe and then nibbles the pulp. He also likes the orchard because it veils his movements; when making his trips to and fro, if danger threatens, the trunk of every tree is a house of refuge. As I write these lines in my leafy tent, a chipmunk comes in, foraging for his winter supplies. I have brought him cherry-pits and peach-pits and cracked wheat, from time to time, and now he calls on me several times a day. His den is in the orchard but a few yards from me, and I enjoy having him for so 7 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES near a neighbor. He has at last become so familiar that he climbs to my lap, then to the table, then to my shoulder and head, looking for the kernels of popcorn that he is convinced have some perennial source of supply near me or about me. He clears up every kernel, and then on his return, in a few min- utes, there they are again ! I might think him a good deal puzzled by the prompt renewal of the supply if I were to read my own thoughts into his little nod- dle, but I see he is only eager to gather his harvest while it is plentiful and so near at hand. No, he is not influenced even by that consideration; he does not consider at all, in fact, but just goes for the corn in nervous eagerness and haste. Yet, if he does not reflect, he certainly has a wisdom and foresight of his own. This morning I mixed kernels of fresh-cut green corn with a handful of the dry, hard popcorn upon the floor. At first he began to eat the soft sweet corn, but, finding the small, dry kernels of the popcorn, he at once began to stuff his cheek pockets with them, and when they were full he hastened off to his den. Back he came in about three minutes and he kept on doing this till the popcorn was all gone; then he proceeded to make his breakfast off the green corn. When this was exhausted, he began to strip some choke-cherries (which I had also placed among the corn) of their skins and pulp, and to fill his pockets with the pits, thus carrying no perish- able food to his den. He acted exactly as if he knew 8 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES that the green corn and the choke-cherries would spoil in his underground retreat, and that the hard, dry kind, and the cherry-pits, would keep. He did know it, but not as you and I know it, by experi- ence; he knew it, as all the wild creatures know how to get on in the world, by the wisdom that pervades nature, and is much older than we or they are. My chipmunk knows corn, cherry-pits, buck- wheat, beech-nuts, apple-seeds, and probably several other foods, at sight; but peach-pits, hickory -nuts^ dried sweet corn, he at first passed by, and pea- nuts I could not tempt him to touch at all. He was at first indifferent to the rice, but, on nibbling at it and finding it toothsome, he began to fill his pockets with it. Amid the rice I scattered puffed wheat. This he repeatedly took up and chipped into, at- tracted probably by the odor, but, finding it hollow, or at least very spongy and unsubstantial in its in- terior, he quickly dropped it. It was not solid enough to get into his winter stores. After I had cracked a few hickory-nuts he became very eager for them, and it was amusing to see him, as he sat on my table, struggle to force the larger ones into his pockets, supplementing the contractile power of his cheek muscles with his paws. \Mien he failed to pocket one, he would take it in his teeth and make off. I offered him some peach-pits also, but he only carried one of them up on the stone wall and han- dled it awhile, then looked it over and left it. But 9 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES after I had cracked a few of them and had thus given him a taste of what was in them, he began to carry them to his den. It is interesting to see how well these wild crea- tures are groomed — every hair in its place and shining as if it had just been polished. The tail of my chipmunk is simply perfect — not a hair missing or soiled or worn. In fact, the whole animal looks as new and fresh as a coin just minted, or a flower just opened. His underground habits leave no mark or stain upon him, and his daily labors do not rujffle a hair. This is true of nearly all the wild creatures. Domestication changes all this; domestic animals become dirty and unkempt. The half -tame gray squirrels in the parks have little of the wild grace and beauty of the squirrels in the woods. Especially do their tails deteriorate, and their sylvan airiness and delicacy disappear. The whole character of the squirrel culminates and finds expression in its tail — all its nervous rest- lessness and wild beauty, all its jauntiness, archness, and suspicion, and every change of emotion, seem to ripple out along this appendage. How furtive and nervous my chipmunk is, rush- ing about by little jerks incessantly, not stopping for anything! His bright, unwinking eyes, his pal- pitating body, his sudden spasmodic movements, his eagerness, his industry, his sleekness and clean- liness — what a picture he makes ! Apparently he 10 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES does not know me from a stump or a clothes-horse. His cold paws on my warm hand, on my arm, or on my head give him no hint of danger; no odors from my body, or look from my eyes, disturb him; the sound of my voice does not alarm him ; but any movement on my part, and he is off. It is moving things — cats, weasels, hawks, foxes — that mean danger to him. In the little circuit of his life — gathering his winter stores and his daily subsistence, spinning along the fences, threading the woods and bushes, his eye and his ear are evidently his main dependence ; odors and still objects concern him lit- tle, but moving things very much. I once saw a chipmunk rush to his den in the side of a bank with great precipitation, and in a moment, like a flash, a shrike darted down and hovered over the entrance. I can talk to my chipmunk in low, slow tones and he heeds me not, but any unusual sound outside the camp, and he is alertness itself. One day when he was on my table a crow flew over and called sharply and loudly; the squirrel sat up and took notice in- stantly; with his paws upon his breast he listened and looked intently for a few seconds, and then re- sumed his foraging. At another time the sharp call of a red squirrel in a tree near by made him still more nervous. With one raised paw he looked and lis- tened for two or three minutes. The red squirrel hazes him on all occasions, and, I think, often robs him of his stores. 11 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES No doubt the chipmunk has many narrow es- capes from hawks. A hunter told me recently of a hawk-and-chipmunk incident that he had witnessed the day before in the woods on the mountain. He was standing still listening to the baying of his hound on the trail of a fox. Suddenly there was a rush and clatter of wings in the maple-trees near him, and he saw a large hawk m pursuit of a chip- munk coming down, close to the trunk of a tree, like a thimderbolt. As the hawk struck the ground, the hunter shot him dead. He had the squirrel in his claw as in a trap, and the hunter had to pry the talon open to free the victim, which was alive and able to run away. From the description I guessed the hawk to be a goshawk. What the chipmunk vv^as doing up that tree is a mystery to me, since he sel- dom ventures far from the ground; but the truth of the incident is unquestioned. When the chipmunk is in the open, the sense of danger is never absent from him. He is always on the alert. In his excursions along the fences to col- lect wild buckwheat, wild cherries, and various grains, he is watchfulness itself. In every trip to his den with his supplies, his manner is like that of the baseball-player in running the bases — he makes a dash from my study, leaping high over the grass and weeds, to an apple-tree ten yards away; here he pauses a few seconds and nervously surveys his course ahead; then he makes another sprint to a 12 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES second apple-tree, and pauses as before, quickly glancing round; then in a few leaps he is at home, and in his den. Returning, he usually pursues the same course. He leaves no trail, and is never off his guard. No baseball runner was ever more watchful. Apparently while in the open he does not draw one breath free from a keen sense of danger. I have tempted him to search my coat pockets for the nuts or cherry-pits that I have placed there, and, when he does so, he seems to appreciate at what a disadvan- tage his enemy might find him — his eyes are for the moment covered, his rear is exposed, his whole situation is very insecure; hence he seizes a nut and reverses his position in a twinkling; his body palpi- tates; his eyes bulge; then he dives in again and seizes another nut as before, acting as if he thought each moment might be his last. When he goes into the tin cocoa-box for the cherry -pits, he does it with the hurry of fear; his eyes are above the rim every second or two; he does not stop to clean the pits as he does when on my table, but scoops them up with the greatest precipitation, as if he feared I might clap on the lid at any moment and make him pris- oner. In all the hundred and one trips he has made from my camp to his den he has not for one moment forgotten himself; he runs all the bases with the same alertness and precaution. Coming back, he emerges from his hole, sits up, washes his face, then looks swiftly about, and is off for the base of supplies. 13 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES One day I went by a roundabout course and stood three paces from his hole. In the mean time he had loaded up, and he came running over the course in his usual style, but before he left the second base he saw me, or an apparition that was not there before, and became very nervous. He jumped about; he sat up on his haunches and looked; crouched by a wood- chuck's hole and eyed me, his cheeks protruding; changed his attitude a dozen times; then, as the apparition changed not, he started and came one third of the way; then his heart failed him and he rushed back. More posing and scrutinizing, when he made a second dash that brought him two thirds of the way; then his fears overcame him again, and he again rushed to cover. Repeating his former be- havior for a few moments, he made a third dash and reached the home base in safety. How carefully he seems to carry his tail on entering his hole, so as not to let it touch the sides! He is out again in less than a minute, and, erect upon his haunches, looks me squarely in the eye. He is greatly agitated; he has not had that experience before. What does it mean? Erect on his hind legs, he stands almost motionless and eyes me. I stand motionless, too, with a half -eaten apple in my hand. I wink and breathe; so does he. For ten minutes we confront each other in this fashion, then he turns his back upon me and drops down. He looks toward the camp; he remembers the nuts and corn awaiting 14 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES him there; he stirs uneasily; he changes his position; he looks at my motionless figure again, then toward the source of supplies, and is off, leaving me at his threshold. In two minutes he is back again with protruding pockets, and now makes the home run without a pause. He emerges again from his den, washes his face three times, his mouth first, then his nose and cheeks, then is off for another load. I re- turn to my chair and soon he is again on my lap and table, or sitting in the hollow of my hand, loading up as before. The apparition in the chair has no terrors for him. I would not say that he is burdened with a con- scious sense of danger; rather is his fear instinctive and unconscious. It is in his blood — born with him and a part of his life. His race has been the prey of various animals and birds for untold ages, and it has survived by reason of an instinctive w^atch- fulness that has been pushed to the highest degree of development. He is on the lookout for danger as constantly as he is on the lookout for food, and he takes no more thought about the one than about the other. His life is keyed to the fear pitch all the time. His heart beats as fast as the ticking of a watch, and all his movements are as abrupt and spasmodic as if they were born of alarm. His behavior is an excel- lent illustration of the unconscious fear that per- vades a large part of the animal kingdom. All creatures that are preyed upon by others lead 15 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES this life of fear. I don't know that the crow is ever preyed upon by any other creature, so he apparently has a pretty good time. He is social and noisy and in the picnicking mood all the day long. Hawks apparently are afraid of man only. Hence their lives must be comparatively free from harassing fear. Even fish in the streams are not exempt from fear. They are preyed upon by large fish, and by minks and otters, and by the fish hawk. If the weasel has a natural enemy, I don't know what it is. He is the boldest of the bold. He might be captured by a hawk or an eagle, but such occurrences are probably very rare, as a weasel can dodge almost anything but a gun. Of all our wild creatures the rabbit has the most enemies; weasels, minks, foxes, wildcats, and owls are hovering about poor Bunnie at all times. No wonder she never closes her eyes, even in sleep. To compensate in a measure for all this, nature has made her very fleet of foot and very prolific, so that the race of rabbits is in full tide, notwithstanding its many enemies. Such animals as the skunk and the porcupine show little fear, because their natural enemies, if they have any, would go by on the other side. There is evidence that the skunk is sometimes preyed upon by the fox and the eagle and the horned owl, and the porcupine by the lynx and the wolf, but these must be exceptional occurrences. The lion probably fears 16 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES nothing but man. Little wonder that he looks calm and majestic and always at his ease ! But I am get- ting away from my apple-trees. The arch-enemy of the chipmunk is the small red weasel, and I wonder if it is to hide from him that he usually digs his den away from the fences and other cover, in clean open ground, leaving no clue what- ever as to its whereabouts. He carries away all the soil, and either makes a pile of it some feet away, or else hides it completely. The den of my little neighbor is in the open grassy space between the rows of apple-trees, thirty or more yards from either fence. All that is visible of it is a small round hole in the ground nearly concealed by the overhanging grass. I had to watch him in order to find it. His chamber is about three feet below the surface of the ground, and has but one entrance, through a long crooked passage eight or ten feet long. If his arch-enemy were to find it, there would be no es- cape. There is no back door, and there are no secret passages. Probably many a tragedy is enacted in those little earth-chambers. The weasel himself fears nothing; he is the incarnation of bloodthirsti- ness, and his victims seem so horrified at the dis- covery that he is pursuing them that they become paralyzed. Even the fleet-footed rabbit in the open woods or fields falls an easy prey. One day last summer as I sat at the table in my hay-barn study, tlicre boldly entered through th£ 17 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES open door this arch-enemy of our small rodents — brown of back and white of belly. He rushed in as if on very hurrying business, and all my efforts to de- tain him, by squeaking like a mouse, and chirping like a bird, proved unavailing. He thrust out his impudent snake-Uke head and neck from an opening in the wall, and fixed his intense, beady eyes upon me for a moment, and was gone. I feared he was on the trail of the chipmunk that had just carried away the cherry-pits I had placed for him on a stone near by; but the little rodent appeared a half -hour later, as sleek as ever, but with a touch of something sus- picious and anxious in his manner, as if he had at least had tidings that his deadly enemy was in the neighborhood. After I had cracked some hickory-nuts for my little friend this morning, and he had got a taste of the sweet morsel inside, he quickly began to stuff the whole nuts into his pockets and carry them to his storehouse. It was amusing to see him struggle with the larger nuts, first moistening them with his tongue, to force them into those secret and appar- ently inadequate pockets. The smooth, trim cheeks would suddenly assume the appearance of enormous wens, extending well down on the sides of the neck. The pouches are not merely passive receptacles; they evidently possess some power of muscular ac- tion, like the throat muscles, which enables them to force the grain and nuts along their whole course. 18 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES As the little squirrel picks the corn from the floor you can see the pouches swell, first on the one side, then on the other. He seems to pick up the kernels and swallow them. What part the tongue plays in the process, one cannot see. In forcing a whole or a half hickory-nut into them, the chipmunk uses his Daws. The pouches are doubtless emptied by mus- cular movements similar to those by which they were filled — a self-acting piece of machinery, a pocket that can fill and empty itself. I see my little hermit making frequent visits to my study in the morning before I am seated there, exploring the floor, the chair, the table, to see if the miracle of the corn manna has not again happened. He is anxious to be on hand as soon as it occurs. He is no discriminator of persons. One morning a wo- man friend took her seat in my chair with corn in her lap and under her arched hand on the table, and waited. Presently the little forager appeared and climbed to her lap, and pushed under her hand, as he had under mine. Another woman sat on the cot a few feet away, and the two conversed in low tones. The squirrel gave little heed to them, but any movement of their hands or feet startled him. One day I shifted my position from the table to near the cot, with my extended feet near the en- trance. The squirrel was in the act of coming in when I made some slight movement. With that characteristic chippering of his, he retreated hast- 19 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES ily to the first apple-tree twenty feet away, and, perched upon its leaning trunk, sounded his little alarm, " Chuck, chuck,'* for fifteen minutes or more. Apparently he had but just discovered me. After a time he came slyly back and resumed his foraging. The activity of the chipmunk when he is out of his den is almost incessant. Like the honey-bee, he seems filled with a raging impulse to lay up his win- ter stores. When he finds an ever-renewed supply, as in my orchard camp, his eagerness and industry are delightful to see. The more nuts I place for him, the more eager he becomes, as most of us do when we strike a rich lead of the things we are in quest of. Will his greed carry him to the point of filling his den so full that there remains no room for himself in it? Will he let the god of plenty turn him out of doors? Last summer I had seen a chipmunk's hole filled up with choke-cherries to within three inches of the top. ("Naturally, being choke-cherries," says a friend, looking over my shoulder.) From previous experience I calculated the capa- city of his chamber to be not more than four or five quarts. One day I gave him all I thought he could manage, — enough, I fancied, to fill his cham- ber full, — two quarts of hickory-nuts and some corn. How he responded to the invitation ! How he flew over the course from my den to his ! He fairly panted. The day might prove too short for him, or some other chipmunk might discover the pile of 20 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES treasures. Three, and often four, nuts at a time, went into his pockets. If one of them was too large to go in readily, he would take it between his teeth. He would first bite off the sharp point from the nut to keep it from pricking or irritating his pouches. I do not think he feared a puncture. I renewed the pile of nuts from time to time, and looked on with interest. The day was cloudy and wet, but he ran his express train all day. His feet soon became muddy, and it was amusing to see him wash his face with those soiled paws every time he emerged from his hole. It was striking to see how much like a machine he behaved, going through the same mo- tions at the same points, as regularly as a clock. He disappeared into his hole each time with a peculiarly graceful movement which seemed to find expression in the sweep of his tail. It was to the eye what melodious sounds are to the ear, and contrasted strangely with the sudden impulsive movements of his usual behavior. When he emerged, the top of his head and eyes first appeared, then a moment's pause, then the head and neck arose, then the whole body shot up in the erect posture with the paws folded and hanging down on the white breast. The face-washing was the next move, first the mouth, then the nose and cheeks. Then, after a swift glance around, off he goes, with tail well up in the air, for another load. As the day declined, and the pile of nuts was ever 21 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES renewed, I thought I saw signs that he was either getting discouraged or else that his den was getting too full. At five o'clock he began to carry the nuts out from my camp and conceal them here and there under the leaves and dry grass. His manner seemed imdecided. He did not return to his den again while I waited near it. After some delay I saw him go to the stone wall and follow it till he was lost from sight under the hill. I concluded that his greed had at last really turned him out of doors and that he had gone off to spend the night with a neighbor. But my inference was wrong. The next day he was back again, carrying away a fresh supply of nuts as eag- erly as ever. Two more quarts disappeared before night. The next day was rainy, and though other chipmunks were hurrying about, my little miser rested from his labors. A day later a fresh supply of nuts arrived — two quarts of chestnuts and one of hickory-nuts, and the greed of the little squirrel rose to the occasion. He made his trips as fre- quently as ever. My enforced absence for a few days prevented me from witnessing all that happened, but a friend took notes for me. He tried to fool the chipmunk with a light-colored marble placed among the nuts. The squirrel picked it up, but quickly dropped it. Watching his opportunity, my friend rubbed the marble with the meat of a hickory-nut. The chip- munk smelled it; then put it in his pocket; then 2^ UNDER THE APPLE-TREES took it out, held it in his paws a moment and looked at it, and returned it to his pocket. Three times he did this before rejecting it. Evidently his sense of taste discredited his sense of smell. On my return at the end of the week, the enthusi- asm of the chipmunk had greatly abated. He was seldom out of his den. A nut or two plaxied at its entrance disappeared, but he visited me no more in my camp. Other chipmunks were active on all sides, but his solicitude about the winter had passed, or rather his hoarding instinct had been sated. His cellar was full. The rumor that right here was a land of plenty seemed to have gone abroad upon the air, and other chipmunks appeared upon the scene. Red squirrels and gray squirrels came, but we wasted no nuts upon them. A female chipmunk that came and occupied an old den at my doorstep was encouraged, however. She soon became as familiar as my first acquaintance, climbing to my table, taking nuts from my hand, and nipping my fingers spitefully when I held on to the nuts. Her behavior was as nearly like that of the other as two peas are alike. I gave her a fair supply of winter stores, but did not put her greed to the test. So far as I have observed, the two sexes do not winter together, and there seems to be no sort of camaraderie between them. One day, earlier in this history, I saw my male neighbor chase a smaller chipmunk, which I have little doubt was this female, 23 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES out of the camp and off into the stone wall, with great spitefulness. All-the-year-round love among the wild creatures is very rare, if it occurs at all. Love is seasonal and brief among most of them. My little recluse has ample supplies for quite a family, but I am certain he will spend the winter alone there in the darkness of his subterranean dwelling. He must have at least a peck of nuts that we gave him, besides all the supplies that he carried in from his foraging about the orchard and the fields earlier in the season. The temptation to dig down and uncover his treasures is very great, but my curi- osity might lead to his undoing, at least to his seri- ous discomfort, so I shall forbear, resting content in the thought that at least one fellow mortal has got all that his heart desires. As our lives have touched here at my writing- table, each working out his life-problems, I have thought of what a gulf divides my little friend and me; yet he is as earnestly solving his problems as I am mine; though, of course, he does not worry over them, or take thought of them, as I do. 1 cannot even say that something not himself takes thought for him; there is no thought in the matter; there is what we have to call impulse, instinct, inherited habit, and the like, though these are only terms for mysteries. He, too, shares in this wonderful some- thing we call life. The evolutionary struggle and unfolding was for him as well as for me. He, too, is 24 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES a tiny bubble on the vast current of animate nature, whose beginning is beyond our ken in the dim past, and whose ending is equally beyond our ken in the dim future. He goes his pretty ways, gathers his precarious harvest, has his adventures, his hair- breadth escapes, his summer activity, his autumn plenty, his winter solitude and gloom, and his spring awakening and gladness. He has made himself a home here in the old orchard; he knows how deep to go into the ground to get beyond the frost-line; he is a pensioner upon the great bounty upon which we all draw, and probably lives up to the standard of the chipmunk life more nearly than most of us live up to the best standards of human life. May he so continue to live, and may we yet meet for many summers under the apple-boughs. Part II When the spring came I was seized with a curios- ity to know how much of his stores my little friend had disposed of, and which of his various assortment of nuts and grain had proved his favorites. To set- tle these points there was only one course to pursue : we must dig him out. So one April day we pro- ceeded to do so. We at once discovered a new hole or entrance, only a few inches from the other, and apparently more in use than it was. We foimd his chamber about three feet below the surface with its usual nest of dry leaves and grass, and a few 25 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES shells of hickory-nuts and cherry-pits, but, dig as we would, we could not find any recess or granary large enough to hold the peck or more of nuts that I had seen him carry in. We searched carefully for side chambers into which he might have stored the sur- plus of his unexpected harvest, but we found none. He would not have prepared in advance for such a contingency, as he could have had no hint of the bounty which a designing and near-by Providence was to bestow upon him. The shells we found accounted for only a small fraction of those with which we had supplied him. Not a chestnut or a peach-pit or a hickory-nut did we find, nor any corn, nor wild seeds of any sort. I was much puzzled, and am still, as to just what had happened. The chipmunk either had been plun- dered by his neighbors, or else had freely distributed his supplies among them. What did the new hole signify? The old one was ample, and led to the same chamber. We did not find the chipmunk in his den, nor any convincing evidence that he had recently been there. Although I spent the following summer in the same bush camp, I am not certain that I ever saw my little neighbor that season. But the next fol- lowing season, he or another was again my neighbor under the apple-trees, and disclosed to me a refresh- ing bit of natural history — that of a chipmunk digging his hole. He came and dug it in broad daylight within a few yards of my bush camp under 26 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES the apple-trees, and gave me daily opportunities to watch the proceedings. I have never known any one who has been so for- tunate in this respect, nor have I ever seen in print any account of the little rodent's proceedings on such an occasion. For several years I have been an observer and an investigator of their little mounds of freshly dug earth along the margin of the high- ways or the woody borders of the fields, but until now have never caught one of the little miners at work. I had fancied that the digging was done at night, and that the earth was carried out to the dumping-place in the cheek pouches. But such is not the case. My little neighbor worked by day, and his cheek pockets were never used in transporting the earth from his hole to the dumping-place. I had often found the pile of fresh earth two or three yards from the hole out of which it came, with never a grain of soil littering the grass between the two, and no sign of a trail. I had also been fairly bewildered by finding stones in the pile of fresh soil so large that they could not be forced back into the hole out of which I was sure they had come. On three occasions I had found such freshly dug stones, and they were all too big for the opening that led to the chipmunk's den. By what magic had he got them out? From what I had seen one November, after the earth had been frozen and then thawed once or twice, I con- cluded that the little engineer had made a niche in 27 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES the side of his hole just deep enough to make room for the passage of these broad, flat stones, and then had packed it full of earth again. In one ease where a red squirrel had apparently been trying to force an entrance, such a niche was disclosed, as if the softer earth there had dropped out. Yet, as I had found other holes the rims of w^hich had evidently never been tampered with, and the dump of which held one or more stones larger than its diam- eter, I was hopelessly puzzled. I had found still other holes that had no dump at all — not a grain of fresh earth anywhere in their neighborhood. There is one by the roadside in front of Woodchuck Lodge now, eight feet from the stone fence, into which the chipmunk is daily carrying his winter stores, but which has not the slightest vestige of an earth-mound anywhere in its vicinity. If the squir- rel ever carried the dirt away in his cheek pockets, I might conclude that he had scattered it along the roadway. This mystery of the holes that have no visible dumping-place I have not yet cleared up. Were there a woodchuck-hole near any of them I might think that the loosened soil had been shot into that. As the problem stands i with me now, it is an insoluble mystery. A friend suggests that, like the Irishman, he probably digs another hole to put the earth in, which reminds me of an old story about two countrymen who tried to "stump" each other with questions, it being stipulated that no question 28 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES should be asked that could not be answered by the propounder. *'How is it,'* said one, "that a chipmunk digs a hole without throwing out any dirt?" "You can't answer that yourself," said the other. "I can; he begins at the other end of the hole,'* replied the first. "How does he get to the other end?" asked the second. "You must n't ask any question that you can't answer yourself." It is certainly true that in such cases the chip- munk did begin at the other end of his hole, but that end must be somewhere on the surface of the ground. In all cases, whether there is a pile of earth or not, the hole is cut up through the turf from beneath, and hence all the soil must have been removed back along the tunnel and out at the entrance. We often see the same thing in the procedure of the wood- chucks — the large pile of earth at the mouth of the main entrance and another hole a few yards away which has been cut up through the turf from below. The woodchuck makes no effort at concealment as does the chipmunk, but apparently aims only at convenience and safety. But how the squirrel can dispose of a bushel of soil and leave no trace is a problem. The mystery of the large stones was soon made clear; they did not come out of the neat, round hole in the turf through which the squirrel enters or 29 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES leaves his finished den, but out of the larger work- hole through which the soil was removed, and which is finally stopped up and obliterated. I happened to discover my chipmunk probably the second day after he had begun to dig. Some people were calling on me at my bush camp when, as they turned to go, one of them said, **See that chipmunk!" I looked and saw him sitting up amid a little fresh earth, washing his face. His face cer- tainly needed washing; it was so soiled it looked comical. Presently I investigated the spot and found a rude hole a few inches deep, with the loos- ened earth in front of it. ** Evidently a greenhorn," I said; "a pretty dooryard he will have by the time he finishes, with a hole big enough to admit a red squirrel!" Next morning there was more fresh earth in front of the hole; indeed, the grass was full of it a foot or more away, and a dump-pile had just been begun. From the hole to this pile there was a deep, wide groove in the loose soil, which I soon saw was made by the squirrel shoving the loosened earth from the hole to the dump, using his nose as a shovel. Day after day, for nearly a week thereafter, I saw him at work, digging and pushing the soil up to the mouth of his hole, and then pushing it along this groove or channel to the dump-heap. His movements were so quick and energetic that, at the final stroke, the soil, a half-teaspoonful or more, would shoot from his 30 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES nose four or five inches. As he turned back along his roadway he would rapidly paw the earth behind him, and then, before entering his hole, would take a quick look all around. He was never for a moment off guard ; the sense of danger was ever present with him. As he entered his hole, a succession of quick jets of earth, forming little parabolas in the air, would shoot up behind him. Then all would be still for from three to four minutes, when he would again emerge, shoving the soil before him and continuing to butt it, quickly glancing right and left the while, till he shot it upon his dump. This was his invariable procedure. Every motion was repeated like clockwork, the forward shoving, the retreating pawing, and the flying spray of earth as he disappeared in his hole. I fancied him there underground loosening the soil with his paws, for two or three minutes, then either kicking it up toward the exit or else shoving it in front of him. When at work he was intensely preoccupied; only one other feeling seemed to pos- sess him — that of impending danger. One day while he was mining beneath the surface, I sprinkled some corn and pumpkin-seeds along his highway and in the mouth of his hole, but when he came to the surface with his burden of soil he heeded them not; he shoveled or pawed them along with his soil, and buried them beneath it. The incident reminded me of the hound I once intercepted, hot on the trail 31 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES of a fox; I offered her my lunch and, holding her, even put it in her mouth, but she threw it disdain- fully from her, and rushed on along that steaming trail. She had but one thought or sense at that mo- ment: she was beside herself about that fox, and her attention could not be diverted from it. My chipmunk w^hen at work was alike obsessed; he knew nothing but his w ork and the danger from his enemies . Day by day the mound of fresh earth grew and spread back more and more toward the hole out of which it came, till it seemed about to cover it. At times the squirrel either worked at night or else very early in the morning before I was on the scene. But later he was not on his job till past mid-forenoon. For two or three days he promptly appeared at eleven o'clock. He would come leaping over the grass from some point behind my camp and quickly resume his excavating. Once he found some fresh peach-pits upon his mound; these arrested his at- tention; he seized them one by one, nibbled off the bits of pulp that were still clinging to them, then dropped them and took up his task. He usually knocked off work by or before two in the afternoon. Evidently he has no partner and will spend the winter in his subterranean retreat alone. I think this is an established chipmunk custom, rendered necessary, it may be, by the scant supply of air in such close quarters, three feet undergroimd, and 32 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES maybe under three or more feet of snow in addition. At any rate, the chipmunk, male or female, is a hermit, and there is no cooperation or true sociabil- ity among them. They are wonderfully provident and industrious, beginning to store up their winter food in midsummer, or as early as the farmer does his. When the nut-crop fails them, as it has this present season, they scour about the neighborhood, gathering all sorts of wild seeds and grains, and wild-cherry pits, working almost as steadily as do the ants and the bees. In the mean time they feed on insects and berries and various green things, but only cured grains and nuts go into their winter stores. The wild creatures rarely make an economic blunder. We are told on excellent authority that the coney, or least hare, in the Rocky Mountains spreads its newly cut grass and other green food on the rocks in the sun, and dries it as carefully as the farmer dries his hay before storing it up for winter use. I think we are safe in saying that it is not the coney's individual wisdom or experience that prompts him to do this, but the wisdom of some- thing much older than he is. It is the wisdom of nature, inherent and active as instinct. One day, when I paused before my little neigh- bor's mound of earth, I saw that the hole was nearly stopped up, and, while I was looking, the closure was completed from within. Loose earth 33 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES was being shoved up from below and pressed into the opening; the movement of the soil could be seen. It flashed upon me at once that here was the key to the secret that had so puzzled me — he would obliterate that ugly and irregular work-hole and the littered dooryard, bury them beneath his mound of earth, and, working from within, would make a new and neater outlet somewhere through the turf near by. He was probably carrying out that scheme at that moment, and was disposing of the loose earth in the way I had observed. The next day the mound of earth had been extended over the place where the hole had been, and the chipmunk was still active beneath it, pushing up fresh earth like a ground-mole. At intervals of a few moments, the fresh soil would slowly heave or boil up, as it does when a hidden crayfish or mole is at work. Twice while I looked the head of the digger came through the thin screen of earth, as if by accident; he winked and blinked as the dirt slid off his head and over his eyes, then ducked beneath it and pro- ceeded with his work. I began to look in the turf around me for the new entrance which I knew would soon be, if it were not already, made. I did not that day find it, but the next morning there it was, not more than four inches from the edge of the dump- heap — a little round shadow under the grass- blades and wild-strawberry leaves, about half the size of the work-hole, with no stain of the soil about 34 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES it, and having such a look of neatness and privacy as coidd not have been given to it if it had been made from without. How furtive and secretive it looked ! Still the little miner kept at work, still the fresh earth boiled up above the old entrance. He is excavating his chamber, I thought; he requires a den or vault down there, of several quarts' capacity, in which to build his nest and store his food. Whether or not he was then excavating his chamber and storeroom, the next day I found two more new holes in the turf, one a foot or more from the first one, and the other three or more feet away in an- other direction — both of them having the same shy, elusive character. Why all these extra holes? I asked. I have never before known of a chipmunk's den with so many back or front doors. Are they only for means of escape if robbers or miu-derers gain an entrance.^ If so, they aiford another proof of the provident cunning of our little striped friend. It happened in this case that the squirrel brought to the surface no stones too large for the new en- trance, but his work-hole was so large and irregular that he might easily have done so. My chipmunk was engaged for nearly three weeks in his excavations. I knew when he had finished by his boldly coming into my camp one morning, a minute or two after he had seen me enter it. Look- ing intently up in my face for a few seconds, he pro- ceeded to stuff his mouth with the dry leaves most 35 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES to his liking that my bushy walls afforded. He did not try to pack the leaves in his cheek pouches, but crammed four or five into his mouth and then made off to his den. He was furnishing his house. Many mouthfuls of dry leaves and fine grass doubtless went to the furnishing, though I chanced to witness only this one. His bedroom is his granary; his winter stores are packed all around and under his nest. Some of his neighbors have been carrying in their supplies since July, just what I could not find out; probably wild seeds of some kind. As there are no beech-nuts this season, and no buckwheat or oat- fields near by, I am wondering what mj^ little neigh- bor is counting on to carry him over the winter. He may have some source of supply that I know not of. I gave him cherry-pits and plum-pits from time to time before his den was finished, and he seemed to have some place to store them. I hope he is not counting too confidently upon the continuance of this bounty. In my walks I have many times come across chip- munk-holes with a pile of earth before them, and a general look of carelessness and disorder all about, and I have said, "That squirrel is a bungler; he is hot equal to his task." The present season I have seen three such holes while walking less than a mile along the highway. They appeared to have been abandoned. Now I know they were only begin- nings, and that had the owners finished their man- 36 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES sions, they would have presented a far different appearance. That ugly work-hole, with its bclit- tered dooryard, would have been completely cov- ered up, and the real entrance deftly concealed. It is highly improbable that every individual chipmunk has a way peculiar to himself, as we hu- mans so often have. Their dens and modes of pro- cedure in digging them are as near alike as two peas, or as two chipmunks themselves. Yet there remains the mystery of an occasional hole without any pile of earth anywhere in sight. I find several such each sea- son, and I can offer no plausible explanation of them. I have found two weasels* dens on the margin of a muck swamp in the woods that presented the same insoluble problem — what had become of the bushel or more of earth that must have been brought to the surface .'^ Both the weasel and the chipmunk have several galleries and one or more large chambers or dining-halls, and how each manages to hide or obliterate all the loose soil that must have been re- moved is a question which has long puzzled me. If we had an American Fabre, or a man who would give himself up to the study of the life-histories of our rodents, with the same patience and enthusiasm that the wonderful Frenchman has had for the life- histories of the insects, he would doubtless soon solve the mystery for me. I used to think that the chipmunk carried away the soil in his cheek pockets, and have so stated in 37 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES one of my books, but I am now very certain that he does not — only his food-stores are thus carried. In the present case I measured the excavated earth and found it a plump bushel. From the point of view of modern scientific phi- losophy, — namely, that the needs of the organism beget the organ, and a change of use modifies it, — it is interesting to note to what novel use the chip- munk puts his nose in digging his den, apparently without changing or impairing it as an organ of smell. If he has been doing this through biological ages, using it as a kind of scoop and pusher, is it not remarkable that it has not undergone some modifi- cation that would make it better suited for these pur- poses.^ Note the shovel-footed mole, with his huge, muscular fore paws with which he forces his way through the soil and heaves it up to the surface, or the pig with his nose so well adapted to rooting. The nose of the chipmunk does not perceptibly dif- fer from that of the other squirrels, which do no undergroimd work. Are we not forced to the con- clusion that the life-habits of the chipmunk have been much changed since the country has been so largely denuded of its forests, thus forcing him to become a dweller in the open? In the primitive woods, with the thick coating of leaves and of snow upon the ground, he would not have needed to pen- etrate the earth so deeply. The wood frogs go barely a few inches under the leaves and leaf -mould, where 38 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES they remain unfrozen all winter. Our beech-woods to-day, when there is a crop of nuts, fairly swarm with chipmunks, and all of them have holes, but rarely is there any sign of freshly dug earth. None of our wild creatures have as yet become much modified, either in form or color, as a result of the change in their environment by the disappear- ance of the forests. They have changed in habits, but the habits have not as yet set their stamp upon the organism. Is it not probable that if the chip- munk goes on scooping and packing soil with his nose for long ages, his anatomy will in time become better adapted to this new use.^ I fancy that in time the w^oodchuck, which from a wood-dweller has now so commonly become a den- izen of the fields, will change in color, at least. How his form now stands out on the smooth surface of the green fields ! His enemies can see him from afar. Is this the reason that while feeding he momentar- ily rises up on his hind legs and takes an observa- tion? He is instinctively uneasy under his give-away color. As a wood-dweller his colors were assimi- lative and therefore protective, but now they ad- vertise him to every enemy in the landscape. In the course of ages he should become a much lighter brown or gray — that is, if our theories as to assimi- lative coloration are well founded. But there is no doubt but that use and wont as well as environment do in time leave their stamp upon every living creature. II THE FRIENDLY ROCKS I FIND there is enough of the troglodyte in most persons to make them love the rocks and the caves and ledges that the air and the rains have carved out of them. The rocks are not so close akin to us as the soil; they are one more remove from us ; but they lie back of all, and are the final source of all. I do not sup- pose they attract us on this account, but on quite other grounds. Rocks do not recommend the land to the tiller of the soil, but they recommend it to those who reap a harvest of another sort — the ar- tist, the poet, the walker, the student and lover of all primitive open-air things. Time, geologic time, looks out at us from the rocks as from no other objects in the landscape. Geologic time ! How the striking of the great clock, whose hours are millions of years, reverberates out of the abyss of the past! Mountains fall, and the foundations of the earth shift, as it beats out the moments of terrestrial history. Rocks have literally come down to us from a foreworld. The youth of the earth is in the soil and in the trees and verdure that springs from it; its age is in the rocks; in the 40 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS great stone book of the geologic strata its history is written. Even if we do not know our geology, there is something in the face of a cliff and in the look of a granite boulder that gives us pause and draws us thitherward in oiu* walk. We linger beneath the cliff, or muse and dream amid its ruins as amid the ruins of some earth temple; we pause beside the huge boulder, or rest upon it and survey the land- scape from its coign of vantage; we lay our hand upon it as upon some curious relic from a world that we know not of. The elemental, the primordial, the silence of ages, the hush and repose of a measureless antiquity look out upon us from the face of the rocks. " The menacing might of the globe " is in the cliffs and the crags; its ease and contentment are in the slumbering boulders. One might have a worse fate than to have his lot cast in a rockless country — • a treeless country would be still worse : but how the emigrant from New England or New York to the prairie States or to the cotton States, must miss his paternal rocks and ledges! A prairie farm has no past, no history looks out of it, no battle of the ele- mental forces has been fought there, and only a very tame, bloodless battle of the human forces. A landscape without rocks lacks something. Without the outcropping ledge, the faces of the hills lack eyebrows; without a drift boulder here and there, the fields lack the rugged elemental touch. Next to the trees, rocks are points of interest in the 41 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES landscape. Slumbering here and there upon the turf, they enhance the sense of repose. How expres- sionless and uninteresting the landscape in one of the prairie States, or in one of the Southern States, contrasted with a New England or a New York farm ! The grazing or ruminating cattle add a picturesque feature, but the gray granite boulders have been ly- ing there chewing their stony cuds vastly longer. How meditative and contented they look, dreaming the centuries away! The rocks have a history ; gray and weather-worn, they are veterans of many battles; they have most of them marched in the ranks of vast stone brigades during the ice age; they have been torn from the hills, recruited from the mountain-tops, and mar- shaled on the plains and in the valleys; and now the elemental war is over, there they lie waging a gentle but incessant warfare with time, and slowly, oh, so slowly, yielding to its attacks ! I say they he there, but some of them are still in motion, creeping down the slopes, or out from the clay-banks, nudged and urged along by the frosts and the rains, and the sun. It is hard even for the rocks to keep still m this world of motion, but it takes the hour-hand of many years to mark their progress. What in my child- hood we called *'the old pennyroyal rock," because /)ennyroyal always gTew beside it, has, in my time, crept out of the bank by the roadside three or four feet. When a rock, loosened from its ties in the hills, 42 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS once becomes a wanderer, it is restless ever after, and stirs in its sleep. Heat and cold expand and contract it, and make it creep down an incline. Hitch your rock to a sunbeam, and come back in a hundred years, and see how much it has moved. I know a great platform of rock weighing hundreds of tons, and large enough to build a house upon, that has slid down the hill from the ledges above, and that is pushing a roll of turf before it as a boat pushes a wave, but stand there till you are gray, and you will see no motion; return in a century, and you will doubtless find that the great rock raft has pro- gressed a few inches. What a sense of leisure such things give us hurrying mortals ! One of my favorite pastimes from boyhood up, when in my home country in the Catskills, has been to prowl about under the ledges of the dark gray shelving rocks that jut out from the sides of the hills and mountains, often forming a roof over one's head many feet in extent, and now and then shelter- ing a cool, sweet spring, and more often sheltering the exquisite moss-covered nest of the phoebe-bird. These ledges appealed to the wild and adventurous J in the boy. The primitive cave-dweller in me, which is barely skin-deep in most boys, found something congenial there; the air smelled good; it seemed fresher and more primitive than the outside air; it was the breath of the rocks and of the everlasting hills ; the home feeling which I had amid such scenes 43 J UNDER THE APPLE-TREES doubtless dated back to the time when our rude forebears were cave-dwellers in very earnest. The little niches and miniature recesses in the rocks at the side were so pretty and suggestive, and would have been so useful to a real troglodyte. Of a hot summer Simday one found the coolness of the heart of the hills in these rocky cells, and in winter one found the air tempered by warmth from the same source. To get down on one's hands and knees and creep through an opening in the rocks where bears and Indians have doubtless crept, or to kindle a fire where one fancies prehistoric fires have burned, or to eat black birch and wintergreens, or a lunch of wild strawberries and bread where Indians had probably often supped on roots or game — what more wel- come to a boy than that? As a man I love still to loiter about these open doors of the hills, playing the geologist and the naturalist, or half -playing them, and half-dreaming in the spirit of my youthful days. Phoebe-birds' nests may be found any day under these rocks, but on one of my recent visits to them I found an un- usual nest on the face of the rocks such I had never before seen. At the first glance, from its mossy exterior, I took it for a phcebe's nest, but close in- spection showed it to be a mouse's nest — the most delicate and artistic bit of mouse architecture I ever saw — a regular mouse palace; dome-shaped, cov- ered with long moss that grew where the water had 44 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS issued from the rocks a few yards away, and set upon a little shelf as if it had grown there. There was a hole on one side that led to the soft and warm interior, but when my forefinger called, the tiny aristocrat was not in. Whether he or she belonged to the tribe of the white-footed mouse, or to that of the jumping mouse, I could not tell. Was the de- vice of the mossy exterior learned from the phoebe.^ Of course not; both had been to the same great school of Dame Nature. Through the eyes of the geologist I see what the agents of erosion have done, how the tooth of time has eaten out the layers of the soft old red sand- stone, and left the harder layers of the superimposed Catskill rock to project unsupported many feet. I see these soft red layers running through under the mountains from valley to valley, level as a floor, and lending themselves to the formation of the beau- tiful waterfalls that are foimd here and there in the trout brooks of that region. At one such waterfall, a mile or more from the old schoolhouse, we used to go, when I was a boy, for our slate pencils, looking for the softer green streaks in the crumbling slaty sandstone, and trying them on our teeth to see whether or not they were likely to scratch our pre- cious slates. In imagination I follow this slaty layer through under the mountains and see where it is cut into by other waterfalls that I know, ten, twenty, thirty miles away. At those falls the water usually 45 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES makes a sheer leap the whole distance, — twenty, thirty, or fifty feet, as the case may be, — the harder rock at the top always holding out while the softer layers retreat beneath it, forming in this respect min- iature Niagaras. When near one of these falls I seldom miss the opportunity to climb the side of the gorge under the overhanging rock and inspect its under surface, and feel it with my hand. The ele- ments have here separated the leaves of the great stone book and one may read some of the history written there. When I pass my hand over the bot- tom side of the superincumbent rock, I know I am passing it over the contours, the little depressions and unevennesses of surface, of the mud of the old lake or inland sea bottom, upon which the material of the harder rock was laid down more than fifty milhons of years ago. There are here and there little protuberances, the size of peas and beans, which probably mark where Uttle gas bubbles were in the old mud bottom. One thing that arrests attention in such a place is the abruptness of the change from one species of rock to another, as marked and sudden as a change in a piece of masonry from brick to stone, or from stone to iron. The two meet but do not min- gle. Nature seems suddenly to have turned over a new leaf, and to have begun a new chapter in her great stone book. What happened.^ There is no evidence in this region of crustal disturbance since 46 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS the original plateau out of which the mountains were carved was first lifted up in Palaeozoic times, when the earth was in her teens. The indications are that on some quiet day the peaceful waters became suddenly charged with new material and the streams or rivers from some unknown land in the vicinity poured it into the old Devonian lakes where it hardened into rock. The changes indicated by these streaks of soft red sandstone suddenly alternating with the hard laminated Cat- skill formation, well up the mountain-sides, with a sharp dividing line between them, occurred many times during the Devonian Age. During one geo- logic day the earth-building forces brought one kind of material, and the next day material of quite another kind, and this alternation without any change of character seems to have kept up for millions of years. How curious, how interest- ing! Both from near-by land surfaces, and yet so different from each other! How difficult to form any mental picture of the condition of things in those remote geologic ages! It is as if one day it had snowed something like brick-dust to a depth of many feet, and the next day it had snowed a dark-gray dust of an entirely different character, and that this alternation of storms had kept up for ages. Long before we reach the tops of the mountains, or at about a thousand feet above the river valley, the red soft strata cease, 47 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES and the hard dark, cross-bedded gray rock con- tinues to the top. In the higher peaks of the southern Catskills an- other kind of rock begins to appear before the sum- mit is reached — a conglomerate. The storm of dark snow has turned to a storm of white hail. As you go up, you seem to be climbing into a shower of quartz pebbles. Presently you begin to see here and there a pebble embedded in the rocks; then, as you go on, you see more of them, and still more; it is hke the first sprinkle of rain that precedes the shower, till, long before you reach the summit, the regular downpour begins, the rocks become solid masses of pebbles embedded in a gray hard matrix; there are many hundreds of feet of them. On the top the soil is mainly sand and coarse gravel from the disinte- grated rock. The streams at the foot of the mountains abound in fragments of this pudding-stone or conglomerate, and in the hard, liberated quartz pebbles. These pebbles were rolled on an ancient sea-beach incalcu- lable ages ago, and now they are being rolled and worn again by the limpid waters of the Catskill trout-brooks. What varied fortune the whirligig of time brings to quartz pebbles as well as to men! Of course the Catskills were under water when this conglomerate was laid down upon them. The coal age was near at hand, and a conglomerate akin to this of the tops of the Catskills underlies the coal 48 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS measures. The Catskill plateau was lifted up before Carboniferous times began, so that there is no coal in this region. We should have to look overhead for it instead of underfoot. When the Catskill plateau rose above the waters, Pennsylvania and most of the continent to the west was under the sea, receiv- ing additional deposits, thousands of feet thick in many places, and in due time supporting a vegeta- tion that gave us our vast deposits of coal. The geologic tornado that brought this hailstorm of quartz pebbles, so marked in the conglomerate that caps the highest Catskills, seems to have been a general storm over a large part of the northern hemisphere, as this conglomerate underlies the coal measures, both in this country and in Europe. It must have occurred in late Devonian or early Car- boniferous times. On the top of Lookout Mountain, in Tennessee, I gathered a handful of pebbles that had weathered out of the Carboniferous sandstone that the ages have exposed on the summit. An earlier storm of quartz pebbles occurred in Silurian times, which formed the Oneida conglom- erate in central New York, and the Shawangunk range in southern New York. This latter range is a vast windrow made up of small pebbles varying in size from peas to large beans, cemented together by quartz sand. It is several hundred feet thick and runs southwest through Pennsylvania into Virginia, affording another proof of the abundance of quartz 49 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES rock in those early geologic ages. Dana thinks this conglomerate gives us an idea of the seashore work of that period. Only on a seashore could the crushed ma- terial have been sorted and distributed in this way. According to the published views of a natural philosopher on the Pacific Coast, this rain of rock material from the heavens is no myth. He believes that the earth in its early history was surrounded by a series of numerous concentric rings of floating cosmic matter, like the rings of Saturn, and that from time to time these rings collapsed and their material fell to earth helping to make up the vast series of stratified rocks. This theory certainly sim- plifies some of the problems of the geologist. My Catskills did not have to go down under the sea to get this coat of mail of quartz pebbles, or these al- ternate layers of red and gray sandstone, and the question of the abrupt ending and beginning of the different series is easily solved; as is also the larger question of where all the diverse material of our enormous system of stratified rock, reckoned by some geologists to be not less than twenty miles thick in North America, came from. In some parts of Scot- land, the old red sandstone, according to Geikie, is twenty thousand feet thick. This explanation of the California theorist gives us all this material, and gives it in the original packages. I wish I could believe it true — and be thankful that there are no more rings to collapse ! 50 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS How one would like to know the history of tliis conglomerate that caps the higher Catskills ! What stone-crusher reduced the quartz rock and sorted the fragments so evenly? The stone-crushing plant that turned out the material for most of the other rocks ground "exceeding fine," but in this instance they turned out a very coarse product, though a very uniform one. On the shores of some Palaeozoic sea have these pebbles been rolled and worn. Only upon one sea-beach have I seen pebbles of this size in lieu of sand, and that was upon Dover beach, on the coast of England. Instead of the hissing of the sands when the breakers come in, there rises the sound of the multitudinous rattling of these myr- iads of pebbles. Some old Devonian seashore has sent up a like sound where these Catskill pebbles were washed by the waves. The rock-crushing plants must have been very busy in the early geologic ages, and quartz rock must have been a drug in the market. We see no natural forces at work now reducing rocks to coarse gravel on any scale comparable to that which must have taken place in Silurian times when the Shaw- angunk rocks and the Oneida conglomerate were laid down. In any case, where were the quartz mountains from which they came, and where were the forces that ground them up? "From lands to the eastward," geologists think, but of such lands there are no traces now. 51 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES On the Pacific Coast of southern CaHfornia I saw a strip of country nearly a hundred miles long and from fifteen to twenty miles wide that was mainly made up of large quartz pebbles. The land was thrown into gentle hills and ridges which became higher as they approached the mountains. Near its inland margin I heard of a search for oil that had been made there, the drill going through nine hun- dred feet of pebbles and striking the granite rock — an unlikely place for oil. But think of the quartz mountains that must have been broken up and put through the mill of the Pacific to form all the vast banks of water- worn pebbles ! In South America Darwin saw hills and moun- tains of pure quartz. Not far from Buenos Ayres they formed tablelands or mesas, without cleavage or stratification. On the Falkland Islands he found the hills of quartz and the valleys filled with *' streams of stone" — huge fragments of quartz rock varying in size from a few feet in diameter "to ten or even more than twenty times as much." Darwin thinks that these streams of quartz stones may have had their origin in streams of white lava that had flowed from many parts of the mountains into the valleys, and then, when solidified, were rent by some enormous convulsion into myriads of fragments. Some such titanic force of nature must have been the stone-crusher that converted vast hills of quartz into the fragments that make up the 52 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS Shawangunk Mountains, the Oneida conglomerate, and the conglomerate on the tops of the Catskills. In our Northern States there are two classes of rocks: the place rocks, and the wanderers, or drift boulders. The boulders are in some ways the more interesting; they have a story to tell which the place rock has not; they have drifted about upon a sea of change, slow and unwilling voyagers from the North many tens of thousands of years ago; now they lie here in the fields and on the hills, shipwrecked mar- iners, in some cases hundreds of miles from home. But usually they have been plucked from the neigh- boring ledges or mountains, and shoved or trans- ported to where they now lie. In nearly all cases the sharp points and angles have been rubbed down, as with most travelers, and they lie about the fields like cattle ruminating upon the ground. **The shadow of a great rock in a weary land " is pretty sure to be the shadow of a drift boulder. The rock about which, and on which, we played as chil- dren was doubtless a drift boulder; the rocks be- neath which the woodchucks and the foxes burrow are drift boulders; the rock under the spreading maples where the picnickers eat their lunch is a drift boulder; the rock that makes the deep pool in the trout-stream of your boyhood is a drift boulder; the rocks which you helped your father pry up from the fields and haul to their place for the "rock bot- tom" of the stone wall, in the old days on the farm, 53 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES were all drift boulders. How sod-bound many of them were, and how the old oxen used to settle into their bows with rigid muscles in pulling them from their beds! If you had looked on their under sides you would have seen how smoothed and worn most of them were. They had been hauled across the land by oxen of another kind long before yours were heard of. The rocks that give the eyebrows to the faces of the hills are place rocks — the cropping-out of the original strata. The place rock gives the contour to the landscape ; it forms the ledges and clijff s ; it thrusts a huge rocky fist up through the turf here and there, or it exposes a broad smooth surface where you may see the grooves and scratches of the great ice sheet, tens of thousands of years old. The marks of the old ice-plane upon the rocks weather out very slowly. When they are covered with a few inches of soil they are as distinct as those we saw in Alaska under the edges of the retreating glaciers. One day, on the crest of a hill above my Lodge on the home farm in the Catskills, I used my spade to remove five or six inches of soil from the upper layer of rock in order to prove to some doubting friends that a page of history was written here that they had never suspected. I quickly disclosed the lines and the grooves, nearly as sharp as if made but yes- terday, and as straight as if drawn by a rule, running from northeast to southwest. Across the valley, a 54 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS third of a mile away, I uncovered other rock sur- faces on the same level, that showed a continuation of the same hues. The great jack-plane had been shoved across the valley and over the mountain- tops and had taken off rocky shavings of unknown thickness. The drift boulders are not found beyond the southern limit of the great ice-sheet — an irregular line starting a little south of New York and running westward to the Rocky Mountains, but in southern California I saw huge granite boulders that looked singularly like New England drift boulders. They cover the hill called Rubidoux at Riverside. I over- heard a tourist explaining to his companions how the old glaciers had brought them there, apparently ignorant of the fact that they were far beyond the southern limit of the old ice-sheet. It is quite evi- dent that they were harder masses that had weath- ered out of the place rock and had slowly tumbled about and crept down the hill under the expansive power of the sun's rays. But I saw one drift boulder in southern California that was a puzzle; it was a water-worn mass of metamorphic rock, nearly as high as my head, at the end of a valley, several miles in among the hills, with no kindred rocks or stones near it. It was evidentlj^ far from home, but what its means of transportation had been I could only conjecture. Amid the flock of gray and brown boulders that 55 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES dot my native fields, there is here and there a black sheep — a rough-coated rock much darker than the rest, which the farmers call firestone, mainly, I suppose, because it does not break or explode in the fire. It is a kind of conglomerate, probably what the geologists call breccia, made up of the con- solidated smaller fragments of older crushed rocks. The material of which it is composed is of unequal hardness, so that it weathers very rough, present- ing a surface deeply pitted and worm-eaten, which does not offer an inviting seat. These rocks wear a darker coat of moss and lichens than the others and seem like interlopers in the family of field boulders. But they really belong here; they have weathered out of the place strata. Here and there one may find their dark worm-eaten fronts in the outcropping ledges. They were probably formed of the coarser material — a miscellaneous assortment of small thin water-worn fragments of rocks and mud and coarse sand — that accumulated about the mouths of the streams and rivers which flowed into the old Devonian lakes and seas. They are not made up of thin sheets like the other rocks, and seem as if made at a single cast. They are as rough-coated as alli- gators, and do not, to me, look as friendly as their brother rocks. They stand the fire better than other stone. The huge stone arch in my father's sugar bush, in which the great iron kettles were hung, was largely built of these stones. I think the early set- 56 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS tiers used them to line the open fireplaces in their stone chimneys. Along the Hudson they used slate, which is also nearly fireproof. I know a huge iron-stone rock lying at the foot of a hill, from beneath which issues one of the coldest and sweetest springs in the neighborhood. How the haymakers love to go there to drink, and the grazing cattle also ! Of course, the relation of the rock to the spring is accidental. The rocks help make the his- tory of the fields, especially the natural history. The woodchucks burrow beneath them, and trees and plants take root beside them. The delightful pools they often form in a trout-stream every angler remembers. Their immobility makes the mobile water dissolve and excavate the soil around and be- neath them, and afford lairs for the big trout. I know of a large one that stood on the edge of the road where it snubbed the wagon-wheels as they came along. For generations it had defied the road- menders, till one June day a farmer of more pluck and endurance than usual tackled it with a heavy crowbar, and, after a prolonged effort, split off a huge slab from its top, making it, as the path-master said, "haul in its horns." When a boy I saw my elder brother drill a hole in one with a churn drill, and with a charge of powder blast it into four pieces, which were used in the foundation of a wall by the roadside. As I pass along that road now, after sixty- five years, I see the square faces of that rock with a 57 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES section of the drili-hole on the corner of each, and think of my brother. It was before the time of fuses, and I remember he primed the blast by the spindle method, and then laid a train of powder with a frag- ment of paper at the end of it. A lighted match was touched to the paper, and then we ran to a safe dis- tance as fast as our legs could carry us. How geologic time looks out from the ledges and walls of gray rocks unmindful of us human ephem- era that pass ! It has seen the mountains decay and the hills grow old. The huge drift boulders rest on the margin of meadows and fields, or stand sentry to the woods, and though races and kingdoms pass, scarcely the change of a wrinkle disturbs their calm stone faces. Yet time gets the better of them also. The frowning ledge melts as inevitably as a snow- bank. Geologic time is the most potent of the gods of change. He wields an invisible hammer beside which the hammer of Thor is a child's toy. Its slow, silent blows break in through granite rocks as big as a house. The traveler sees them along the road when he enters Yosemite; he may see them in New Eng- land; he may see them on Lake Mohonk, or on the Shawangunk Mountains in New York — sheer cleavage of rock-masses from fifty to one hundred feet through — a clean break while the huge frag- ment of the mountain is lying where it fell. It is as if the sunbeams or starbeams did it, as if the 58 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS snows of winter and the dews of summer had the force of dynamite. When I get especially rock -hungry, and the trog- lodyte in me gets restless, as he is apt to in all of us, I take a walk to the ledges on Pine Hill, or on Hem- lock Ridge, and prowl about their caverns and loiter under their overhanging strata, putting my hand in the little niches and pockets where I kept my trinkets and choice possessions when I was a troglodyte, inspecting the phoebe's mossy nest on a little shelf where the four-footed beasts cannot reach it, cleaning out the spring that shows like a small eye under the rocky eyebrow, creeping through what we boys called the "Indian oven." When you want to read a stirring and heroic chapter in the great rock volume of the earth, the very Iliad or Odyssey of the rocks, go to the Grand Canon of the Colorado, or to Yosemite. As you gaze, a sentence from Job may come to your mind as it did to a friend of mine — "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" All through the Southwest the great book of geo- logic Revelation lies open to the traveler in an as- tonishing manner. Its massive but torn and crum- pled leaves of limestone, sandstone, and basalt lie spread out before him all through Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, and he may read snatches of the long geologic record from the flying train. I myself need not go so far to see what time can 59 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES do with the rocks. On the Shawangunk range of mountains in my own State are scenes that suggest a rocky Apocalypse. It is as if the trumpet of the last day had sounded here in some past geologic time. The vast rock-strata of coarse conglomerate, hundreds of feet thick, has trembled and separated into huge blocks, often showing a straight, smooth cleavage like the side of a cathedral. As a matter of fact, I suppose there was no voice of the thunder or of earthquake that wrought this ruin, but the still small voice of heat and cold and rain and snow. There is no wild turmoil or look of decrepitude, but a look of repose and tranquillity. The enormous four-square fragments of the mountain stand a few feet apart, as if carefully quarried for a tower to reach the skies. In classic simplicity and strength, in harmony and majesty of outline, in dignity and se- renity of aspect, I do not know their equal. They are truly Greek in their composure and restraint — impressive, like a tragedy of ^Eschylus, in their naked grandeur. No confusion of tumbled and piled fragments, no sublimity of wreckage and disorder, but the beauty of simplicity, the impressiveness of power in repose. What a diverse family is this of the stratified rocks ! Never did the members of the human family — Caucasian, Negro, Jew, Japanese, Indian, Es- kimo, Mongohan — differ more from one another than do the successive geological formations. White 60 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS and black, hard and soft, coarse and fine, red and gray, yet all in the same line of descent — all dating back to the same old Adam rock of the Azoic period. Time and circumstance, conditions of water and air, of sea and land, seem to have made the difference. As the races of men were modified and stamped by their environment, so the diverse family of rocks reflects the influence of both local and general con- ditions. When analyzed, their constituents do not differ so much. As in the different races of men we find the same old flesh and blood and bones, so in the rocks w^e find the same quartz sand and compounds of lime and iron and potash and magnesia and feld- spar, yet in quantity and character what a world of difference! How differently they are bedded, how differently they weather, how differently they sub- mit to the hammer and chisel of the mason and the stonecutter! Some rocks seem feminine, smooth, fine-grained, fragile, the product of deep, still water; others are more masculine, coarse, tough, the prod- uct of waters more or less turbid or shallow. The purity of the strain of the different breeds of rocks is remarkable; about as little crossing or mingling among the different systems as there is among the different species of animals: considering the blind warring and chaos of the elements out of which they came, one can but wonder at the homo- geneity of the different kinds. They are usually as uniform as if their production had been carefully 61 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES watched over by some expert in the business, — which is, indeed, the case. This expert is water. Was there ever such a sorter and sifter? See the vast clay-banks, as uniform in quahty and texture as a snow-bank, slowly built up in the privacy of deep, still rivers or lakes during hundreds or thousands of years, implying a kind of secrecy and seclusion of nature. Mountains of granite have been ground down or disintegrated, and the clay washed out and carried in suspension by the currents, till it was impounded in some lake or basin, and then slowly dropped. The great clay-banks and sand-banks of the Hudson River Valley doubtless date from the primary rocks of the Adirondack region. Much of the quartz sand is still in the soil of that region, and much of it is piled up along the river-banks, but most of the clay has gone downstream and been finally deposited in the great river terraces that are now being uncovered and worked by the brickmak- ers. The sand and the clay rarely get mixed; the great hydraulic machine turns out a pretty pure pro- duct. The occasional mingling of sand and gravel shows that at times the workmen nodded, but the wonder is that, on the whole, the two should be so thoroughly separated, and so carefully deposited, each by itself. Flowing water drops its coarser ma- terial first, the sand next, and the mud and silt last. Hence the coarser-grained rocks and conglom- erates are built up in shallow water near shore, the 62 THE FRIENDLY ROCKS sandstones in deeper water, and the slates and argil- laceous rocks in deeper still. The limestone rocks, which are of animal origin, also imply deej), calm seas during periods that embrace hundreds and thou- sands of centuries. It is, then, the long ages of peace and tranquillity in the processes of the earth-build- ing forces that have contributed to the homogeneity of the different systems of secondary rocks. What peace must have brooded over that great inland sea when those vast beds of Indiana limestone and sand- stone were being laid down ! A depth of thousands of feet of each without a flaw. Vast stretches of Cam- brian and Silurian and Devonian time were appar- ently as free from violent movements and warrings of the elements as in our own day. Occasionally in a system of rocks one may see a change of color over a considerable area, as from gray or brown to red, with small fragments of older and redder rocks embedded in them. I fancy such streaks were caused by a sudden flood or freshet that carried new material worn from a distant land-sur- face into the sea or into the impounded waters. It would seem to require as distinctly an evolu- tionary process to derive our sedimentary rocks from the original igneous rocks as to derive the vertebrate from the invertebrate, or the mammal from the reptile. Of course, it could not be done by a mechanical process alone. It has been largely a chemical process and, no doubt, to a certain extent, 63 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES a vital process also. The making of a loaf of bread is, up to a certain point, a mechanical process; then higher and finer processes set in. And all the cake and pastry and loaves in the bakeshop do not differ from the original bin of wheat any more than the great family of secondary rocks differs from the un- milled harvest of the earth's original crust. And the increase in bulk seems to have been quite as great as that which the bin of wheat undergoes in passing from the kernel to the loaf or the roll. The leaven that went to the making of our shale and sandstone loaves seems to have been contributed by the sea when the batch was mixed and baked. Little doubt that the bulk of the material of the sedimentary rocks came through the process of erosion and depo- sition from the original igneous rocks, but how has it expanded and augmented during the process ! It seems to have swelled almost as the inorganic swells in passing into the organic. Ill THE IVIASTER INSTINCT FROM the naturalist's point of view, the sole purpose of all forms of life in this world, man included, is to beget more life, and secure the per- petuity of the species. The master instinct in every living creature is to increase and multiply and fill the w^orld with its progeny. Our dream that every living thing was made to serve some namable pur- pose apart from itself, or was designed in some way to serve man, is a notion that has survived from the childhood of the race. Many forms, in both the animal and the vegetable worlds, are the enemies of man and the enemies of one another. Other forms play into one another's hands, but only to help forward the scheme of prop- agation of one or both sides, as when vines and trees incase their seeds in tempting fruit-pulps which the animals eat and thus drop the undigested germs far and near. All our fruits, from the apple down to the wild berries, are plotting to get their seeds scattered and planted, and they offer edible morsels as a wage to any creature that will perform this service. In many cases the wage is a very small one, as with the red cedar, the hardback {Celtis), the sumac, the 65 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES poison-ivy, and the like; but it serves the purpose; the hungry birds are quick to lend a hand. If the plants and vines and trees had minds and could answer our question as to what is passing in them, they would say: "We are thinking how best to per- petuate our species — how to attract the insects to visit the flowers, and thus secure a hardier race by cross-fertilization ; how to tempt the birds and four- footed creatures to come and sow our seeds; how to protect these seeds and nuts till they are ripe and ready to pass along the precious heritage of life; hence some of us trust to the winds and the waters to secure fertilization, in which cases we do not need to develop bright or showy flowers, but a super- abundance of pollen; for sowing our seeds, some of us devise wings and balloons; others devise hooks and hands that seize upon passing animals; others make use of the tension of springs and other mechanical devices. We heavy-nut-bearing trees enter into partnership with squirrels and crows and jays; they carry our nuts to distant woods and fields; some they carelessly drop by the way, some they hide under the leaves or in the grass, and we find our account in each. They unwittingly plant more oaks and chestnuts and hickory-trees." Nearly all the animal orders below man are equally obsessed with the idea of perpetuating their species; for this they live, for this they die. It is a kind of madness; it leads to all kinds of excesses and 66 THE MASTER INSTINCT extravagances: bizarre colors and ornaments, gro- tesque forms and weapons, fantastic rites and cere- monies. The sexual instinct emboldens the timid, and spurs the sluggard; it sharpens the senses, it quickens the wits, it makes even the frogs and toads musical, and gives new life to the turtle. In fact, the drama of all life revolves around the breeding-in- stinct. It is this that fills the world with music, color, perfume. The nuptials of the vegetable world are celebrated with lovely forms, brilliant hues, and sweet incense. With the birds they are attended by joyous songs, gay plumes, dances and festive re- unions, and striking, if at times grotesque, forms. With the insects, music and gay colors mark the day; with the human race, how much of our song and art and pursuit of beauty has grown out of the instinct to please and win the opposite sex! Without this incentive — the mating instinct, the love of chil- dren, and of home and fireside — could we ever have attained to our present civilization? What is the meaning of the spring and summer chorus of bird-songs — the ecstasy of larks and finches, the madness of nightingales, the melody of thrushes, the intoxication of bobolinks and mocking- birds — the jewels in the plumage, the fantastic in behavior — but sexuality, the innate desire for off- spring? How Nature surrounds this passion with the gay, the festive, the hilarious! how she aids it with color and form! how she lavishes upon it all her 67 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES arts to charm and persuade and entice! Her crea- tures forget their staid and quiet ways; there is a sound of music and gayety on the one hand, and a noise of strife and battle on the other. The stag bugles and tosses his horns, the bull bellows and tears and paws the earth, the grouse drums and booms, the woodpecker beats a spring reveille on a dry limb, the insects fiddle and shuflBe and snap their wings — indeed, nearly all forms of life assume new activity and intensity. It is the sex principle that gives the beard to the man, the antlers to the stag, the mane to the lion, the spurs and comb to the cock, and the strange fashions and coloration to the male birds. Repro- duction is the one thing Nature has most at heart and is intent on securing at all hazards — at the hazard of pain, hunger, strife, and seK-destruction. Just to keep up the game of life, to keep the measure full to overflowing — has Nature any other purpose than this? Think of the swarms of the liv- ing that come and go, especially in the insect world, and leave no trace behind ! Yes, and at times, in the higher-animal world. Think of the hordes of lem- mings that at intervals appear in northern Europe, and move through the land devastating the farm- ers* crops, till they reach the sea, into which they plunge and are drowned. Ships are said to sail at times through miles of lemmings, swimming they know not whither. 68 THE MASTER INSTINCT Behold the birds building their nests in spring; how absorbed, how persistent they are! How al- most impossible it is to defeat or discourage them! Any one who has tried to prevent English sparrows from breeding on his premises soon learns what a difficult task he has undertaken. Equally, any one who charges himself to see to it that no burdocks or red-root, or other troublesome weeds, mature their seeds on his farm or about his grounds, finds out what enterprise and hardihood he is trying to thwart. Cut the plebeian burdock down within a few inches of the ground and keep it cut down, shorn of all its big leaves, and yet in August or September, without the support of any foliage, it will push out and de- velop burs in the axils of its old leaves. I have seen masses of burs thus form about the stem half as large as one's fist. The plant was making a last and supreme effort to perpetuate itself. Most garden weeds behave in the same way. As the summer nears its end, and their earlier efforts to form seeds have been thwarted, they seem to become alarmed, and to make a last heroic effort, probably drawing upon the last grain of material stored in the root and stalk to develop the precious germ. Fruit-trees, starved or in an unhealthy condition, seem to be seized with the same alarm and overload themselves with small, inferior fruit. Is it not no- torious that men and women suffering from certain slow, wasting diseases are exceptionally prolific.'^ On 69 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES the other hand, plants and animals overfed or exceptionally prosperous seem to forget the primal command. The birds, I repeat, are not easily discouraged. In April of the past year a pair of phoebe-birds built their exquisite mossy nest in a niche in the rocks at the entrance to my natural cellar at Slabsides. It was a nest in the best style of the phoebe's art, built unhurriedly, as all first nests of the season usually are. Like the plant, the bird does not hurry till the season gets late. One snow-white egg was laid, when, on a visit to me of some schoolboys, the nest acci- dentally came to grief; it was detached from the rock upon which the bird had so carefully masoned it. I replaced the nest, but its foundations had been loosened, and the winds dislodged it. The phoebes then began a nest on a timber under the little shed. One day I found this dislodged and its material pulled apart on the ground beneath. Who or what Vandal or Hun of the woods did it, whether a red squirrel or an owl or other violator of its neighbor's rights, I know not. But the phoebes did not lose heart. When I discovered the second calamity that had befallen them, they were already at work building the third nest, and — what was very unusual — were using the material of the nest just destroyed. Bit by bit the mother bird was gathering it up and recon- structing her "procreant cradle." I hoped a third disaster would not befall the pair, and it did not, 70 THE MASTER INSTINCT but if it had, not later than June, they would prob- ably have built still another nest. The phoebes usu- ally rear two broods in a season when all goes well with them. It is to build the nest and rear the young that they have made the long and hazardous jour- ney from our Southland, or even from Central America, and it is this that will cause them to make it every spring as long as they live. It is this that impels myriads of other small birds and water-fowl to make the same trip from the Far South, braving storms and winds and other perils by land and sea. To beget progeny that will in time reproduce them- selves is the unconscious and unquenchable motive that actuates them all. This same motive impels the golden plover to make its marvelous flight from the plains of Patagonia to the Arctic Circle in Alaska, a distance of nearly half the circumference of the globe, crossing oceans without a rest. It sends the European migrants across the Mediterranean from Africa to France, many of them so fatigued on reaching land that they fall an easy prey to man and beast. It is the impelling force of this motive or instinct that sends the fish up the streams and rivers in the spring, making the waters alive with denizens from the sea, impelling the salmon to leap falls, or, failing to scale them, to keep up the effort till they die from exhaustion. The breeding-instinct is the ruler of life. It asks no questions, it requires no guarantee, it 71 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES pauses at no obstacles. It sends races of men and animals to seek new lands; it fills nations with the desire for expansion, kindles in them the earth- hunger, and is often the chief factor in devastating wars. In man the sexual passion is stronger than all others; it rules his life, it has made his history. Consciously or unconsciously, he hves for his pos- terity. He wages wars to plant colonies or to con- quer territory from his enemies, in which his race may expand and increase. His eye is ever on the future; he is looking out for his children and his chil- dren's children. Nine tenths of the life of woman centres around the idea of making herself attractive to the opposite sex. This is the meaning of all the modes and fashions — of the monstrous hats, the hobble-skirts, the preposterous shoes, the paint, the jewelry, the feathers, the frippery and the furbelows, the immodest exposures, the exaggerations and ac- centuations, and all the bewildering arts and devices by which woman seeks to enhance her feminine charms. The social dances, old and new, though the par- ticipants may be all unconscious of it, are as literally sexual, and have as direct reference to the old com- mand to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, as do the dances and aerial evolutions of the birds and the wild fowl. Fine clothes, like fine feathers, all point in the same direction. Male pride ?2 THE IVIASTER INSTINCT and female pride do not differ in their genesis or natural history from the pride displayed in barn- yards and in the fields and woods — it is all the out- come of the old command to increase and multiply — it is the masterful desire of one sex to make it- self attractive to the opposite. A great number of insect forms die as soon as they have fulfilled the Biblical injunction. This is true of all the ephemera, and at least one form of verte- brates, the lampreys; these perish as soon as they have spawned. The cockchafer dies in a month after completing its metamorphosis. The seventeen-year locusts and the grasshoppers live but a short time after they have deposited their eggs. Nature has no further use for them. Many of the moths deposit their eggs within twenty-four hours after they escape from the chrysalis-case, and then very soon die. Many kinds of flies live only four or five hours — just long enough to lay their eggs. As soon as a drone of the hive-bee has fertilized the queen, the swarm has no further use for the whole tribe of drones and they are mercilessly killed or expelled from the hive. Nature displays the same superabundance of the fertilizing principle in such cases that she does in the trees and plants that cast their pollen upon the wind. This is to offset the element of chance. The services of only one drone is required, but the swarm develoi)s scores of them to make sure that at least one male 73 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES may meet the queen while she is coursing at random on her nuptial flight through the upper air. Speaking of the queen of the hive-bee reminds me how literally the life of the hive revolves around her. The queen's moral support of the swarm, so to speak, is vital. If any accident befall her, in the case of a new swarm before it has established itseK, the whole mass of worker bees instantly becomes de- moralized; the swarm loses heart, and gradually perishes without making any attempt to start a new colony. The members seem to know instinctively that there can be no increase, and that their own lives are worthless. I have seen the whole swarm, when it was sud- denly discovered that the queen was missing, show the greatest agitation, every individual insect rush- ing about with quivering body and wings, in a panic of alarm. What one bee knew and felt, apparently the whole swarm knew and felt simultaneously. It is worthy of note that though it costs the drone his life to fertilize the queen, dozens of them course through the air during the period that the mating- flight of the queen is due to take place, ready to sac- rifice themselves in performing this duty. Alike with drone, worker, queen, the paramount instinct is the perpetuity of the race. So careless of the male of most species is Nature, so solicitous for the well-being of the female! The function of the male is a brief one, that of the female 74 THE MASTER INSTINCT a long and hazardous one. Among birds of prej^ the female is the larger, the bolder, and the more active. The parental instinct seems much stronger in her than in the male. The breeding-instinct has developed among the birds, especially among the ground-builders, one of the most surprising traits or practices to be found in all animate nature. I refer to the tricks and the make-believe that birds will resort to in order to decoy one away from their nests or their young — feigning lameness, paralysis, suffocation, anything to fix the attention of the intruder upon the mother and lure him away from her precious eggs or young. I can recall nothing else so extraordinary in the whole range of animal instinct. The bird suddenly becomes a consummate actor and plays a role she probably never played before, and plays it in the best style of the art. Her behavior looks like the outcome of a sudden process of reasoning. "This creature," it seems to say, "wants my brood, but I will make him want me, and forget the brood. To do so, I have only to throw myself in his way and offer him an easy victim. By my feigned disable- ment I can draw him on and on, while my young hide, or the clue to my nest is lost." Last spring in a low, wooded bottom in Georgia, my friend and I started a woodcock from her nest, in which were three eggs. The bird flew a few yards, at a height of ten feet or more, and then suddenly 75 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES doubled up and fell fluttering to the ground, pre- cisely as if she had been shot. It was a surprising performance. It is highly probable that it was the first time she ever did the trick, but she did it to per- fection. Had we followed her, doubtless she would have given us another exhibition of her art of make- believe. Strange to say, after all her concern for the safety of her eggs, the bird deserted her nest. My friend suggested that it was because we touched one of her eggs; but, as birds have little or no powers of smell, this reason seems inadequate. Rather am I inclined to believe that some accident befell the bird. Equally surprising is it to see this stupid-looking mud-prober transformed into an ecstatic song-bird imder the influence of the mating-instinct. Whoever has witnessed its hurried spiral flight in the March and April twilights, and heard its curious smacking, gurgling notes rain down out of the obscurity of a couple of hundred feet of air, has been present at one of the surprising incidents in the life of this bird. Love not only makes the songless woodcock vocal; it puts a new song into the throats of many of our birds. The oven-bird, the meadowlark, the purple finch, the goldfinch, and certain of the sparrows and warblers are keyed up to the point where the flight- song, or song of ecstasy, is the natural expression of the bird soul. The jays and crows also become musical, and the woodpeckers drum in varying keys 76 THE MASTER INSTINCT on the resonant limbs. This marked contrast be- tween their ordinary tones and their love-songs reminds one of Browning's lines : — "God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with. One to show a woman when he loves her!" In the vegetable world the males of dioecious plants perish as soon as the period of bloom of the females, or pistillate plants, has passed. Our spring plant called mouse-ear and everlasting {Anten- naria) is a familiar example. The two sexes are in separate groups, and show a marked difference in their appearance. The pistillate plants have a fem- inine look, they are more slender and graceful, and show more color; they differ in looks from the males as much as the queen bees differ from the drones. The males are short, stubby, freckled, and after they have shed their pollen they wither and perish, while the females continue to develop and grow in grace and beauty till their seeds are matured. The same is true with all shrubs and trees — hazels, chestnuts, oaks, beeches — which develop their pollen in catkins or aments; as soon as the pollen is shed upon the inconspicuous flowers the catkins wither and fall. There is no case of love and mating among the plants more pleasing to me than that of our Indian corn. When I see the male blossom push its panicle 77 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES up out of the top of the stalk, bold, rigid, conspicu- ous, rustic-looking, — *' topping out," as the farm- ers say, — and then, following down the stalk with my eye, see among the leaves the female blossom timidly putting out her delicate silk fringe, like a lock of greenish-golden hair, — one tender thread for each kernel of corn that is to be, — and awaiting the caresses through the agency of the wind of her suitor above, I am witnessing one of the most pleasing illustrations of Nature's great law that is to be seen in our fields and gardens. In the case of no other tree in our Northern for- ests does the male principle assert itself so conspicu- ously as in the chestnut — a tree that now, alas! seems in danger of extinction from some obscure fungus disease attacking its inner bark. In early summer its masses of creamy- white staminate flow- ers make the top of the woods gay, while its small, modest, greenish female flowers are seen only by him who closely searches for them. But the gala day of the males is brief, while the obscure mother-bloom goes forward and develops her polished triple nuts of autumn. The odors of the blooming corn and blooming chestnut in some way suggest fruition and the sex passion. In the hazel, masculine and feminine contrast in the same way as in the chestnut. The long, showy, pollen-yielding tassels are seen from afar, but the 78 THE MASTER INSTINCT minute crimson stars of the nut-producing flowers you will not see without close inspection. Thus do sex characteristics run throughout organic nature. Whitman speaks of the sexuality of the earth, hav- ing in mind, no doubt, its fertility and the passive feminine relation it sustains to the orbs above. Truly the breeding-instinct, with the whole train of subsidiary instincts that go with it, is close to Nature's heart, closer than the instinct of self- preservation. Life is conserved only that it may produce more life. In the insect world, certain forms utterly exhaust themselves in the art of reproduc- tion; others in the act of providing housing and food for their unborn offspring. The May-fly develops into winged liberty, experiences the love-festival, deposits its eggs, when both sexes die, all within the compass of a few hours. Of some species of thread- worms it is said that "the young live at the expense of the mother till she is reduced to a mere husk." Fabre tells us of a species of dung-beetle the male of which scours the fields for food for the young, which he carries home and, with his trident, reduces to a powder, till, after the labor of months, without nourishment himself, he becomes utterly exhausted and dies. In eating up her lover after he has served her pur- pose, the female spider seems to be carrying domes- tic economy to unwarranted lengths. Yet genera- tion after generation of male spiders court the 79 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES female, though often with obvious signs of hesitancy and trepidation. Love overcomes the lover's fear of the ferocious jaws of his mistress. The same is true of the praying-mantis and the scorpion, as portrayed by the inimitable Fabre. After hours or days of love and nuptial bliss, the female turns and slays her lover, and makes a meal off him. The human, or, rather, inhuman, Bluebeard is matched on the other side of the house. Love and martyrdom go hand in hand with honey-bees, spiders, and scor- pions. Eating up your mate is certainly a simple and primitive way out of matrimonial difficulties. Is it not probable that in all such cases the female obtains some nutritive element, maybe in minute quantities, from the body of the male that is neces- sary for the complete development of her young? The purpose of Nature must be served in some way in such a tragedy, as it is when certain species eat the placenta and when the toad devours his cast-off skin. Weismann has suggested that the bodies of an- imals are but appendages to the immortal chain of sex cells — they are only the vessels in which the precious germs are nourished and conveyed, the body bearing the relation to them of host to para- site. So solicitous is Nature for the well-being of the offspring that she will rob the mother's body, if insufficiently nourished, to feed the baby she is car- 80 THE MASTER INSTINCT rying in her womb. If the laying hen is not properly suppKed with hme material, Nature will draw it from the bones of the hen herself to build the shell of the egg. The offspring is first always, and has the right of way over all else. In short, the struggle to live in the whole organic world resolves itself into the struggle to have and to rear offspring. This is * the one divine event Toward which the whole creation moves.'' IV DAME NATURE AND HER CHILDREN WHEN I saw a chipmunk going by my door, busily storing up his winter supphes in his den in the bank a few yards below, I thought how curious it is that these wild creatures, thrown en- tirely upon their own resources in the great merci- less world of wild nature, with no one to care for them or advise them, should get on so well, and apparently have such a good time of it. I was, of course, looking at the subject from the human point of view; and I could not help thinking how many appliances, how much science, how much coopera- tion, and what laws and government, and the like we all require in order to live out our lives as suc- cessfully as the wild creatures do. In summer and winter, in storm and cold, in all seasons and in all places, by night as by day, with- out organization, or power of reason, or supervision, or leaders, or defenders, or government, or schools, or churches, there they go, well and happy, equal to all, or nearly all, emergencies, and making fewer mistakes than we human beings do. Think of our elaborate helps and conveniences ; of our machinery for taking us abroad, or for preserving us at home; 82 DAME NATURE AND HER CHILDREN of our laid-up stores; and then think how un- equipped are the wild creatures in comparison. Look at the snow buntings in w^inter, so trium- phant over storm and cold, or the tiny chickadees in the frozen w^inter woods. They know where to look for their food, what to do by day, and where to go by night. They know their enemies; they know where and how to build their nests, and how to rear their young; they know all they have to know in order to live their lives. When I see a chickadee or a kinglet come to the bit of suet that I put out on the trunk of the old maple in front of my window in December, I say, "See that infant! How can he face all alone the season of scarcity and cold.^^ '* But he does not need coaching from me; he avails himself of my suet, but he would get on without it. He is wise in his own economies. I doubt that our winter birds ever freeze or starve, unless in extraordinary circum- stances. When I see a band of robins in late October dis- porting in my vineyards, filled with holiday cheer and hilarity, calling, singing, squealing, pursuing one another like children in some sort of game, apparently not at all disturbed by the approach of the inclement season and the failure of their food- supplies, I almost envy them their felicity. They are wise without reason, happy without forethought, secure without rulers or safeguards of any sort. 83 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES When a Cooper's hawk makes a dash among them, their mirth turns to terror, but they are usually equal to the emergency, and by darting through the vines they manage to escape him. It is said that when a flock of mallards, or of black ducks, while feeding upon the water, see an eagle, or a certain large hawk coming, they take to wing, knowing that they can outdistance their enemy, but that when they see a duck hawk coming, they hug the water the closer, knowing well that their safety is not in flight, but in diving beneath the surface. What ages upon ages of schooling in the fierce struggle for existence it must have taken the wild creatures to get their wisdom into their very blood and bones ! Yet we cannot think of them as existing without it; we cannot go back in thought to the time when they did not have it; to be without it would be to cease to exist. What, then, is its genesis.'^ We cannot think of man as existing without his reason, his tools, his artificial aids of one kind and another; yet there was a time when he did exist without them, just as the monkeys and anthropoid apes exist with- out them. Sufficient for the day is the wisdom there- of. Every stage and phase of animal life is wise in those things necessary for its continuance, but whether that wisdom comes from experience or in- heritance, or is one phase of the wisdom that per- vades the whole economy of nature, — that makes the heart beat and the eye see, and that adapts 84 DAME NATURE AND HER CHILDREN every organism to its environment, — who can tell? The plants are all wise in their own way; they have to be, or cease to exist. The cultivated ones cannot shift for themselves like the weeds and wild growths; they have been too long dependent upon the care and culture of man for that; thrown upon their own resources, they perish, or else revert to the habits of their wild ancestors, as the animals do. I suppose it is impossible for us to conceive of the discipline, the struggle, the schooling, the selection, that all species of animals and plants have gone through in the course of biologic time, and that has given them the hardiness, the hold upon life, that they now possess. The strongest, the cleverest, the fittest have always had the best chance to survive. Natural competition has constantly weeded out the feeble, and still does so; but it does not do it so tlior- oughly among men as among mice, because mice have no medicine, no surgery, no hospitals, no altruism. Different species of animals and plants differ greatly in their power to get on in the world. The ruffed grouse, for example, has a much deeper hold upon life than his cousin the quail, mainly because he is a more miscellaneous feeder. In deep snows the quail is in danger of perishing for want of food, but the grouse takes to the tree-tops and subsists 85 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES upon the buds of the birch, the apple, and other trees. The flicker will thrive where other woodpeckers would starve, because he is a ground-pecker as well, and lives upon ants and other ground in- sects. In the struggle for existence the red squirrel is more than a match for his big brother, the gray, because he is more energetic, and has a wider range of diet. When hard put, he will come to your or- chard and garden and chip up the unripe apples and pears for the immature seeds in them; he will cut out the germ from the green elm-flakes; he will rob birds' nests of eggs and of young; he will find or cut his way into your house and barn, and will take toll of your crops in a way that the gray squirrel will not do; on the other hand, his lesser brother the chip- munk will survive him, because he regularly lays up winter stores in his den in the ground, and is snug and warm with a full larder, while the red squirrel is picking up a precarious subsistence in the cold, snow-choked woods. The bear lasts after the wolf is gone, because he is a miscellaneous feeder, and is rarely reduced to extremities. For the same reason the hawk starves where the crow thrives. If the crow cannot get flesh, he will put up with fruit, and grain, and nuts. The flycatchers among our birds are far less nu- merous than the fruit- and seed-eaters, and the her- 86 DAME NATURE AND HER CHILDREN bivorous and graminivorous mammals greatly exceed in numbers the flesh-eaters; they can get their food more easily, for they do not have to use speed, wit, strength, or prowess in order to obtain it. How rare are the weasels, compared with their prey of rats and mice and birds and squirrels and rabbits! Yet the weasels have goodly families each season. If man had not been a miscellaneous feeder, could he have overspread the earth as he has done.? If an animal can eat only fish, it must keep near the water; if it can eat only nuts, it must keep near the woods; if it subsists upon mosquitoes, it must live near the marshes; if grass is its only diet, its range is limited to certain zones and certain seasons. The farmer finds it much more difficult to check or exterminate certain plants or weeds than others. The common milkweed and the Canada thistle defy his plough because the parent roots are beyond its reach; they creep horizontally through the soil, and send up their shoots at short intervals. To exter- minate the plants, you must remove the parent roots. Looked at in the light of the doctrine of natural selection, it would seem as if these two plants had learned through experience to avoid the plough by diving deeper into the soil and establish- ing permanent parent roots there. This method or habit baffles the plough completely. What other enemy or circumstance could have so driven them into the ground? In a region un visited by the 87 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES plough, would they not succeed just as well nearer the surface, or with only a tap-root like most other plants? This habit is doubtless much older than the plough, and it is very doubtful if the explanation can be found in the theory of natural selection. Quack-grass is baffling for the same reason; there is a family root that travels horizontally under the soil and sends up shoots all along its course; dig out a yard of it, and yet if you have left an inch, the plant renews itself. The chickweed is a wonderfully en- terprising plant. It is one of the very first to start in business in the spring; it begins to bloom in March or April; it matures its seeds rapidly, and keeps on blooming and seeding nearly all summer, so that it outwits the most industrious hoe or plough that I have yet seen. Unless you catch it in the first bloom- ing, it gets ahead of you. The field veronica is an innocent weed, but its ability to get on in life is remarkable. It stole into our vineyards like a thief in the night; where it came from I have no knowledge; for twenty years there was no vestige of it; then suddenly it appeared, and rapidly overspread the surface of the ground. It blooms in April, and by the time the plough starts, a sheet of delicate blue hovers over all the vineyard- slopes. It is a low plant, only an inch or two high, and the plough wipes it out completely; but the next spring there it is again, thicker than ever, painting the ground in the most delicate cerulean tints; it 88 DAME NATURE AND HER CHILDREN matures some of its seeds each spring before the plough starts, and so is secure. Sooner or later animals and plants learn to play the game of life well; if they fail to do so, they ulti- mately become extinct. OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES LAST winter and early spring in central Georgia I had great pleasure in the little glimpses of wild life, mostly bird-life, that I got from the win- dows of the cabin study which my friend built for me in one corner of an old unused building situated in a secluded place near a bushy spring run and a grove of pine- and oak-trees. Many of our more northern birds — such as song sparrows, bluebirds, juncoes, and white-throats — winter in Georgia and impart a sort of spring air to the more secluded places at all times. The mockingbird, the brown thrasher, the cardinal, the meadowlark, the crested titmouse, the Carolina wren, the blue jay, the downy woodpecker, and a few others are there the year round. February in Georgia is like April in New York or New England, and March has many of the features of early May. In late February or early March the red maples are humming with honey-bees and the elms are beginning to unpack their floral budgets. The sparrows — white-throats and song sparrows — were at home in the weedy and bashy ground around my little hermitage, and I soon encouraged 90 OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES them to come under my window by a plentiful sprinkling of finely cracked corn and bird-seed. They were always very shy, but they soon learned to associate me with the free lunch, so that, very soon after my appearance, — about nine o'clock in the morning, — they would begin to gather from the near-by coverts, one to two dozen white-throats, with four or five song sparrows, and now and then a female chewink. The chewinks remain there the year round, but the song sparrows and the white- throats, like myself, were only there for a season. By easy stages from one covert to another, trav- eling mostly at night, the birds were soon to begin the return journey northward. I think the same birds lingered with me day after day, though one cannot be sure in such a matter. The individual units in a stream of slowly passing birds of the same species do not differ from one another in appear- ance any more than do the separate ripples in a stream of flowing water. Outside of man's influ- ence, the individuals of a species of wild creatures or wild flowers do not seem to differ from one an- other by as much as one hair or one feather or one petal. They are like coin stamped with the same die, and the wonder of it is that each and all, among the birds, at least, seem like new coin — not one blurred or imperfect impression. This fact alwaj^s strikes one in gazing upon a flock of wild birds of any kind in the fall or in the spring. The wear and tear of life 91 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES seems to leave no mark upon them. Take a hundred snow buntings in winter, or robins or bluebirds in the spring, and each individual seems up to the standard of its kind. Indeed, Nature has standard- ized them all. Among the song sparrows and white-throats that gathered for their daily lunch under my window, I noted differences between male and female and be- tween old and young, yet each individual seemed at the top of its condition. How free from spot or blem- ish they were, not one disheveled or unkempt, not one vagabond or unfortunate among them. How neatly groomed they were, every feather perfect and every feather in its place. How bright and distinct the pencilings of the song sparrows' backs! The surplices of the white-throats had just come from the laundry. Among all the wild creatures it is the same. Nature deals evenly and impartially with them. They differ markedly in this respect from birds and mammals under domestication. A brood of newly hatched chickens are fresh and clean enough, but they very soon deteriorate in appear- ance; but a brood of young grouse or quail keep as clean and bright as shells upon the beach. Then consider the chipmunks and red squirrels — how rarely is one of them below the standard of its kind! how rarely one shows any indication of hard luck, or a loss of standing among his fellows ! None are poor; all are equally prosperous. Success is wTitten 92 OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES on every one of them. Rarely is a single hair out of place. How wise the white-throats are about cracked corn, taking nothing above a certain size! They pick up the larger pieces and test them with their beaks and drop them, then pick them up and feel them again to be quite sure they have made no mis- take. Their little gizzards cannot grind the flinty corn except when taken in very small bits. The fruit- and insect-eating birds that sometimes come about your door in winter or spring with the white- throats will examine the seeds and bits of corn, but will not eat them. One February a flock of white- throats and juncoes came daily to the dooryard of a friend of mine near New York City. She sprinkled the ground with rolled oats and hominy grits and her visitors made the most of her bounty. One morning there was a newcomer — a thrush evi- dently hard put for food. He hopped about amid the feeding sparrows with drooping wings, picking up the seeds and grains and dropping them again, ap- parently wondering what the others found that was so appetizing. The bird was in desperate straits; he ate the snow, but I fancy it only aggravated his hunger. The newcomer turned out to be a hermit thrush. I told my friend to take any dried fruit she happened to have — raisins, dried currants, dried cherries, or dried berries, and cut them up and sprinkle them 93 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES among the seeds. She did so, and it was not long before the thrush began to examine them and taste them doubtingly, but very soon he was eating them. That afternoon his drooping wings were getting back to their normal place, and in a day or two he was a changed bird, brisk and bold, domineering over the other birds, — in a very courteous way, however, — and very much set up in life. A bird never appears emaciated; it will starve and retain its plump appearance. Robins will famish amid a world of seeds and grains. They must have fruit or worms. Three years ago, while spending the winter in Georgia, I had evidence that a vast num- ber of robins starved to death in March. People picked them up in their yards and in the fields and along the edge of the woods. They seem to have started north from Florida and the Gulf States too soon. A sudden cold snap kept the worms and in- sects below the surface of the ground, and there was no fruit but the white, dry china-berries, and these appear to poison or to paralyze the robins when they eat them. In my walk one morning I picked up a cock robin that was unable to fly. As it did not appear to have been injured in any way, and was of very light weight, I concluded it was starving. I took it into the house and let it perch on the back of a chair in the study. It showed little signs of fear and made no effort to escape. I dug a handful of earthworms, and dangled one of them before its 94 OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES beak. After eyeing it a moment it opened its beak and I dropped the worm into its mouth. Others soon followed, and still others. The bird began to wake up and come to itself. In a little while it was taking the food eagerly and without any signs of fear. I could stroke it with one hand while I fed it with the other. It would sit on my knee or arm and take the food that was offered it. I was kept pretty busy supplying its wants till in the afternoon it be- gan to fly and to run about the room and utter its call-note. Before night it had become so active and so clamorous for its freedom that we opened the window. With a dash and a cry it was out of the house and on the w^ing to a near-by tree. I trust, with the boost I had given it, it was soon safely on its northward journey. The incident shows how extreme hunger in a wild creature banishes fear. One March day, when I was a boy, I found a raccoon wandering about the meadow so famished that he allowed me to pick him up by the tail and carry him to the house. He ate ravenously the food I offered him. The struggle for hfe among the birds and other wild creatures is so severe that the feeble and mal- formed, or the handicapped in any way, quickly drop out. Probably none of them ever die from old age. They are cut off in their prime. A weeding-out process goes on from the time they leave the nest. A full measure of life, the perfection of every quill 95 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES and feather, and unerring instinct carry them along. They are always in the enemy's country; they are always on the firing-line; eternal vigilance and ceaseless activity are the price of life with them. The natural length of life of our smaller birds is probably eight or ten years, but I doubt if one in a thousand reaches that age. Not half a dozen times in my life have I found the body of a dead bird that did not show some marks of violence. Next to the trim, prosperous, well-dressed ap- pearance of a flock of wild birds, one is struck with their caution and watchfulness, not to say nervous- ness, at all times, especially when feeding in the open. My band of sparrows were apprehensive of danger every moment. Here are some notes made on the spot: — Now there are over two dozen sparrows, among them a solitary female chewink, feeding on the ground in front of my window. An ever-present fear possesses every one of them. They pick up the seeds hurriedly, looking up every few seconds. Suddenly they all stop, and, crouch- ing, look toward the near-by weeds and bushes. Some vague alarm has seized them. Then two of them dart away; then the w^hole flock rushes to cover. I see no cause for the panic; there is none; the strain has become too great to be longer borne. Though no danger is near, yet their instinct, developed and sharpened by the experi- ences of untold generations, tells them danger might be near — a hawk, a cat, or other enemy — and that safety demands a frequent rush to cover. After a few minutes they return, one by one, flying from weed-stalk to weed- 96 OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES stalk, and dropping upon the ground where the seed is scattered, with many a suspicious flip of wing and flirt of tail. A dozen or more are soon hurriedly feeding again, now and then running spitefully at one another, as if the aggressors felt a prior claim, but not actually coming to blows. When the dry grass and weeds cover the seed a song sparrow may be seen now and then executing a quick movement upon it with both feet, a short double jump forwards and backwards. This is the way the sparrow scratches — a crude and awkward way, certainly. She has not yet learned to stand alternately upon one foot and scratch with the other, as do the hen and all other true scratchers, and she probably never will. The sparrows, and many other birds, move the two feet together. They are hoppers, and not walkers or runners. Such birds make a poor show of scratching. The chewink scratches in the same way, but being a much larger bird, she rakes or kicks obtruding weeds about quite successfully. In less than two minutes the birds again take the alarm and dart away to their weedy refuge. This is the habit of all birds that feed in numbers in this way in open places. Snow buntings, juncoes, sparrows, reed-birds, blackbirds — all are haunted by a vague sense of impending danger when they are feeding, and are given to sudden flights to cover, or to circling in the air. I remember that the flocks of passenger pigeons that I used to see in my youth would burst uj) from the ground when they were feeding, at short inter- vals, in the same sudden, alarmed way. It is easy to see how the fear of all ground-feeders has become 97 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES so developed and fixed. Hawks are doubtless the main cause of it. The hawk comes suddenly and strikes quickly, and is doubtless as old an enemy as the birds have. For ages he had been wont to swoop down from the air or from the cover of a tree, or has skimmed over the hill and in a twinkling snatched a feeding bird. I have seen the sharp-shinned hawk in winter sweep over a garden fence and snatch an English sparrow from a flock feeding in the street. I have seen one of the smaller hawks pick up a high-hole feeding in the fields in the same v/ay. Birds feeding singly are less easily alarmed than when feeding in flocks, just as you and I would be. Fear is contagious, and a bird feeding alone has no alarms or suspicions but its own to disturb it. Since these birds left Canada and northern New England last October they have probably traveled over two thousand miles, beset by their natural en- emies at all times and places — in fields and marshes and woods ; in danger of hawks and shrikes and cats by day, and of owls and other prowlers by night; com- pelled to hustle for food at all times, and to expose themselves to a thousand dangers. Is it any wonder that they are nervous and watchful .^^ In returning they will be exposed to the same dangers. Their traveling is mostly done by night and it is probably by easy stages. But just how long any single flight is we have no accurate means of knowing. It would be interesting to know if the song 98 OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES sparrows and juncoes traveled in company with the white-throats, as they are usually found together by day. If they do, the song sparrows would })egiQ to drop out of the procession by the time they reached the Potomac, and continue dropping out more and more all through New York and New Eng- land, but some of them keeping on well into Canada. The juncoes would begin to drop out in the Catskills, where they breed, and a few white-throats may do so likewise, as I have found them in midsummer in some of the higher regions of these mountains. Fear and suspicion are almost constant compan- ions of most of the wild creatures. Even the crow, who has no natural enemies that I know of, is the very embodiment of caution and cunning. That peculiar wing-gesture when he alights or walks about the fields — how expressive it is ! It is a little flash or twinkle of black plumes that tells you how alert and on his guard he is. It is a difficult problem to settle why the crow is so suspicious and cunning, since he has few or no natural enemies. No creature seems to want his flesh, tough and unsavory as it evidently is, and we can hardly attribute it to his contact with man, as we can the wildness of the hawk, because, on the whole, mankind is rather friendly to the crow. His suspicion seems ingrained, and probably involves some factor or factors in his biological history that we are ignorant of. On the whole, it is only the birds and animals 99 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES whicli are preyed upon that show excessive caution and fear. One can well understand how the constant danger of being eaten does not contribute to the ease and composure of any creature, and why these which are so beset are in a state of what we call ner- vousness most of the time. Behold the small ro- dents — rats, mice, squirrels, rabbits, woodchucks, and the like; they act as if they felt the eyes of the mink or the weasel or the cat or the hawk upon them all the time. Among the birds some are much more nervous and "panicky" than others. The woodpeckers are less so than the thrushes and finches; the jays less than the starlings and the game-birds. The seed- eaters and fruit-eaters are probably preyed upon much more than the purely insectivorous birds, because doubtless their flesh is sweeter. Birds of prey have few enemies apart from man. Among the land animals we ourselves prefer the flesh of the vegetable-eaters, and the carnivora do the same. We aU want to get as near to the vege- table as we can, even in our meat-eating. The birds, even the prettiest of them, are little savages. In watching from my window the feeding white-throats and song sparrows, I cannot help no- ticing how ungenerously they behave toward one another — apparently not one of them willing to share the feast with another. Each seems to think the food his or her special discovery and that the 100 OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES others are trespassers. They charge spitefully upon one another, but rarely come to blows. Just what makes one give way so readily before another, with- out any test of strength, is a puzzle. Is the author- ity in the eye, in the bearing, or is it just a matter of audacity and self-assertion.'^ There may be timid and retiring souls among the birds as well as among other folk. I am inclined to think that usually it is the males bullying the females. Occasionally two males, known by their more conspicuous markings, confront each other and rise in the air a yard or two, beak to beak, and then separate. During the mating season there is mutual aid and cooperation between the sexes, the male bird often feeding the female. But at other times there is lit- tle friendliness, certainly no gallantry. The downy woodpecker in w inter will drive the female spitefully away from the bone or the suet on the tree in front of my window till he is first served. I have never seen crows quarrel or strive with one another over their food. On the contrary, if the crow discovers food in winter, he seems glad to be joined by a com- panion or several of them. The crow is a generous bird; he has the true social instinct. He will watch while his fellow feeds; he cheerfully shares his last morsel with a comrade. How different from any of the hawk tribe ! A farm-boy living near me brought up four young sparrow hawks in a cage. They w^ere as jealous of one another over their food as cats are, 101 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES and when they were nearly full-grown, and the food was insuflacient, they proceeded to devour one an- other. I kept two of the survivors a few days, but they were so utterly cruel and savage that I was glad to let them escape. Most of our rodents are as free from guile as our birds; they have none of the subtlety and cunning of their enemies the fox and the wolf; they are simply wild and shy. The rabbit has little wit, yet she manages to run the gantlet of her numerous enemies. Some of her arts of concealment are as old as mankind — the art of hiding where no one would think of looking — concealment where there is little to conceal her. One March day I started a rabbit from her form in a broad, open cultivated field. She had excavated a little place in the soft ground just deep enough to admit the hind part of her body and there she crouched in the open sunlight with only a little dry grass partly screening her. When I was within two paces of her she bounded away like the wind and directed her course toward a bushy ravine several hundred yards away. The advantage of her position was that she commanded all approaches; nothing could steal a march upon her, and she could flee in any direction. In a tangle of weeds or bushes she would have been where every one of her natural enemies prowl or beat about, and where concealment would have been more or less confine- ment. A few yards farther along I came upon an- 102 OLD FRIENDS IN NEW PLACES other vacant form — the perfection of art witliout any art. When the rabbit builds her nest and has her young she does not seek out a dense cover, but comes right out into the clear open spaces where you would never think of looking. She excavates a little cradle in the ground, gathers some dry grass, weaves a little blanket of dry grass and fur from her own body, just large enough to cover it, and her secret is well kept — most hidden when hidden the least. Quail and grouse know something of the same art, and never make their nests in a thick tangle. I have seen a quail's nest with twenty eggs in it on the edge of a public highway. The brooding bird allowed me almost to touch her with my hand be- fore she flew away. If every bushy and weedy spring run in Georgia embracing not more than an acre or two of ground has two dozen sparrows, to say nothing of a pair or two of cardinals, Carolina wrens, and mockingbirds, one can get some idea of what a vast number of birds such a large State — over three hundred miles long and two hundred miles wide — holds. With two pairs of birds to the acre, a fair estimate, it would count up to over seventy millions. The farm of about one hundred and thirty acres upon which I passed February and March probably held several dozen sparrows and as many juncoes, a score or two blue jays, and two or three dozen meadowlarks, a pair each of cardinals, Carolina wrens, and browD 103 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES thrashers, besides other birds. In one ploughed field I saw, day after day, ten or fifteen killdee plovers. Their wild cries, their silver sides glancing in the sun, and their long powerful wings were always a welcome sight and sound. Probably more kinds of birds feed on insects than upon seeds and fruits, though the seed- and fruit- eaters are the more numerous, and abide with us more months in the year. It is true also that the seed-eaters nearly all eat insects at times, and start their young in life upon insect food. One can easily see, then, what an inevitable part the birds play in keeping down the insect pests that might otherwise overwhelm us. VI THE STILL SMALL VOICE ONE summer day, while I was walking along the comitry road on the farm where I was born, a section of the stone wall opposite me, and not more than three or fom* yards distant, suddenly fell down. Amid the general stillness and immobility about me, the effect was quite startling. The question at once arose in my mind as to just what happened to that bit of stone wall at that particular moment to cause it to fall. Maybe the slight vibration imparted to the ground by my tread caused the minute shifting of forces that brought it down. But the time was ripe; a long, slow, silent process of decay and disin- tegration, or a shifting of the points of bearing amid the fragments of stone by the action of the weather, culminated at that instant, and the wall fell. It was the sudden summing-up of half a century or more of atomic changes in the material of the wall. A grain or two of sand yielded to the pressure of long years, and gravity did the rest. It was as when the keystone of an arch crumbles or weakens to the last particle, and the arch suddenly collai)ses. The same thing happened in the case of the large spruce-tree that fell as our steamer passed near the 105 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES shore in Alaskan waters, or when the campers in the forest heard a tree fall in the stillness of the night. In both cases the tree's hour had come; the balance of forces was suddenly broken by the yielding of some small particle in the woody tissues of the tree, and down it came. In all such cases there must be a moment of time when the upholding and down- pulling forces are just balanced; then the yielding of one grain more gives the victory to gravity. The slow minute changes in the tree, and in the stone wall, that precede their downfall, we do not see or hear; the sudden culmination and collapse alone arrest our attention. An earthquake is doubtless the result of the sudden release of forces that have been in stress and strain for years or ages; some point at last gives way, and the earth trembles or the mountains fall. It is the slow insensible changes in the equipoise of the elements about us that, in the course of long periods of time, put a new face upon the aspect of the earth. Rapid and noisy changes over large areas, which may have occurred during the geologic ages, we do not now see except in the case of an earthquake. It is the ceaseless activity, both chem- ical and physical, in the bodies about us, of which we take no note, that transforms the world. Atom by atom the face of the immobile rocks changes. The terrible demonstrative forces, such as electric dis- charges during a storm, which seem competent to 106 THE STILL SMALL VOICE level mountains or blot out landscapes, usually make but slight impression upon the fields and hills. In the ordinary course of nature, the great benef- icent changes come slowly and silently. The noisy changes, for the most part, mean violence and dis- ruption. The roar of storms and tornadoes, the ex- plosions of volcanoes, the crash of the thunder, are the result of a sudden break in the equipoise of the elements; from a condition of comparative repose and silence they become fearfully swift and audible. The still small voice is the voice of life and growth and perpetuity. In the stillness of a bright summer day w^hat work is being accomplished! what proc- esses are being consummated! When the tornado comes, how quickly much of it may be brought to naught! In the history of a nation it is the same. The terrible war that is now devastating Europe is the tornado that comes in the peace and fruitful re- pK)se of a summer's day. As living nature in time re- covers from the destructive effects of the mad war- ring of the inorganic elements, so the nations will eventually recover from the blight and waste of this war. But the gains and the benefits can never offset the losses and the agony. The discipline and agony of war only fit a people for more war. If war is to be the business of mankind, then the more of it we have the better; if there is no true growth or expansion for a people, save through blood and fire, then let the blood and fire come to all of us, the more the 107 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES better. The German gospel of war, so assiduously preached and so heroically practiced in our day, is based upon the conviction that there is no true growth for a nation except by the sword, that the still small voice of love and good will must give place to the brazen trumpet that sounds the onset of hostile and destroying legions. Are the arts of peace seductive, and do they hasten the mortal ripening of a people's character? Must the ploughshares now be forged into swords and the swords used to spill our neighbors' blood? The current gospel of war is the gospel of hate and re- prisal, of broken treaties and burned cities, of mur- dered women and children, and devastated homes. What a noise politics makes in the world, our poli- tics especially ! But some silent thinker in his study, or some inventor in his laboratory, is starting cur- rents that will make or unmake politics for genera- tions to come. How noiseless is the light, yet what power dwells in the sunbeams — mechanical power at one end of the spectrum, in the red and infra-red rays, and chemical power at the other or violet and ultra-violet end ! It is the mechanical forces — the winds, the rains, the movements of ponderable bodies — that fill the world with noise; the chemi- cal changes that disintegrate the rocks and set the currents of life going are silent. The great loom in which is woven all the living textures that clothe the world with verdure and people it with animated 108 THE STILL SMALL VOICE forms makes no sound. Think of the still small voice of radio-activity — so still and small that only molecular science is aware of it, yet physicists be- lieve it to be the mainspring of the universe. The vast ice-engine that we call a glacier is almost as silent as the slumbering rocks, and, to all but the eye of science, nearly as immobile, save where it discharges into the sea. It is noisy in its dying, but in the height of its powder it is as still as the falling snow of which it is made. Yet give it time enough, and it scoops out the valleys and grinds down the mountains and turns the courses of rivers, or makes new ones. We split the rocks and level the hills with our powder and dynamite and fill the world with noise; but behold the vast cleavage of the rocks which the slow, noiseless forces of sun and frost bring about! In the Shawangunk Mountains one may see enor- mous masses of conglomerate that have been split down from the main range, showing as clean a cleavage over vast surfaces as the quarryman can produce on small blocks with his drills and wedges. One has to pause and speculate on the character of the forces that achieved such results and left no mark of sudden violence behind. The forces that cleft them asunder were the noiseless sunbeams. The unequal stress and strain imparted by varying temperatures clove the mountains from top to bot- tom as with a stroke of the earthquake's hauuncr. 109 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES In and about Yosemite Valley one sees granite blocks of the size of houses and churches split in two where they lie in their beds, as if it had been done in their sleep and without awakening them. This silent quarrying and reducing of the rocks never ceases to surprise one. Amid the petrified forests of Arizona one marvels to see the stone trunks of the huge trees lying about in yard lengths as squarely and cleanly severed as if done with a saw. Assault them with sledge and bar and you may reduce them to irregular fragments, but you cannot divide the blocks neatly and regularly as time has done it. The unknown, the inaudible forces that make for good in every state and community — the gentle word, the kind act, the forgiving look, the quiet de- meanor, the silent thinkers and workers, the cheerful and unwearied toilers, the scholar in his study, the scientist in his laboratory — how much more we owe to these things than to the clamorous and dis- cordant voices of the world of politics and the news- paper! Art, literature, philosophy, all speak with the still small voice. How much more potent the voice that speaks out of a great solitude and rever- ence than the noisy, acrimonious, and disputatious voice! Strong conviction and firm resolution are usually chary of words. Depth of feeling and parsi- mony of expression go well together. The mills of the gods upon the earth's surface grind exceeding slow, and exceeding still. They are 110 THE STILL S:\LVLL VOICE grinding up the rocks everywhere — pulverizing the granite, the Hmestone, the sandstone, the basalt, between the upper and nether millstones of air and water to make the soil, but we hear no sound and mark no change; only in geologic time are the results recorded. In still waters we get the rich deposits that add to the fat of the land, and in peaceful, un- troubled times is humanity enriched, and the foun- dations are laid upon which the permanent institu- tions of a nation are built. We all know what can be said in favor of turmoil, agitation, w^ar; we all know, as Goethe said, that a man comes to know himself, not in thought, but in action; and the same is true of a nation. Equally do w^e know the value of repose, and the slow, silent activities both in the soul of man and in the proc- esses of nature. The most potent and beneficent forces are stillest. The strength of a sentence is not in its adjectives, but in its verbs and nouns, and the strength of men and of nations is in their calm, sane, meditative moments. In a time of noise and hurry and materialism like ours, the gospel of the still small voice is always seasonable. VII NATURE LEAVES I. IN WARBLER TIME THIS early May morning, as I walked through the fields, the west wind brought to me a sweet, fresh odor, like that of our little white sweet violet {Viola blanda). It came probably from sugar maples, just shaking out their fringelike blossoms, and from the blooming elms. For a few hours, when these trees first bloom, they shed a decided perfume. It was the first breath of May, and very welcome. April has her odors, too, very delicate and suggestive, but seldom is the wind perfumed with the breath of actual bloom before May. I said. It is warbler time; the first arrivals of the pretty little migrants should be noted now. Hardly had my thought defined itself, when before me, in a little hemlock, I caught the flash of a blue, white-barred wing; then glimpses of a yellow breast and a yellow crown. I approached cautiously, and in a moment more had a full view of one of our rarer warblers, the blue-winged yellow warbler. Very pretty he was, too, the yellow cap, the yellow breast, and the black streak through the eye being conspicuous features. He would not stand to be looked at long, but soon disappeared in a near-by tree. 112 NATURE LEAVES The ruby-crowned kinglet was piping in an ever- green tree not far away, but him I had been hearing for several daj^s. \Yith me the kinglets come before the first warblers, and may be known to the attentive eye by their quick, nervous movements, and small, olive-gray forms, and to the discerning ear by their hurried, musical, piping strains. How soft, how rapid, how joyous and lyrical their songs are ! Very few country people, I imagine, either see them or hear them. The powers of observation of country people are seldom fine enough and trained enough. They see and hear coarsely. An object must be big and a sound loud, to attract their attention. Have you seen and heard the kinglet? If not, the finer in- ner world of nature is a sealed book to you. ^Yhen your senses take in the kinglet they will take in a thousand other objects that now escape you. My first warbler in the spring is usually the yel- low redpoll, which I see in April. It is not a bird of the trees and woods, but of low bushes in the open, often alighting upon the ground in quest of food. I sometimes see it on the lawn. The last one I saw was one April day, when I went over to the creek to see if the suckers were yet running up. The bird was flitting amid the low bushes, now and then dropping down to the gravelly bank of the stream. Its chestnut crown and yellow under parts were noticeable. The past season I saw for the first time the golden- 113 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES winged warbler — a shy bird, that eluded me a long time in an old clearing that had grown up with low bushes. The song first attracted my attention, it is so like in form to that of the black-throated green-back, but in quality so inferior. The first dis- tant glimpse of the bird, too, suggested the green- back, so for a time I deceived myself with the notion that it was the green-back with some defect in its vocal organs. A day or two later I heard two of them, and then concluded my inference was a hasty one. Following one of the birds up, I caught sight of its yellow crown, which is much more conspicuous than its yellow wing-bars. Its song is like this, *n-'n de de de, with a peculiar reedy quality, but not at all musical, falling far short of the clear, sweet, lyrical song of the green-back. Nehrling sees in it a resem- blance to that of the Maryland yellow-throat, but I fail to see any resemblance whatever. One appreciates how bright and gay the plumage of many of our warblers is when he sees one of them alight upon the ground. While passing along a wood road in June, a male black-throated green came down out of the hemlocks and sat for a moment on the ground before me. How out of place he looked, like a bit of ribbon or millinery just dropped there ! The throat of this warbler always suggests the finest black velvet. Not long after I saw the chestnut- sided warbler do the same thing. We were trying to make it out in a tree by the roadside, when it 114 NATURE LEAVES dropped down quickly to the ground in pursuit of an insect, and sat a moment upon the brown surface, giving us a vivid sense of its bright new plumage. When the leaves of the trees are just unfolding, or, as Tennyson says, " When all the woods stand in a mist of green. And nothing perfect," the tide of migrating warblers is at its height. They come in the night, and in the morning the trees are alive with them. The apple-trees are just showing the pink, and how closely the birds inspect them in their eager quest for insect food! One cold, rainy day at this season Wilson's black-cap — a bird that is said to go north nearly to the Arctic Circle — explored an apple-tree in front of my window. It came down within two feet of my face, as I stood by the pane, and paused a moment in its hurry and peered in at me, giving me an admirable view of its form and markings. It was wet and hungry, and it had a long journey before it. What a small body to cover such a distance! The black-poll warbler, which one may see about the same time, is a much larger bird and of slower movement, and is colored much like the black and white creeping warbler with a black cap on its head. The song of this bird is the finest in volume and most insectlike of that of any warbler known to me. It is the song of the black and white creeper reduced, high and swelling in the middle and low and faint 115 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES at its beginning and ending. When one has learned to note and discriminate the warblers, he has made a good beginning in his ornithological studies. n. A SHORT WALK One midsummer afternoon I went up to "Scot- land" and prowled about amid the raspberry-bushes, finding a little fruit, black and red, here and there, and letting my eyes wander to the distant farms and mountains. The wild but familiar prospect dilated and rested me. As I lingered near the torn edge of the woods in a tangle of raspberry-bushes, I caught a glimpse of some large bird dropping suddenly to the ground from a tall basswood that stood in the edge of the open, where it was hidden from my view. Was it a crow or a hawk? A hawk, I guessed, from its manner of descent. I threw a stone after waiting some moments for it to reappear, but it made no sign. Then I moved slowly toward the spot, and presently up sprang a hen-hawk and, uttering its characteristic squeal, circled around near me and then alighted not far off. A young hawk, I saw it was, and quite unsophisticated. Presently, as I made my way along, just touching the edge of the woods, a covey of nearly full-grown partridges burst up out of the berry-bushes, ten or twelve of them, and went humming up mto the denser woods, some of them alighting in the trees, whence they stretched their necks to watch me as I passed along. The dust 116 NATURE LEAVES flew from their plumage as they jumped up, as if they had been earthing their wings. My next adventure was with a young but fully grown bluebird, which crawled and fluttered away from my feet as I came upon it in the open. It could not fly, and I easily picked it up. Its plumage showed the mingled blue and speckled brown of the immature bird. I looked it over, but could see no mark or sign of injury to wing or body. Its plum- age was unruflfled and its eye bright, but its move- ments were feeble. Was it ill or starved? I could not tell which, probably the latter. It may have got lost from the brood and was not yet able to forage for itself. I left it under the edge of a rock, where the fresh blue of the ends of its wings and tail held niy eye a moment as I turned to go. Farther along, under some shelving rocks, I came upon two empty phoebes' nests — a relic of bird-life that always gives a touch to the rocks that I delight in. I find none of these nests placed lower than three feet from the ground, and always in places that seem to be carefully chosen with reference to enemies that can reach and climb. Two or three woodchucks, which I bagged with my eye, completed my afternoon's adventures. III. IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In southern California the seasons all go hand in hand, and dance around one like a ring of girls, first 117 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES one season, then another in front of you, — Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. Now in March I see January on Mt. San Antonio, with wraiths of snow blowing over his white summit against the blue sky. In the valley I see them harvesting oranges and planting their gardens. The camphor-trees are shed- ding their leaves, and the eucalyptus and other trees are blooming. The oak-trees are shaking out their catkins and resound with the hum of bees. I see calla lilies in bloom four feet high, and wild flowers an inch high just opening. Along the road the wild sunflowers and other tall plants are in bloom, as in August in the Atlantic States. June is in the knee- high grass and oats and blooming white clover, and April in the bursting apple-tree buds and pink peach- and almond-trees, — yes, and in the new furrow and the early planting, — autumn in the golden orange- orchards, and the red berries of the pepper-trees, and the black berries of the camphor-trees. The birds are nesting, the shad are running, and swallows are in the air, midsummer butterflies dance by, and house-flies tease you indoors. I see and hear the white-crowned sparrow that at home I see in May. Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, I say, all nudge you, and claim your attention at once. During the last ten days of March there were heavy rains with four feet of snow in the near-by mountains. The air was like cold spring- water — full of just melted frost. 118 NATURE LEAVES Yesterday friends took us to Chiremont, a ride of thirty miles, in their automobile. The day was all sun and sky above, and all fresh green earth be- low, with a line of snow-white peaks behind dark near-by mountain barriers on the horizon. After a week or more of cloud and rain, how we enjoyed the brightness and the sunshine! Especially did that line of white peaks cut off by that dark moun- tain wall in front of them draw and hold my eye. Over the top of the highest one, San Antonio, we could see the snow lifted by the wTst wind and car- ried high in the air over on the east side. It was like a thin, w^hite flame, swaying, flickering, sinking and falling, but clinging tenaciously to the moun- tain-peak. Thus have I seen this frost flame stalk across my native hills in midwinter. All the time we were speeding through orange-groves yellow with fruit, along improved lands red with the new fur- row, and past wild, unclaimed places spotted with the bloom of many flow^ers. I think the bird I most want to take home with me, and establish in our towns and villages, is the blackbird, — Brewer's blackbird, — one of the best-mannered, best-dressed, best-groomed birds I ever saw. He is like a bit of polished ebony moving quietly over your lawn. His coat has the same rich iridescent hues as that of our crow blackbird, and he has the same yellow eye, but he is nmch less in size and much more graceful in form and movement, 119 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES and much softer- voiced. Besides, he is a bird of the streets and dooryards, very noticeable everywhere, and, so far as I can learn, has no tastes or habits that incur the enmity of the farmer or the fruit-grower. I pass within a few feet of him and his duller-colored mate walking about the smooth lawns, picking some minute insects from the ends of the grass-blades. This seems to be his chief occupation. Like all blackbirds, these are social and gregarious, and at times, when in flocks, their musical instincts are stimulated. I have heard a band of them in the later afternoon discourse a wild, pleasing music much superior to the crude, harsh cackle and split whistles of the related species with us. The birds here are abundant both in kinds and in numbers. The white-crowned sparrows are fa- miliar about the houses and the gardens, and they sing most sweetly, but the song is not quite equal to the song they sing along the Hudson for a brief day or two in May. Here they sing for weeks. The mockingbirds are as common as robins are at home — all about the lawns and gardens and streets, flitting, flirting, attitudinizing, and singing — on the housetops, on the telegraph and telephone wires, on the curbstones, on the lawn. In the face of this bird's great fame as a songster, I wonder why I am so indifferent to it. It pleases me less than do its cousins, the catbird and the brown thrasher. I detect little or no music — sweet tones — in it. It 120 NATURE LEAVES is a series of disjointed quirks and calls, quite sur- prising as vocal feats, but, to my ear, entirely desti- tute of real bird melody. It is a performance, the tricks of a vocal acrobat, and not in any sense a serious, unified song. The bird has much less music in its soul, less of the spirit of self-forgetting joy and praise, than has our little song sparrow. I would rather have one robin, or one song sparrow, about my place than any number of "mockers." Indeed, the more "mockers" there were, the less welcome they would be. It is a polyglot, but not a songster. The mockingbird is a theatrical creature, both in manners and delivery. I have heard it in Jamaica, in Florida, and now in southern California, and I have heard it by night and by day, and I have no good word to say for it. It is a Southern bird and has more the quality of the Southern races than our birds have. Northern birds are quieter, sweeter- tempered, softer-voiced, and more religious in tone. IV. AEE THERE COUNTERFEITS IN NATURE? One day my son killed a duck on the river that an old gunner told him was a mock duck. It looked like a duck, it acted and quacked like a duck, but when it came upon the table it mocked us. I now recall that it was a "coot," a species of duck not usually eaten. The incident led me to thinking whether or not there were really any mock things — any couutcr- 121 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES feits in nature — known to me. Some of our wild flowers are named *' false " this and that, as false indigo, false Solomon's-seal, false mitrewort, and others; but in designating them thus we are simply slandering Nature and exposing our own ignorance. Other things come to mind that are not what they seem, or what they are popularly called; *' cedar plums,'* for instance, — those yellow fungous growths upon the branches of the red cedar which suddenly develop with the rain and warmth of May or June, and that look like ripe fruit upon the tree. In sun and dryness they soon shrink and wither; on the return of a wet day they are again clammy ge- latinous masses. Later in the season they disappear entirely. They are not the work of an insect, but the result of some disease like black-knot on our plum- and cherry-trees. They can scarcely be called coun- terfeit fruit. The so-called oak-apple bears a some- what closer resemblance to a genuine fruit. Its stringy texture might be taken for the skeleton of the pulp of the apple. It is a gall caused by the sting of an insect. The oak is made to grow the cell or house in which the young of the insect is hatched and developed. The May apples which children gather from the wild azalea and eat with much rel- ish are also a sham fruit — the work of an insect. Can we call the infertile flowers of certain plants, like those of the fringed polygala, shams or counter- feits? They seem to exist for show merely, while 122 NATURE LEAVES the fertile flowers are small and upon the roots hid- den beneath the surface. What purpose the showy infertile flowers serve in the economy of the plant I am unable to say. In the Southern States the plough sometimes turns out of the soil a curious vegetable product called "Tuckahoe," or "Indian loaf," that suggests a counterfeit of some sort. It is a brown roundish mass, the size of a cocoanut or larger, whitish within, with a characteristic odor, and it is said to be use- ful and nutritious in diseases of the bowels. It is thought that the Indians used it as a kind of bread. Its origin is shrouded in mystery. What it springs from, what conditions favor its growth, are all un- known. It is not a fungus, like the truffle, nor a normal vegetable product. It has no cellular struc- ture, as has the potato, for instance, and it contains no starch, but is composed mainly of pectin, which for the most part makes up the jellies of fruit. It is probably the result of degeneration in the roots of some plant. Among animals shams and imitations are not uncommon. The marsh wren, for instance, often builds several sham, or cock, nests in the reeds sur- rounding the real nest. These nests seem like the mere bubbling over or surplusage of the breeding- instinct in the male. Many birds, especially ground- builders, feign lameness or paralj^sis to draw atten- tion to themselves and lure the intruder away from 123 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES their nests. They know to perfection the atl of make-beheve. The males of bumblebees and wasps when caught will imitate perfectly the action of a bee when it thrusts its stinger into your hand. The look of frightfulness which certain caterpil- lars take on often, in the shape of two fierce coun- terfeit eyes, is only a mask to scare the unsophisti- cated birds. At least experiment seems to prove that this is the case. The caterpillars of some of the hawk-moths wear this frightful mask. These insects can so retract their heads and front segments as to give an increased look of fearfulness. Weismann found that certain small birds were afraid of them. When one insect mimics another for the purpose of protection, as is now generally believed to be the case among a number of butterflies, such insect is sailing under false colors. There is perhaps more masquerading in nature than we wot of, and yet it is all natural. VIII THE PRIMAL MIND I ONE of my problems is how to reconcile the unity of creation with the fact, or apparent fact, that while the vast mass of the visible universe is governed by purely physical laws, a compara- tively small part of it is dominated by laws of an- other order, and is the abode of life and intelligence. How these two parts or phases of the cosmos are related, how we can ascribe purpose and intelli- gence to living matter, and deny them to the non- living, without doing violence to our sense of the oneness of universal nature, is the problem. Are we to believe that the universe is part rational and part irrational? — that mind is operative in the grass, the trees, the animals, and not in the stars and sidereal systems? Emerson celebrates " the primal mind That flows in streams, that breathes in wind." But unless we identify mind with cosmic or solar energy, Emerson's lines do not seem especially happy. Is it possible to think of mind, or anything like intelligence, as we know it in this world, as 125 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES active in streams or winds or tides, or in any of the blind mechanical forces? All these things go their appointed ways and their ways are not as om- ways; they are void of purpose, void of will, void of any suggestion of a rational principle; they are ruled by irrefragable law. Mind as we know it, and can only know it, is associated with life. Not the caressing winds, nor the sparkling currents, nor the beauty of crystals and precious stones, nor the glory and the majesty of the heavens, suggest mind; they suggest power and measureless energy. The midnight skies fill us with awe, they overwhelm us with a sense of our own insignificance, but do we see anything akin to ourselves in them? Do we not rather see that which leaves us out of the account entirely? An infinity of celestial bodies ruled by rigidly mechanical laws, going their inevitable rounds at the risk of cosmic collisions and disruptions in which suns and systems are at times shipwrecked, unutterably sublime and awe-inspiring, but lifeless, mindless, unhuman. In all the vast depths of sidereal space, strewn with celestial bodies as a June meadow with clover blos- soms, we see but the dance and whirl of dead matter. The heavens declare the glory of a god who hath not one attribute akin to our own. What shall we say, then? What can we say but that this astronomic background of cosmic matter and energy seems but a vast theatre upon which a small fraction of the 126 THE PRIMAL MIND whole, clothed with new powers and purposes, plaj^s the drama of organic nature? Who can say that it even seems designed for this purpose? On the con- trary, from our human point of view, how casual and uncertain the drama appears! Inside of this stupendous carnival of the physicochemical forces — at far removed points, and doubtless at vast intervals of time, flickering here and there in the cosmic darkness like a dim taper — appears this mysterious change, this light which we call life and mind, appears and disappears, like the lamps of the fireflies of a summer night, confined to a very narrow range of thermal and physical conditions, and, in its higher manifestations on our planet, at least, limited to a very narrow period of time. In our solar family of nine planets (considering the asteroids as fragments of an exploded body be- tween Mars and Jupiter) only one is unmistakably the abode of life, with a strong probability in favor of Mars. Our earth is the seventh child of the Sun in point of time, and on it life is clearly as yet in the heyday of youth. But what an enormous prepon- derance of lifeless matter the other planets present ! Though the superior planets are aons older and thousands of times larger, it is evident that they have never been the abode of life, and doubtful if they ever can be. As the planets are all made of one stuff, and the same physical and chemical laws are operative in all, it is evident that the conditions of 127 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES life must everywhere be essentially the same, and hence that life is not possible on the major and minor planets unless, or until, conditions upon them are similar to those upon the earth. But what astro- nomic significance would the fact have if life never appeared upon any of the other planets, nor upon any of the bodies that swarm in celestial space? None whatever. The vast celestial mechanism would know it not. Doubtless there are untold worlds where life has never appeared and never will appear, and other untold worlds upon which it has appeared and has run its course, or is now in full career. The natm-al philosophers tell us that under a cer- tain size a planet cannot retain an atmosphere; it drifts away to the larger and more powerful bodies. Probably our moon has never had an atmosphere. They also tell us that a world with a very small par- ticle of radium in its rocky interior, — two parts in a million million parts, — like our earth, must inevi- tably, in the course of time or of eternity, explode. This may be what happened to the body of which the four hundred asteroids are fragments. What a comfort, a sort of cosmic comfort, it would be to us dwellers upon this astronomic mote, to have positive proof that there were beings like ourselves upon other astronomic motes in the heav- ens around us, even if we had to know that millions of them were trying desperately to extermmate each 128 THE PRIIVLVL MIND other, as they are at this moment upon this war- scarred planet ! Astronomy and geology grind away at their everlasting tasks, but biology is as a flower that Cometh in a day and on the morrow is cut down. Our greedy anthropomorphism sees the whole uni- verse travailing in pain to bring forth man — sees him as the sum and purpose of it all; but clearly the cosmic gods have taken very little thought about him; if his patrimony is this vast sidereal province, he is likely to come into possession of a very small part of it. He is of secondary importance, as are all forms of life, though he alone can assign each god his rank and sit in judgment in the council-chamber of the Infinite. I am only trying to see with modern eyes, and in the light of modern science, what the old Hebrew seers and prophets saw so long ago — the littleness of man, and his brief, uncertain foothold in the total scheme of things. His glory is that he is a part, an infinitesimal part, of this total scheme, and that with his finite mind he can to some extent grasp and measure it. The secret of his relation to it, the close- ness of his kinship with it, whether he came out of it through the inevitable operation of natural laws, or was grafted upon it by an omnipotent power external to it, is a question that opens up a line of inquiry of which he never tires. Is it possible to reconcile the revelations of astron- omy, of geology, of paheontology, — the waste, the Ud UNDER THE APPLE-TREES delays, the cosmic cataclysms, the indifference to life, a universe sown with dead worlds and with extinct suns, the mindless depths, the supremacy of mechanical laws, the unconscionable energy, — all this and more, with our ideas of a beneficent, om- nipotent being governing all, of whose love and concern for man this universe is the expression? The imiverse as the theatre of mechanical laws — • the action and interaction of matter and energy — • is godless; neither human nor divine attributes are displayed there. It is only as the theatre of biologi- cal laws that we can recognize in it the sources of our own lives or get any glimpse of what we call mind. The source and fountain of life in the uni- verse is clearly no more intent upon man than upon any other form of life, even the humblest. All life is cheap in the presence of the material forces. The tempest and the earthquake blot out human com- munities as unhesitatingly as they blot out commu- nities of ants and mice. Fire, flood, gravity, and chemical affinity respect nothing that lives. The organizing tendency in matter, whatever be its source, works as if it knew what it wanted when not interfered with; it builds up its predetermined forms and hands the secret of the craft down to succeed- ing generations unerringly, so long as nothing di- verts or confuses it, or imposes foreign purpose upon it, as do the many parasites of the animal and vege- table world. An insect stings a leaf or a stalk and 130 THE PRIMAL MIND thus diverts the Hfe-energies of the phint to its o\\ti purpose. In the case of maHgnant tumors, the Hfe- energy of the body consumes itself. The hostile germs destroy the body by the use of the vital energy which the body furnishes. The body can be made to destroy itself, to eat itself up. II Interfere with the normal currents and course of life in the mother's body, and her womb grows a monstrosity or hideous deformity; the cells go on building blindly; the push of life is not abated, but it has lost its way or forgotten its plan ; it wanders aimlessly. Now, what gives it a plan, or guided it through all its vagaries and wanderings in the lowly or monstrous forms of the foreworld, till it built up man from the ape, and the bird from the fish or rep- tile .^^ Natural selection, the Darwinians say. But there must be a variety to select from, and some scheme or purpose in the selecting agent. Mechani- cal laws may select the strongest, or the largest, or the smallest, as the case may be, but not the fittest. The fittest implies a scheme, implies progression. The survival of the fittest implies the push of life, the aspiration, as it were, toward higher forms. How could the gift of mind be brought about by mechan- ical means, unless there was incipient mind — a tendency to mind — in the struggling forms? The physicochemical forces are not creative; they bring 131 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES about startling changes, but have their cycles ; they go their rounds over and over, and can never depart from them. Oxygen and hydrogen unite to form water, sodium and chlorine unite to form salt, but their formulas do not vary, and they lose nothing in the cycle of change; their elements can be sepa- rated and reunited any number of times. Not so with any living thing. Intelligence, then, seems inseparable from life. Wherever we see adaptation as opposed to mere time-induced adjustment, and purposive forms and movements as contrasted with mechanical and acci- dental forms and movements, we recognize the ac- tion of mind; do we not? The use of specific means to specific ends indicates what we have no name for but intelligence. It is obvious that the hairs on plants, the varnish on leaves, the wax on buds, the hooks, wings, balloons, on seeds, all have a specific purpose; that is, these things are true devices, and not merely chance combinations or fortuitous occur- rences. The ingenious devices of certain plants to insure cross-fertilization are, to me, just as much an evidence of what we must call mind, though of mind of a vastly different order from our own, as any model or device in our patent oflSices, while the forms of the rocks, the hills, the shore, the streams, the rivers, are in no sense purposive. If man, with all his powers and attributes, is a part of nature, — and the naturalist can regard him 132 THE PRIMAL MIND in no other light, — if the sun is his father and the earth his mother as Hterally as they are the parents of all other forms of life, then all that he is or can be is latent or potential in nature; then is his human- ity, his reverence, his love as much a part of nature as are the instincts and the cuniang of animals a part of nature; then is his literature, his philosophy, his art, his religion a part of nature; then is he as amenable to biological laws and as truly a subject for the natural historian as are the animals; then also are all his follies, sins, shortcomings, supersti- tions, cruelties, ingratitudes, and the rest a part of what we call nature. If not so, then of what are they a part? Man is not separated from nature by his body; he is dependent upon the material elements and forces — upon the air, the water, the soil — to the same extent and by virtue of the same organs and relations as are all other forms of life. He is begotten and nourished like all other animals, and he dies as they do. He differs from all others in his mental and spiritual equipment, but in view of his humble remote ancestry, as seen in the light of palae- ontology, and the gradations of intelligence and com- plexity of organization between him and them, can there be any doubt that these gifts also come out of nature? Can there be any doubt that what we must call mind pervades at least all organic matter, and, potentially, all other forms? Where would you have man's mind come from? 133 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES The supernatural? Then let us name it the natural- supernatural, as Carlyle did? Let us annex all the territory that adjoins us; let us put a circle around every reality we can conceive of, and regard the universe as one, and not as two or three. Carlyle's idea of the natural-supernatural still permitted him to look upon nature as the " Time- vesture of God, which reveals him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish"; but the notion of vesture or clothes suggests an arbitrary and artificial relation which is more in consonance with theology than with science or with life. Goethe's expression "the living gar- ment of God " is less misleading, but Pope's familiar couplet, — " All are but parts of one stupendous whole. Whose body Nature is, and God, the soul," — is the least objectionable of all, as this restores the vital unity which must exist. If Nature be half God and half demon, it is all the more easy to believe that man arose out of her, since these terms fitly describe him also. We say that the fountain cannot rise above its source, but surely the source is usually above the fountain, and if we choose to conceive of this God-nature as much above man, there is still room for a broad ground of rela- tionship between them. Nature is cruel and blun- dering and irrational, and does not the present world- war exhibit man as her legitimate offspring? How the gods on Olympus must smile and chuckle and 134 THE PRIMAL MIND say, "Surely they are our children, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh"! A recent critic says that my principal mistake is in considering life and mind as concrete realities when, in fact, they are only abstract terms, indicat- ing conditions of matter. In the act of denying mind do we not affirm mind? What is it but mind that makes that statement denying all reality to mind? Is not the assertion self-destructive? If we affirm that the only concrete reality is matter, what are we going to do about our minds that make this affirmation? Are they unreal or nonentities? Can a nonentity grasp and weigh an entity? We cannot use our eyes to prove that there are no eyes in the universe, nor our reason to dethrone reason. Sci- ence cannot cut the ground from under its own feet. Huxley was convinced that there were three realities in the universe — matter, energy, and consciousness. How could he affirm the reality of matter and energy if he denied the reality of that which affirmed it? If we are not sure of our own existence as knowing, reasoning beings, how can we be sure of this uncor- tainty? Our light is self -extinguished; mind, or consciousness, belongs to a difi^erent order of reality than do matter and energy. We know mind only as a subjective reality, whereas we know matter and energy as objective realities. Destroy all life and consciousness in the world of matter, and energy still exists. Of course, this assertion is also sclf- 135 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES contradictory, as we postulate ourselves as still being witnesses of the existence of matter and en- ergy. Blot out life and mind, and, so far as we are concerned, there is nothing left. We cannot get rid of ourselves without turning the universe topsy- turvy, and even then we are on hand to bear witness that it is topsy-turvy. In my youth I once heard an old Methodist preacher say that we could not con- ceive of annihilation without thinking of our unan- nihilated selves as looking on. The modern, rigidly scientific mind, in consider- ing this question of life, gets right down to the ground and denies everything we call spirit, mind, soul, creative energy, and the like. Man is a ma- chine and only a machine, it says, run by the phys- icochemical forces. His brain is only a photochemi- cal mirror, his thoughts only molecular activities. Mind, or our mental states, is only a name for complex physicochemical processes in the brain- substance. But what is it that understands and names these processes? Can a physicochemical process write a poem, or paint a picture, or weigh the stars? Modern biophysics sees no more evidence of mind in living processes than in non-living. Intelli- gence is only a sequence of physical states caused by physical stimuli. The brain is no more creative than is the prism when it divides a ray of light into the component colors of the spectrum. The division 136 THE PRBLVL MIND of a drop of water into two drops or the union of two drops into one by chemical changes inside them involves the same forces that cell-division involves, and cell-division is a no more mysterious process. Life is nothing but chemistry and physics; mind, soul, consciousness, only a sequence of chemical and physical changes in the brain-substance. But what about the living brain-substance? Do these same changes beget mind or soul when controlled in the laboratory? Does the compound in your retort think, and speculate about itself? Is there not something in living beings that science does not take account of? Mankind has long believed in a spiritual order of reality, and in so doing it is only affirming the reality of that which distinguishes it from stocks and stones. The psychic world is as much a matter of fact to us as is the world of matter and energy; because the first fact is consciousness of self, it is that which rec- ognizes the world of matter and energy. The I is the pillar that upholds the very heavens ; it is the veri- table creator of the world and of all the gods that ride over it. But to what extent, if any, it is independ- ent of matter and energy, or has been in the past, or may be in the future, is a question. (How contra- dictory all these questions are! The only realities to us are our varying states of consciousness. To the dead in their graves there is no death; death is real only to the living.) 137 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES All living things know; they know what they want, they know how to multiply, they know how to fit themselves to their environment. We cannot in the same sense ascribe intelligence to any of the motions of inert matter; they are blind, fateful, stereotyped. The cell is an intelligent being; through the chemicophysical forces it builds up a man and fits him with a brain and all his wonderful organs and powers. It builds the flower, the seed, the leaf, the stalk, the root, and through the mystery of inheritance keeps up the succession of its kind. Back of the cell is unorganized protoplasm, back of that must lie still lower conditions of matter, and so down till we come to the inorganic. But what is it that sets the process of organization going and keeps it up and pushes on and on through the bio- logic ages, from lower to higher till man is reached? Darwin says natural selection. But clearly natural selection is a secondary process; there must be a primeval onward impulse, something that profits by selection, something that knows in a blind way what it wants; that struggles, that gains and loses, and that has a goal. The weak, the unfit, drop out; that is natural rejection. The strong, the fit, press on; that is natural selection. But if there were no plan or purpose, no urge from behind, no end to be achieved, there would be neither selection nor re- jection. Live things would progress no more than do the pebbles on the beach. Do we not have to 138 THE PRIMAL MIND postulate a primal impulse toward development? I3 it all pure mechanics? Of course, in saying all this we are ascribing our intelligence to nature, and we cannot do otherwise. We can think of degrees of intelligence, but not of kinds. Evolution in the inorganic world has been a purely chemicomechanical process, but in the or- ganic there has been a new factor, supermechanical and superchemical. We are forced to think of it in those terms. Think of the blind, irrational, or, at least, un- rational forces that are careering over the earth at this moment, and every moment, — in the winds, the tides, the rains, the storms, the floods, the river and ocean currents, — changing its surface, pulling down, building up, transporting; sleeping here, raging there; one moment fostering life, the next, destroying it; malignant or benevolent according as we place ourselves in relation to them; and all, from our point of view, without intelligent guidance. No engineer has planned the drainage-system of the globe, and yet see how surely the waters find their way to the sea. I can see nothing in the operations of inorganic nature analogous to human intelligence or human benevolence, or, I may add, analogous to human malevolence. Human intelligence would go more directly to its goal and avoid the waste, the delay, the suffering, the failures, that we see about us. We 139 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES do not plant our forests or sow our seed or trim our trees, or drain our land, as Nature does; we abbrevi- ate, and select, and take short cuts, and do in a sea- son what Nature takes years to accomplish. Her forests get planted, her trees get trimmed, her canals get dug, but think how modern business methods would improve her processes. We see what we call intelligence in organic nature, — adaptation, selec- tion, the use of means to an end, — but it is all a kind of blind, groping, experimenting intelligence, like that of man in a new and strange field, when he feels his way, tries and tries again, and reaches his end after many delays and failures. If our minds only knew all that our bodies know, or knew how our bodies come to know the things they seem to know, then we should have the secret of organization, of inheritance, of adaptation, and of many other things. The body knows how to build itself up from single cells, how to preserve its form, how to run itself, how to repair and reproduce itself, and many other things. But it does not know how to combat certain enemies that attack it as well as we know how. We can aid it in many of its func- tions, and relieve it in many of its obstructions. What I know, and what my body knows, are two different things. We can separate the mind from the body in this way, and we can and do separate man from physical nature in the same way, but the truth is that the mind and the body are one, and 140 P THE PRIMiVL MIND man and the universe are one. Yet the body seems to know things which the mind does not know, as there is a wisdom in the universe that man cannot compass. We separate ourselves in thought from our bodies, on the one hand, and from the universe, on the other, while in reality the unity in both cases is complete. I think the knowledge the animal seems to possess is of the same kind and degree as the knowledge its body seems to possess, and which enables it to dis- charge all its functions and build itself up and repro- duce itself. But man transcends his body, he knows more than it does, more than outward nature about him does. It is as if he had eyes while they had only the sense of touch. His reason is his mind's eye; man sees, but his dog, as it were, goes by touch. IX "FATED TO BE FREE" I THE question of fate and free will is hoary with age. In touching upon the subject here, I have little hope that I can put a youthful face upon it. But it seems to me that the question has been discussed mainly on religious and metaphysical grounds. I have in mind to see what light can be thrown upon the subject from the consideration of our relation to the natural world around us and within us. The moment we think of ourselves as a part of this natural world, with its laws and forces vital within us and an innate part of our essential being, the problem takes on a new aspect. The neces- sity that rules us is no longer foreign to us, but is the essence of our own wills. Our sense of freedom is as clear and secure as our own eyesight. The phrase "fated to be free," is Emerson's, and well expresses the kind of contradiction and mar- riage of opposites that we find everywhere in nature and in life. "Man is fated to be free." The deter- minism of the nature within him and without him does not blunt or abridge his sense of absolute free- dom of choice. He always feels himself free to choose 142 « FATED TO BE FREE" between two objects or two courses of action, no matter how much in reaUty he may be in the grip of the necessity that rules in the sequence of cause and effect. Our relation to the atmosphere well illustrates the principle of fate and free will. We live at the bottom of a great atmospheric sea in which we move with the utmost freedom, but which yet presses upon us with the force of many tons' weight. We are not conscious of this enormous pressure because om* organizations are adapted to it; we are born and grow up under its influence as do the fish in the bottom of the sea under water pressure. It is not the pressure of a burden; our freedom is un- hampered; the frailest bubble is not affected by it, because the pressure from within neutralizes the pressure from without. Herein we see the fatalism of nature, which presses upon us so heavily from all sides and yet leaves us with a sense of perfect free- dom and spontaneity because it acts w^ithin us as well as without — in the mechanism of our bodies and in our inherited traits and dispositions, as well as in the external forces that constantly play upon us. The fatalism of nature working within us does not hamper us because, I repeat, it is a part of our very selves. We are always free to do what we like, because we never like to do what is contrary to the nature within us. In one sense, therefore, we are not free at all, be- cause we are a part of that nature which is greater 143 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES than we are, and which works over us and through us. In another sense we are absolutely free, because that nature is vital within us and is the pith and marrow of our own wills. We cannot separate our- selves from the world of forces that surround us, and set up on our own account as independent centres of energy, but what we call our wills give us power in a measure to direct and modify the very nature of which we form a part. Nature works us cunningly as a machine is worked by external forces, and yet we know it not. How sure we are, for instance, that we draw the air into our lungs when we breathe, as literally as we put the food into our mouths ! The universal mechanical principle involved, in other words, the involuntary nature of our breathing, we never suspect. Can we not breathe fast or slow, deeply or superficially, practice abdominal breathing or chest breathing, or even inhibit breathing for a minute or more? How free the act seems to be, and yet the chest is a bellows over which our wills have but slight control. Our freedom in breathing, as in many other acts, is freedom inside of a stern necessity. We are free inside of the iron circle of fate; or, to use a still better image, we are free to move inside the ship, or on the train that is carrying us along. We are free to obey our natures, our spontaneous promptings, but all these things are rings of fate around us. They bear us along, but we can move a little in 144 "FATED TO BE FREE" other directions while, at the same time, we are moving with these currents. By an effort of will we can deny ourselves this or that, inhibit for a time this or that tendency, but no effort of will can make us wise, or happy, or angry, or in love, or hungry, or sad, nor can it make one temperament as calm, as patient, as sanguine as another. We are more conscious of the pull of gravity be- cause that is in one direction only; but we do not know that the force which our body exerts through its various complex movements is the force of grav- ity which the earth gives us. We overcome gravity with every step we take, only by using gravity. If our bodies were devoid of weight, how could we exert force .^ We are strong by that which opposes us, and which will crush us if we give it a chance. We are fitted into the complex of forces which runs this universe in such a subtle way that we are run by it without being aware of the fact. We do not know that the air is forced into our lungs when we breathe, the water into our mouths when we drink, and the force of gravity into our limbs when we walk. Life is that mysterious something which alone uses and rises above the material forces in this manner. Life makes servants of the energy of the non-living. It is a part of the fate which it tri- umphs over. It turns the material forces against themselves; it defeats gravity by the aid of gravity; it fights fire with fire; it outwits the wind by the aid 145 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES of the wind. The organism is built up by the same chemical reactions that would pull it down; its strength is the strength of the forces it has over- come. Life has no capital but that which it draws from the non-living. The modus operandi of this drawing science may analyze and explain, but the secret of life itself — that impulse which lifts this wave of matter up into these myriads of living forms — is beyond the reach of scientific analysis. Our breathing and drinking, I have said, are on the principle of the bellows, but the bellows implies the man working it. So our breathing implies the life-principle working the respiratory apparatus; but working from within, not from without, sus- taining a vital and not merely a mechanical relation to it. Of this we have no parallel in our mechanical contrivances. The nearest we can come to it is in the electromagnetic world, where the active and potent principle is inseparable from the ponderable body which it animates. A man may repeat the type of character of his father or grandfather — the main course of his life may be determined by his unconscious inheritances, or by his race, and the nation of which he forms a part, and yet have the utmost sense of freedom, because these things do not act as external or for- eign forces, but form the body and substance of his inmost personality; his identity is one with them. 146 "FATED TO BE FREE" How can we separate the energy that acts within us, giving power to our muscles and all our movements, that is the source of our weight and the strength of our hands, from the energy that acts without us, that checks or restrains all our movements? They are both one and the same. We overcome gravity with gravity. We break its pull whenever we lift our feet, or hurl a weight, or raise any object from the ground. The cyclone that hfts your house from its foundations, and levels forests, and heaps up the waves could do nothing without the weight which gravity imparts to the air. The force that sets the air in motion — thermic or electric, a steep gradient of temperature or an electromagnetic strain — is probably not of gravitational origin. In vegetable life what we used to call a vital force lifts matter up in opposition to gravity — lifts tons of water up into the trees, and tons of lime and potash and other earth salts, but does it by mechanical and chemical means. The vital and the physical are inseparably united, and play into each other's hands. In animal life, mechanical and chemical principles are equally active in all living bodies. In the higher forms a psychic principle comes into play. The will of man through mechanical means reverses or controls the action of gravitation and directs chemical reactions — in every instance two contraries work together and make one whole. 147 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES n Life and nature and philosophy are full of contra- dictions. The globe upon which we live presents the first great contradiction. It has no under or upper side; it is all outside. Go around it from east to west, or from north to south, and you find no bottom or top such as you see on the globe in your study, or as you apparently see on the moon and the sun in the heavens. A fly at the South Pole of the schoolroom globe is in a reversed position, but the discoverers of the South Pole on our earth did not find them- selves in a reversed position on their arrival there, or in danger of falling off. The sphere is a perpetual contradiction. It is the harmonization of opposites. Our minds are adjusted to planes and to right lines, to up and down, to over and under. Our action upon things is linear. Curves and circles baffle us. My mind cannot adjust itself to the condition of free empty space. Transport yourself in imagination away from the earth to the vacancy of the interstellar regions. Can you convince yourself that there would be no over and no under, no east and no west, no north and no south? Would one not look down to one's feet, and lift one's hand to one's head? What could one do? — no horizontal, no vertical — just the negation of all motion and direction. If one rode upon a meteor- ite rushing toward the earth, would one have the 148 "FATED TO BE FREE" sensation of falling? Could one have any sensation of motion at all in absolutely vacant space — no matter at what speed with reference to the stars one might be moving? To have a sense of motion must we not have also a sense of something not in mo- tion? In your boat on the river, carried by the tide or the current, you have no sense of motion till you look shoreward. With your eye upon the water all is at rest. The balloonist floats in an absolute calm. The wind does not buffet him because he goes with it. But he looks down and sees objects beneath him, and he looks up and sees clouds or stars above him. Fancy him continuing his journey on into space till he leaves the earth behind him — on and on till the earth appears like another moon. Would he look up or down to see it? Would he have a sense of rising or of falling? If he threw out ballast, would it drop or soar, or would it refuse to leave him? Such speculations show how relative our sense standards are, how the law of the sphere upon which we live dominates and stamps our mental concepts. Away from the earth, in free space, and we are lost; we cannot find ourselves; we are stripped of every- thing but ourselves; we are stripped of night and day, of up and down, of east and west, of north and south, of time and space, of motion and rest, of weight and direction. Just what our predicament would be, who can fancy? 149 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES The belief in free will is like the belief that the earth is a plane instead of a sphere. For all practi- cal purposes the earth is a plane — a plane which has no boundaries; and for all practical purposes the will is free. We feel at liberty to do what we like, to go here or to stay there, to vote for this candidate or to vote for that. We live our lives without any sense of the sphericity of the globe, and without any sense that our power of choice is not absolutely free. But it is as easy to prove that the will is not free as to prove that the earth is round. In the realm of material things fatalism abounds. Everything is held in the iron law of cause and effect. Only life is spon- taneous. We speak justly of the spontaneity of the great poets, of the great orators, of our own best acts, while yet we do not take into account the subtle and hidden physical forces at work. The flower blooms spontaneously, but not independently of the long chain of forces at work there in the soil, in the air, m the sun. Heroic deeds and poetic thoughts are spontaneous in the same sense. Without thought or calculation heroic deeds flash out in the lives of men, noble thoughts are born in our minds and hearts, as spontaneous as the rain or the dew, — and no more so; which is to say that they are the result of an intricate complex of causes at work in unison with the creative force of Life. Something cannot come from nothing. Some force in the man impelled him to the heroic act. All 150 it FATED TO BE FREE" that had gone to the making of his character up to that hour impelled him to it. Something in the poet bloomed or flashed out in his lyrical burst, but per- haps if he had had a headache, or had just lost a friend, the lyric would not have come. In terms of science every effect has its cause, and there is no life except from antecedent life. Wlien we fix our attention upon matter, and the laws of matter, the belief in free will is impossible. We are in the land of fatalism. We are not here by our own will. We are not of this type or family or race by oiu- own will. We are hardly more of this or that political or religious creed by our own will. We did not choose to have red hair or black hair, blue eyes or gray eyes. We have no power of choice in the main things of our lives and fortunes. And yet to us it seems that our wills are free. When we appeal to the natural scientific order, we are held in the iron bonds of necessity or determinism. The natural order is inviolable. The river is free to flow where gravity directs or pulls it, or rather, where its in- herent mobility allows it to flow. Each thing is free to obey the laws of its o\\ti nature, which means it is not really free at all. "Free as the air" we say, but the air always behaves the same under the same conditions; it is controlled by its own laws. The wind does not blow where it listeth, but where its laws decree that it shall blow. Human nature is free in the same way — a vastly more complex 151 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES^ affair than the air, yet it cannot transcend its own limitations. You and I are free to act according to our natures, modified by our training and by the times in which we Hve. This modification is not voluntary, at least only in part. Our times, our environment, our proclivities, shape us insensibly and involuntarily. How, then, is the will free.^^ A scientific analysis shows that it is not free when looked at objectively, but free when looked at subjectively. We do not ordinarily feel the bonds of our own natures. In the moral order we are free; we are unconscious of restraint or control. In our own thought we seem to do what we like, though what we like has been determined by forces or conditions far older than we are. What we like and dislike are inherent in our own natures, and with our own natures — our mental and spiritual constitutions — we have had little to do. With our physical natures likewise we have had little to do, and how closely our mental and spiritual make-ups are dependent upon the physical, we are coming more and more to realize. We like a fine day because we thrive best on a fine day, but all fine days would grow monotonous, and we should sigh for cloud and storm. We like kindness, gentleness, good nature, a cheerful spirit, because these things are conducive to our well-being. We prefer truth to falsehood, because our nature demands it. 152 "FATED TO BE FREE" We are not free in the physical order; how, then, are we free in the moral order? We cannot be wise at will, or always choose the best course, or always speak the right word, but we are free because we feel that we are free. We have moral freedom. We are willing to be held responsible for the choice we make, though that choice be in reality not so much a matter of our wills as a matter of our characters — a vague, non-scientific term with a very uncertain content. The big man who marries the little woman, and the little woman who accepts the big man, both feel that they had perfect freedom of choice, yet is it not clear that there is a law in such matters? In fact, is it not clear that most marriages are complemen- tary, — black eyes with blue, slowness with quick- ness, weakness with strength, — though the con- tracting parties yielded, as it seemed to them, to the utmost freedom of choice? Their wills were free — to do what Nature wanted them to do. Her pur- pose was deeper than theirs. A man is free to elect heaven or hell, if heaven or hell have a mortgage upon him. But if it have, he never will know it, and will credit himself with absolute power of choice. Hence, we say the will is free, though freedom only means the absence of any conscious restraint. In the pride of our wills we boast that we are masters of our fate, and so we are in a very limited 153 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES sense. In a large way human history is under the same law as natural history or biological history; is subject to the same haphazard, hit-and-miss proc- ess, the same waste, delays, failures. The only sure thing in either case is the law of progress — evolution in a general broadcast way. We do not know that the great historical characters appeared w^hen most needed. When they did appear, they did their work, filled their places, but how many epochs have come and gone without their redeemers and leaders! In how many cases the great leader and savior may have been there, though conditions and events have not favored his appearance! Grant would have died unknown had not events brought him out. So would Washington and Lincoln and Lee. Opportunity is half of life. We cannot jump off the sphere; no more can we free ourselves of the idea of a final cause. This idea of causation is developed in us by our experience in life; if we forget it, we speedily come to grief. But it does not help us in dealing with the final mystery. We can find no end to the causal sequence. We simply rest in First Cause. Two opposites may make a whole. There is often the larger truth with the lesser truth inside it. The larger truth is the law of causation; the lesser truth is the freedom of the will. Fate is true and, within limits, freedom of choice is true. If my tempera- ment, or that complex of forces and tendencies 154 (( FATED TO BE FREE" which I call my disposition, impels me to act thus and not otherwise, if my Irish blood, or my Dutch blood, or my English blood, if my maternal or my paternal grandfather, if my small brain or my large brain, rule the destinies of my life, I am still free, because these things and influences are my very self. They are not something external which lays a guid- ing and restraining hand upon me; they are the me. Hence, with the utmost sense of freedom I go my way in life. Gravity makes the stream flow, the lay of the land determines its course, but if the water were conscious, would it feel that it did not flow where it had a mind to? It has a mind to flow where gravity and the lay of the land permit it to flow. The joy of free choice is in us all because the forces that choose for us are a part of our very selves. In choosing our way of life we are controlled by many factors, but these are all vital in our char- acters. In choosing our wives, we unconsciously choose a woman who is mainly complementary to us, and yet, she is the choice of the heart — the heart chooses in obedience to this law of nature; in choosing our bosom friends, we are in the same way guided by influences we wot not of. In choosing our walk in life, we are guided by our talent, our attractions, and the like. The father chooses the profession of his son through his blood. Our con- stitutions play a part in all we do or think or 155 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES choose, and our constitutions are complexes of forces that date from the past as much as, or more than, they date from the present. Determinism is only a name; free will is only a name; the reality is our joyful and conscious obedi- ence to the promptings of our own natures. That our individual natures are a part of the general na- ture, and subject to its laws, is the fact above all. At times we are conscious of struggling against a tendency in us, but this struggle also has its natural history. We are pulled two ways, and the stronger pull wins. We yield to it because it is the strongest. Freedom of will means freedom to lift the arm, to open the eyes, to close the mouth, but not freedom to lift the hair, or to close the nose or the ears, or to abolish hunger, or any of the other things we might enumerate as against nature. All the little but fun- damental acts of our lives, all the movements of our bodies, are immediately under the control of what we call our wills. But the movements of our spirits, the promptings of our character, our temper, our dispositions, are not in the same sense under the control of our wills. Only so much of a man knows itself and is under the control of the conscious will as is necessary to his dealing successfully with outward things. By far the larger part of every one of us is the subcon- scious self. The body runs itself. Our minds have but little to say about it. All the physical functions 156 "FATED TO BE FREE" are so important that they could not be left to the hazards of the forgetful and sleep-indulging niind. In health the body does not forget to breathe, or the heart to beat, or the stomach to digest. in In all our human relations and enterprises we are no doubt under the influence of general, impersonal laws to a much larger extent than we ever suspect. Our destinies are shaped more or less by the geogra- phy of the country, by its geology, by its climate. A great river, a great lake, the coastline, a moim- tain-range — all set their stamp upon our lives. We are independent of our environment only within very narrow limits. The mountains beget one type of character, the plains another, the sea another. These influences work over and beyond our power of choice. Men in masses and tribes are subject to influences and courses of action that the individ- ual members composing them are exempt from. There is a rule of the multitude, and a rule of the in- dividual. Men collectively will be guilty of deeds and crimes that the separate units would not stoop to. In a crowd we escape the feeling of individual re- sponsibility. In mobs man reverts to more primitive and savage conditions; he becomes more like the irrational forces of nature. Is there any ground of hope that international morality will ever reach the standard of individual morality? — that the 157 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES nation will ever be as unselfish and fair-minded as the individuals composing it? The experience of most of us with individual Germans has been of the most satisfactory kind — an honest, sober-minded, fair-dealing, humane people is our verdict; but the nation embattled and fired with the thirst of con- quest and in the grip of a military despotism, re- verts to the temper of the original Hun: the atroc- ities their government and armies are guilty of shock mankind. The history of all other nations shows similar contrasts, but not, in our time, to the same degree. The streams and rivers all find their way to the sea; the conditions and influences that shape their courses are few and constant; but once they are united in the ocean, a new set of influences is called into play: the tides appear and the vast ocean cur- rents begin to flow and modify the climates of the globe. The laws of water are not changed, but new laws or forces, that have their sources beyond the earth, at once begin to operate. An application, not too precise and literal, of this fact to the na- tions of the earth may throw some light upon their behavior. X SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE I SCIENTIFIC faith is no more smooth sailing than is theological faith. One involves about as many mysteries, as many unthinkable truths, as the other. It is unthinkable that a particle of mat- ter can be so small that it cannot be made smaller, yet the atomic theory of matter involves this con- tradiction. The luminiferous ether, the most dense and at the same time the most attenuated body in the universe, which science has invented to account for the action of bodies upon other bodies at a dis- tance, is unthinkable; but with all the contradic- tions which it involves, we are compelled to assume its reality in order to account for things as we know them. How many things may be affirmed of the visible, ponderable bodies on the earth's surface which are just the opposite of what is true of the invisible, im- ponderable bodies of the interior world of matter, and which also do not hold among the bodies of celestial space! Thus all inanimate bodies on the earth's surface are at rest until some force exterior to themselves acts upon them. In the world of 159 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES molecular physics the molecules and atoms and electrons are self -moved, and are in perpetual mo- tion. If the Brunonian movement extended to visible ponderable bodies, the earth would be un- inhabitable; we should behold a sight such as we have never yet beheld. Spontaneous motion never takes place among inanimate bodies, while it is the rule among the atoms of which they are composed. Gravity and friction bind the bodies on the surface of the earth, but these laws are inoperative in the world of atoms and electrons. On the other hand, when we reach the astronomic world, or the sidereal universe, we find the same condition that prevails in the world of the infinitely little: perpetual motion goes on, friction is abolished, and nothing is at rest; there are collisions and disruptions just as there are in the world of atoms. Height and depth, upper and under, east and west, north and south, weight and inertia, as we experience them, have vanished. There are no boundaries, no ending and no begin- ning, no centre and no circumference; the infinite cannot have any of these. Rest and motion are rela- tive terms. The sun is at rest with reference to the earth, but in motion with reference to some larger system, which is again at rest when tried by the sun. Motion implies something which is not in motion. The bodies we know have weight with reference to the earth, as the earth has with reference to some larger body, and this again with reference to 160 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE some other still larger, and so on; but the universe as a whole can have no weight. A body at the centre of the earth can have no weight. If unsupported, would it move up or down? The infinitely little and infinitely vast alike baffle the understanding, developed as it is by our concrete finite life. Crea- tion is typified by the sphere. A circle is a straight line that at every point ceases to be a straight line, and the earth's surface is a plane that every moment ceases to be a plane. Following the surface of the earth does not carry us to the under side, because there is no more an under side than there is an upper side — there is only a boundless surface. But if it were possible for us to build a globe upon the earth of any conceivable dimensions would it not have an upper and an under side? n The mysteries of religion are of a different order from those of science; they are parts of an arbitrary system of man's own creation; they contradict our reason and our experience, while the mysteries of science are revealed by our reason, and transcend our experience. One implies the supernatural, while the other implies inscrutable processes or forces in the natural. That man is of animal origin is a de- duction of reason, but the fact so far transcends our experience that it puts a great strain upon our scientific faith. 161 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES The miracles of our theology do violence to our understanding, but it is a part of our faith to accept them. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and of the turning of water into wine, have their parallels in chemical reactions, as in the conversion of starch into sugar, or of sugar into an acid; the mystery is that of chemical transformations, and occurs in the every- day processes of nature, while the biblical miracles are exceptional occurrences, and are never repeated. The miracles of religion are to be discredited, not because we cannot conceive of them, but because they run counter to all the rest of our knowledge; while the mysteries of science, such as chemical affinity, the conservation of energy, the indivisibil- ity of the atom, the change of the non-living into the living, and the like, extend the boundaries of our knowledge, though the modus operandi of these changes remains hidden. We do not know how the food we eat is trans- formed into the thoughts we think; in other words, the connection of the physical with the mental baffles us; but our familiarity with the phenomena causes us to look upon them as a matter of course. In fact, while most of the mysteries and marvels of the prescientific ages only served to measure the depth of the mental darkness of those ages, the mysteries and the marvels of modern science serve to measure the depths to which we have penetrated into the hidden processes of natural law. 162 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE The scientific faith which triumphs over all o])stacles is not common. The hite Alfred Russel \\'allace was an eminent scientist and naturalist, co- kborerwith Darwin in sustaining the theory of the origin of species by natural selection; but he could not accept the whole of Darwinism. The break in his scientific faith is seen in his failure to accept com- pletely the animal origin of man; he looked upon man's spiritual nature as a miraculous addition to his animal inheritance. Natural science owes a great debt to Agassiz, but he, too, faltered before the problem of the origin of species through natural descent. He belonged to an age that had not fully emancipated itself from the dogmas of the church. He saw an incarnated thought of the Creator in every species of animal and plant. The great major- ity of mankind still see a dualist world — half nat- ural and half supernatural. But the strict scientist knows only the natural. Even the origin of life is to him only a problem of the inherent potency of matter. Darwin's scientific faith was not quite able to stand alone; it had to lean upon teleological j)rops. He could not accept the whole proposition of the natural origin of man and of other forms of life; his theory of descent had to start with a few forms, animal and vegetable, three or four, miraculously brought into the world by the creative power of rtn omnipotent being; these few original forms, through 163 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES the action of natural selection, working upon chance variation, gave rise to all the infinite diversity of forms that now people the earth. Darwin's scientific faith was strong where that of Wallace was weak, inasmuch as he had no more difficulty in accounting for the mind of man by the theory of descent, than he had in accounting for the body of man. Both were an evolution of lower forms. His was a type of mind much more steady and consistent than was the mind of Wallace. Darwin's mind was of the planetary order, while Wallace's was more cometary. The later works of Wallace are a curious mixture of scientific data and theological moonshine. Darwin's conviction of the origin of species through descent was so deep and whole-hearted that one wonders why it did not carry him back into the problem of the very beginning of life upon the globe. If natural law is adequate to account for the wonderful diversity of vegetable and animal forms, including the body and the soul of man, why should it not be adequate to account for the origin of the first primordial forms? If we are to believe that the mentality and spirituality of man as we know him to-day could arise from the blind, unreasoning lower orders, should we have any trouble in believing that living matter could arise or be evolved from the non- living? The change is no greater in the latter case than in the former. Are we to look upon the universe as half natural 164 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE and half supernatural? Must it not be entirely one or the other to be a universe? Is it any easier to believe that God planted the germs of evolution in a few forms, created out of hand, so to speak, than it is to believe that He kindled the evolutionary im- pulse in matter itself? If we believe that one species was brought into being by a special act of creative energy, are we not bound to believe that all species were? It is the old story of our fathers: that the Creator is active in nature at certain times and places, and is passive at others. The processes of creation being miraculously started, they then con- tinue under the guidance of natural law. This break in Darwin's scientific faith does not at all detract from the immense value of his work. I only point to it as showing how difficult it was for even his mind to commit itself unreservedlv to the full guidance of natural science. Tyndall, whose scientific faith was more consistent, saw the "prom- ise and the potency" of all terrestrial life in matter itself, but he wrote matter with a big M, and de- clared that at bottom it was essentially mysterious and transcendental; and Bruno, in declaring that matter was the mother of us all, brought the Crea- tor near us in the same way. Such views simply show the creative energy as always immanent in the universe. They free our minds of the notion that creation is a miracle at one end, and ordinary devel- opment at the other; that a primary cause sets the 165 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES machine going, then turns it over to secondary causes. How is it possible to conceive of so-called secondary causes, except as phases of the First Cause? When we use the phrase, the idea of dele- gated power, drawn from our civic experience, seems to be in our minds. But I doubt if the universe is run on this plan, though our ecclesiasticism has made much of this idea. Our idea of cause, anyhow, is drawn entirely from our experience with material bodies and forces. In living nature, and in the brain of man, cause and effect meet and become one. There is no up and no down, no east and no west, no north and no south, in the depths of sidereal space; neither do any other of our mundane notions of primary and secondary causes apply to the universe as a whole. The rain causes the grass to grow, and the sun causes the snow to melt, but we cannot apply the idea of cause, in this sense, to nature as a whole, but only to parts of nature. Gravitation caused New- ton's apple to fall, but what causes the earth to fall forever and ever, and never to fall upon the body that is said to attract it? Huxley's scientific faith was more radical and un- compromising than Darwin's. It never went into partnership with the old teleological notions of cre- ation. Huxley not only accepted the development theory, with all that it implies, but, so far as I can make out, he accepted the theory of the physico- 166 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE chemical origin of life itself. He found no more place for miracle at the beginning than at the end of evolution, yet he repudiated materialism as emphat- ically as he rejected what he calls spiritualism, — declaring that the latter was only the former turned bottom-side up. While recognizing that "the logical methods of physical science are of universal applica- bility," he saw clearly enough that many subjects of thought and emotion — doubtless he would say, many forms of truth — lie entirely outside the prov- ince of physical science. He recognized three forms of reality in the universe, — matter, energy, and consciousness, — and that the last-named was no conceivable modification of either of the others. Whether he assigned to consciousness the same cos- mic rank as to matter and energy, does not appear. It is quite certain that matter and energy existed before consciousness appeared, and will continue to exist after it disappears. But, in making this state- ment, are we projecting our consciousness into the past, and into the future? I note one weakness in Huxley's faith: it seems to have balked at accepting the reality of things it could not conceive of. While looking upon the the- ory of the atomic constitution of matter as a valua- ble working hypothesis, it balked at the objective existence of the atom, — a point of matter which occupied space and had form and weight, and yet was indivisible. This was beyond his power of 167 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES conception, as it is beyond the power of conception of the best of us. Yet we have to accept the atom on the demonstrations of experimental science. The hehum atom has been proved to be an objective entity as truly as is the sun in heaven. The apparent contradiction of an indivisible body is mvolved in our habits of thought formed by our dealings with ponderable bodies; we are introduced to the world of chemical reactions. We cannot conceive or pic- ture to ourselves just what takes place when two gases unite chemically, as when hydrogen and oxy- gen unite to form water. Our only resource is to apply to the process mechanical images; our experi- ence affords us no other. We fancy that the difference between two com- pounds with the same chemical formula, but with widely different properties, — say alcohol and ether, — consists in the different arrangement of the particles. Arranged in one order, they produce one compound; arranged in a different order, they result in a compound with different properties. Yet every particle of these gases is supposed to be exactly like every other particle. How hard, then, to conceive of any mere spatial arrangement of them as resulting in such widely different products. One has to think of each atom or electron as a little world in itself, containing different stores of energy or vibrating at a different rate of speed, in order to see substances of such different properties arising out of the differ- 168 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE ent orders in which the atoms are arranged in the molecule, and the molecules in the mass. If the atoms of carbon or oxygen or hydrogen are each as unique and individual as men and women are, one can see that the order in which they join hands or select their partners may be fraught with important consequences. Or if the atoms are vibrating each with a different degree of energy, or carry dill'erent charges of electricity, then one can see that the dif- ferent orders in which they stand to each other would be significant. But no mechanical image, nor the action and interaction of ponderable bodies in time and space, afford us a key to chemical combination. How can we figure to ourselves any sort of spatial disposition of the ultimate particles of the invisible gases of oxygen and hydrogen that shall result in a product so unlike either as water? How impossible it all is in the light of our experience with visible bodies! Each atom or electron seems to get inside the other. But how can an indivisible particle of matter have either an inside or an outside, or place, or weight, or any other property that we ascribe to the bodies that we see and feel.^ What a world of the imagination it all is ! It introduces us to some of the unthinkable truths of science — truths beyond our power to grasp, yet which experinKMital science verifies. It is unthinkable that matter and motion can exist without friction; that two bodies can occu- py the same space at the same time; that a particle 169 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES can be so small that it might not be smaller, or so large that it might not be larger; that space is with- out limits, creation without beginning; that at the centre of the earth there is no up and no down, on its surface no under and no over. Two waves of sound may interfere with each other and produce a silence, and two waves of light produce a darkness. Molecular physics has made great strides since Huxley's time. With all the phenomena of electric- ity before him, he could not conceive of electricity as a positive entity; he seems to have regarded it as 'only a mode of motion, like heat. How shall we think of dematerialized substance, of disembodied energy, of a fluid as elusive and ubiquitous as thought itself, or of the transformation of one form of energy into another, as of electrical energy into mechanical.? Electricity disappears in matter be- yond the reach of any analysis to reveal; it is sum- moned again from matter as by the wave of a wand. In a thunderstorm we see it rend the heavens and disappear again into its impossible lair as quick as thought — energy which is not energy. Yet we know the reality of all these things, and the atomic theory of electricity is securely established. This gross matter with which life struggles, and which we conceive of as at enmity with spirit, is far more wonderful stuff than we have ever dreamed of, and the step from the clod to the brain of man is not so impossible as it seems. There is deep beneath deep 170 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE all around us. Gross matter has its interior in the molecule; the molecule has its interior in the atom; the atom has its interior in the electron; and the electron is matter in its fourth or its ethereal estate. We easily conceive of matter in the three states, — the solid, the liquid, the gaseous, — because experi- ence is our guide; but how are we to figure to our- selves matter in the ethereal estate? In other words, how are we to grasp the electric constitution of matter? Ill In Sir Oliver Lodge we have an example of a thor- oughly trained and equipped scientific mind which yet, to account for things as we find them in this world, has to postulate another world of a different order — the world of spiritual reality — interpene- trating and interacting with the visible and tangible world about us. In doing this, Sir Oliver takes an extra-scientific step and lays himself open to the same criticism that has been visited upon Alfred Russel Wallace. Our Professor Loeb would account for all our gods through physical and chemical changes in matter, and would probably look as much askance upon Huxley's "consciousness" as belonging to the trin- ity of cosmic realities, as upon Sir Oliver Lodge's hierarchy of spirits. Huxley's coat of mail is his agnosticism: he does not know, and sees no way of 171 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES knowing, the truth of many things about which some of his fellows are so certain. Haeckel's faith is so robust that he has no trouble in seeing life arise from lifeless matter by easy nat- ural processes. But it is extraordinary matter that he starts with — unorganized matter charged with such potency that it goes forward from step to step up the ladder, from compound to compound, each step a nearer approach to life, till what he names the moneray an organism without organs, is reached, then organized protoplasm, then the cell, then the functioning organism. The first bit of unicellular life is charged with such possibilities of development that the whole world of living things lies folded in it : man and all that lies below him, all the orders and suborders and species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, are latent in the first bit of life-stuff that Haeckel invokes by the magic of words from inert matter. For his start Haeckel goes back to the first harden- ing of the earth's crust, the formation of water in a fluid condition, and great changes in the carbonic- laden atmosphere. Under these conditions a series of complicated nitrogenous carbon compounds was formed, and these first produced albumen or protein. The molecules of albumen arranged themselves in a certain way, according to their unstable chemical attractions, in larger groups of molecules; and these combined to form still larger aggregates, and thus 172 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE produced homogeneous plasma-granules. As these grew they divided, to form still hirgcr plasma-gran- ules of a homogeneous character, and the result is what he calls the monera, — the first bit of hving unorganized matter, a cell without nuclei. Out of this moneray by surface strain and chemi- cal differentiation and other obscure processes, that wonder, the nuclear cell, arose — the architect of all living things on the globe. Our bodies, and the bod- ies of all other living beings, are simply multipli- cations of cells, all fundamentally the same, — the work of a complex microscopic mechanism that seems to know from the start the part it is to play in the world, and proceeds to build all the diversities of living forms that we know; but why, in the one case, it builds a flea, or a cat, or a monkey, or a man, and in another a flower, or a pine, or an oak, Haeckel's exposition does not help us to understand. Do we know of anything in the laws of matter and force, as we see them in the non-living world, that would lead us to expect such novel results? Wiy the cell should build anything, since the colony of living cells that Dr. Carrel has kept going for a year or more builds nothing, but only multiplies its units, is a question which Haeckel's chemistry and physics will never be able to answer. *'The organs of a living body," he says, "perform their functions chiefly by virtue of their choniical composition." Undoubtedly, but what made it a 173 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES living body and gave it organs? Of course the func- tioning of any bodily organ involves chemical proc- esses, but do the processes determine the function? Do they assign one function to the liver, another to the kidneys, another to the heart? In other words, is the organizing effort that awakens in matter the result of chemistry and physics? Do we not need to go outside of the material con- stituents of a living body to account for its purpo- sive organization? Can we deduce an eye or an ear or a brain from any of the known chemical proper- ties or their material elements? Does any living thing necessarily follow from its known chemical composition? Do the material constituents of the different parts of a machine determine the purpose and function of that machine? The function of an organ and the organ itself are the result of some un- known but intelligent power in the body as a whole. I have no purpose to discredit Haeckel's science or his philosophy, but only to show how great is his scientific faith, — how much it presupposes, and what a burden it throws upon chemistry and phys- ics. Like all the later philosophical biologists, he reaches a point in his argument when chemistry and physics become creative, while he fails to see that they differ at all in their activities from the chemis- try and physics of inorganic matter. To be consist- ent he is forced to believe in the possibility of the artificial production of life. He helps himseff out by 174 SCIENTIFIC FAITH ONCE MORE endowing all matter with sensation and i)urpose, and thus its passage from one condition to another higher in the scale is easily accomplished. Haeckel's manipulation of matter to get life will to many persons seem like a sleight-of-hand trick. One thing disappears, and at a w^ord another entirely different takes its place. Now we see the solid life- less crust of the earth, then we see water and carbon dioxide, then nitrogenous carbon compounds, then, presto! we have albumen or protoplasm, the physi- cal basis of life. Out of protoplasm by a deft use of words comes the monera ; another flourish of his pen and there is that marvel, the living cell, with its nucleus, its chromosome, its centrosome, and all its complicated, intelligent, and self-directed activities. This may be the road the creative energy traveled, since we have to have creative energy whether in matter or apart from it; but our scientific faith hesi- tates until these steps can be repeated in the lab- oratory and life appear at the behest of chemical reactions. The scientific faith of mankind — faith in the uni- versality of natural causation — is greatly on the increase; it is waxing in proportion as theological faith is waning; and if love of truth is to be our form of love of God, and if the conservation of human life and the amelioration of its conditions are to be our form of brotherly love, then the religion of a scien- tific age certainly has some redeeming features. XI LITERATURE AND SCIENCE I IT is not in the act of seeing things or apprehend- ing facts that we differ so much from one an- other, as in the act of interpreting what we see or apprehend. Interpretation opens the door to the play of temperament and imagination, and to the bias of personahty, and is therefore within the sphere of hterature. A mind that has a Uvely fancy and a sense of mystery will interpret phenomena quite differently from a mind in which these things are absent. The poetic, the religious, the ethical mind will never be satisfied with the interpretation of the physical universe given us by the scientific mind. To these mental types such an interpreta- tion seems hard and barren; it leaves a large part of our human nature unsatisfied. If a man of science were to explain to a mother all the physical proper- ties, functions, and powers of her baby, and all its natural history, would the mother see her baby in such a portraiture.^ Would he have told her why she loves it? It is the province of literature and art to tell her why she loves it, and to make her love it more; of science, to tell her how she came by it, and 176 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE how to secure its physical well-being. Literature interprets life and nature in terms of our sentiments and emotions; science interprets them in terms of our understanding. The habit of mind begotten by the contemplation of Nature, and by our emotional intercourse with her, is in many ways at enmity with the habit of mind begotten by the scientific study of Nature. The former has given us literature, art, religion ; out of the latter has come our material civilization. Out of it has also come our enlarged conception of the physical universe, and a true insight as to our re- lations with it, albeit this gain seems to have been purchased, more or less, at the expense of that state of mind that in the past has given us the great poets and prophets and religious teachers and in- spirers. The saying of Coleridge, that the real antithesis to poetry is not prose but science, is of permanent value. When we look upon nature and life as the poet does, or as does an emotional, imaginative being, we see quite a different world from the one we see when, armed with chemistry and physics, we go forth to analyze it and appraise it in teruLs of exact knowledge. Science is cold and calculating, and can only deal with verifiable fact. And by far the larger part of nature and of life is unverifiablo, and therefore beyond the province of science. Sci- ence strips Nature to her bare bones; literature and 177 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES philosophy clothe the bones with something analo- gous to flesh and blood and warmth and color. The sensitive, imaginative mind cares only for that scientific truth which points to something beyond science — to large, ideal views. Unless sci- ence makes the world more alive and significant to such a mind, unless its truths have ideal values and can in some measure be made into the bread of literature, it does not permanently interest it. The hard, literal facts of physical science, unless one can synthesize them and thus in a measure escape from them, are barren and tasteless to the artistic mind. In the great sciences, like astronomy and geology, one gets wholes; the imagination has play-room. The cosmic laws launch him upon a shoreless sea. One is blown upon by a breeze from eternity. The same with biology in the light of evolution. The humanistic view and the scientific view of the universe supplement each other; science corrects and guides sense, humanism enlarges and colors and vitalizes science. After science has unveiled the heavens, our human emotions play about them; after it has revealed to us the history of the earth and of man, emotion and imagination have fresh material to work upon. Science is exact fact; litera- ture is liberal truth. The universe of science is the real world; the imion of literature and art shows what we make of 178 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE it — our interpretation of it, or huraanization of it. Literature is plastic, flowing, suggestive; science is exact, uncompromising, inflexible. If you want to know the exact condition of the weather, consult the thermometer and the barometer and the hygrome- ter, but if you want to know the quality of the day, or the subtle difference between spring and fall, and the morning and the evening, or between one day and another, consult your senses. The body will tell you what the instruments will not — the character of the day — its balminess, softness, sweetness; but it will not tell you the exact temperature, or the amount of moisture in the air, or the degree of pres- sure. The result of our sense impressions gives us the material of literature; the thermometer and the barometer give us science, exact knowledge, knowl- edge shorn of its fringe of poetry. The body and the mind sympathize with surrounding conditions; im- plements of precision do not. Science reveals things as they are in and of them- selves; literature, as they stand related to our men- tal and emotional condition and edification. One is not true and the other false; both are true in their own sphere, true as fact, and true as emotion and idea. Science explains the rainbow, but literature sees it as a symbol and a promise. So with the sunset or the sunrise. Science knows all about the diamond, but knows not why it is so prized by us. It explains the pearl, but not the pearl necklace. 179 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES Science analyzes all the life-processes, and knows all the mechanism of living beings; but it cannot find the secret of Hfe. Life, as such, it knows not; it only knows its material elements. Literature alone can grasp and interpret life; it names a vital force at which science scoffs; it names spirit, but spirit does not fall within the categories of science. The latest biological science names a new force, **biotic en- ergy," — an old friend with a new name; and it names a new substance, "plasmogen," which it has not yet found, and which is just as hypothetical as vital force. The scientific interpretation of the universe repels a great many minds because it lays the emphasis upon matter itself instead of upon something super- material. It hesitates to name a creative energy, but makes matter itself creative, and does not try to help it out with teleological conception. Science sees man arise out of the earth, as literally as it sees the plants and the trees arise, and it is convinced that if a moving picture could be had of man's long and wonderful line of descent through the geologic ages, we should see his development or growth from imorganized matter up through himdreds of chang- ing living forms during the geological ages, till we behold him as he is to-day. Condense his history, cut out the element of time, as the moving-picture machine cuts it out of the changes in the growing plant, and behold the protozoa mount and unfold, 180 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE putting on and off form after form, till man appears at the end of the series. This is the ministry of physical science, to reveal to us the divinity that lurks in the ground under- foot. We do not so much need its services to point out the glory and grandeur overhead. In all ages man has been aware of this; but the soil he treads, the bodies that impede his way, he has spurned with his foot; they were anathema to him. They were the antithesis of spirit, and his enemy. The heavens declared the glory of God because they were so far off; near at hand, they were of the earth, earthy. Science teaches us that the earth is a celestial body also, and that there is no better or finer stuff in the heavens above than in the earth beneath, and Whitman*s lines indicate this fact — "Underneath, the divine soil. Overhead, the sun." But the moral and religious import of this stupen- dous truth has not yet influenced our habits of thought; we are still the prisoners of the old dualism. II As I have said, the two types of mind, the scien- tific and the artistic, the analytic and the synthetic, look upon nature and life with quite different eyes. Wordsworth said of his poet that he was quite "con- tented to enjoy what others understood." When Whitman, as he records in one of his poems, Ikd 181 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES from the lecture-hall where the "learned astrono- mer" was discoursing about the stars, and in silence gazed up at the sky gemmed with them, he showed clearly to which type he belonged. Tyndall said that men of warm feelings, with minds open to the elevating impressions produced by nature as a whole, whose satisfaction therefore is rather ethical than logical, lean to the synthetic side, while the analytic harmonizes best with the more precise and more mechanical bias which seeks the satisfaction of the understanding. Tyndall said of Goethe that while his discipline as a poet went well with his nat- ural history studies, it hindered his approach to the physical and mechanical sciences. Tyndall, him- self, was a notable blending of the two types of mind; to his proficiency in analytical and experimen- tal science he joined literary gifts of a high order. It is these gifts that make his work rank high in the literature of science. Tyndall was wont to explain his mechanistic views of creation to Carlyle, whom he greatly re- vered. But Carlyle did not take kindly to them. This was one of the phases of physical science which repelled him. Carlyle revolted at the idea that the sun was the physical basis of life. He could not en- dure any teaching that savored of materialism. He would not think of the universe as a machine, but as an organism. Yggdrasill, the Tree of Life, was his favorite image. Considering how the concrete forces 182 LITERxVTURE AND SCIENCE of the universe circulate and pull to^'clhcr, he found no similitude so true as that of the tree. "Beauti- ful, altogether beautiful and great," said he. "The Machine of the universe — alas! to think of that in contrast!" Carlyle was a poet and a prophet and saw the world through his moral and spiritual nature, and not through his logical faculties. He revolted at the conception of the mystery we name life being the outcome of physical and chemical forces alone. Literature, art, and religion are not only not fos- tered by the scientific spirit, but this spirit, it seems to me, is almost fatal to them, at least so far as it banishes mystery and illusion, and checks or inhibits our anthropomorphic tendencies. Literature and art have their genesis in love, joy, admiration, spec- ulation, and not in the exact knowledge which is the foundation of science. Our creative faculties may profit by exact knowledge of material things, but they can hardly be inspired by it. Inspiration is from within, but scientific knowledge is from without. There is no literature or art without love and con- templation. We can make literature out of science only when we descend upon it with love, or with some degree of emotional enjoyment. Natural his- tory, geology, biology, astronomy, yield literary ma- terial only to the man of emotion and imagination. Into the material gathered from outward nature 183 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES the creative artist puts himself, as the bee puts herself into the nectar she gathers from the flowers to make it into honey. Honey is the nectar plus the bee; and a poem, or other work of art, is fact and observation plus the man. In so far as scientific knowledge checks our tendency to humanize nature, and to infuse ourselves into it, and give to it the hues of our own spirits, it is the enemy of literature and art. In so far as it gives us a wider and truer conception of the material universe, which it cer- tainly has done in every great science, it ought to be their friend and benefactor. Our best growth is at- tained when we match knowledge with love, insight with reverence, understanding with sympathy and enjoyment; else the machine becomes more and more, and the man less and less. Fear, superstition, misconception, have played a great part in the literature and religion of the past; they have given it reality, picturesqueness, and power; it remains to be seen if love, knowledge, democracy, and human brotherhood can do as well. Ill The literary treatment of scientific matter is nat- urally of much more interest to the general reader than to the man of science. By literary treatment I do not mean taking liberties with facts, but treating them so as to give the reader a lively and imagina- tive realization of them — a sense of their aesthetic 184 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE and intellectual values. The creative mind can quicken a dead fact and make it mean something in the emotional sphere. When we humanize things, we are beyond the sphere of science and in the sj)here of literature. We may still be dealing with truths, but not with facts. Tyndall, in his "Fragments," very often rises from the sphere of science into that of literature. He does so, for instance, in considering the question of per- sonal identity in relation to that of molecular change in the body. He asks : — How is the sense of personal identity maintained across this flight of the molecules that goes on incessantly in our bodies, so that while our physical being, after a certain number of years, is entirely renewed, our consciousness exhibits no solution of continuity? Like clianging sen- tinels, the oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon that depart seem to whisper their secret to their comrades that arrive, and thus, while the Non-ego shifts, the Ego remains the same. Constancy of form in the groujiing of tlie mole- cules, and not constancy of the molecules tliemsclves, is the correlative of this constancy of perception. Life is a wave which in no two consecutive moments of existence is composed of the same particles. Tyndall has here stated a scientific fact in the picturesque and poetic manner of literature. Henri Bergson docs this on nearly every page. When his subject-matter is scientific, his treatment of it is literary. Indeed, the secret of the charm and power of his "Creative Evolution" is the rare fusion and 185 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES absorption of its scientific and philosophical mate- rial, by the literary and artistic spirit. How vividly present Huxley is in everything he writes or speaks, the man shining through his sen- tences as if the sword were to shine through its scab- bard ! — a different type from Tyndall, more con- troversial. A lover of combat, he sniffs the battle afar; he is less poetical than Tyndall, less given to rhetoric, but more a part of what he says, and hav- ing a more absolutely transparent style. How he charged the foes of Darwin, and cleared the field of them in a hurry ! His sentences went through their arguments as steel through lead. As a sample of fine and eloquent literary state- ment I have always greatly admired that closing passage in his essay on "Science and Morals" in which he defends physical science against the at- tacks of Mr. Lilly, who, armed with the weapons of both theology and philosophy, denounced it as the evil genius of modern days : — If the diseases of society [says Huxley] consist in the weakness of its faith in the existence of the God of the theologians, in a future state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as the doctors s.a3% is to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which they know nothing have been the prime cause and con- tinual sustenance of that evil skepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable. Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters. She lights the fire, sweeps the house, 186 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE and provides the dinner; and is rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken of the pair of shrews who are quarreling downstairs. She sees the order which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, hut also with abundant goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she learns in her heart of hearts the lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible proi)ositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge. She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this or that theological creed, but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends social disorganization upon the track of immorality as surely as it sends physical disease after physical tres- passes. And of that firm and lively faith it is her high mission to be the priestess. Although Tyndall and Huxley possessed fine liter- ary equipments, making them masters of the art of eloquent and effective statement, they were never- theless on their guard against any anthroponiori)liic tendencies. They were not unaware of the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, but as men of science they could interpret evolution only in terms of matter and energy. Most of their writ- ings are good literature, not because the authors humanize the subject-matter and read themselves into Nature's script, but because they are masters 187 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES of the art of expression, and give us a lively sense of the workings of their own minds. Herbert Spencer, so far as I have read him, never breathes the air of pure literature. "Life," says Spencer, *'is a continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." In other words, without air, water, and food our bodies would cease to function and life would end. Spencer's definition is, of course, true so far as it goes, but it is of no more interest than any other statement of mere fact. It is like opaque and inert matter. Tyndall's free charac- terization of life as a "wave which in no two con- secutive moments of existence is composed of the same particles" pleases much more, because the wave is a beautiful and suggestive object. The mind is at once started upon the inquiry. What is it that lifts the water up in the form of a wave and travels on, while the water stays behind? It is a force imparted by the wind, but where did the wind get it, and what is the force? The impulse we call life lifts the particles of the inorganic up into the organic, into the myriad forms of life, — plant, tree, bird, animal, — and, when it has run its course, lets them drop back again into their original ele- ments. Spencer was foreordained to the mechanistic view of life. His mind moves in the geometric plane. It is a military and engineering intellect applied to the problems of organic nature. How smoothly and 188 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE orderly his intellect runs, with what force and i)reci- sion, turning out its closely woven philosoi)hical fabric as great looms turn out square miles of tex- tiles, without a break or a flaw in the process. Never was a mind of such power so little inspired; never was an imagination of such compass so com- pletely tamed and broken into the service of the rea- soning intellect. There is no more aerial perspective in his pages than there is in a modern manufacturing- plant, and no hint w^hatever of "the light that never was on sea or land." We feel the machine-like run of his sentences, each one coming round with the regularity and precision of the revolving arms of a patent harvester, making a clean sweep and a smooth cut; the homogeneous and the heterogene- ous, the external and the internal, the inductive and the deductive processes, alternating in a sort of rhythmic beat like the throb of an engine. Si)encer had a prodigious mind crammed with a prodigious number of facts, but a more juiceless, soulless sj's- tem of philosophy has probably never emanated from the human intellect. IV The tendency to get out of the si)here of science — the sphere of the verifiable — into the sphere of literature, or of theology, or of philosophy, is j)ro- nounced, even in many scientific minds. It is pro- nounced in Sir Oliver Lodge, as seen in his book on 189 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES "Science and Immortality." It is very pronounced in Alfred Russel Wallace; in fact, in his later work his anthropomorphism is rampant. He has cut more fantastic tricks before the high heaven of science than any other man of our time of equal scientific attainments. What a contrast to the sane, patient, and truth-loving mind of Darwin! Yet Darwin, it seems to me, humanized his birds when he endowed the females with human femininity, attributing to them love of ornament and of fine plumage, and making this love of ornamentation the basis of his theory of sexual selection. It seems as though in that case he could not find the key to his problem, and so proceeded to make one — a trick to which we are all prone. Since science dehumanizes nature, its progress as science is in proportion as it triumphs over the an- thropomorphic character w^hich our hopes, our fears, our partialities, in short, oiu- innate humanism, has bestowed upon the outward world. Literature, on the other hand, reverses this process, and humanizes everything it looks upon; its products are the fruit of the human personality playing upon the things of life and nature, making everything redolent of hu- man qualities, and speaking to the heart and to the imagination. Science divests nature of all human attributes and speaks to impersonal reason alone. For science to be anthropomorphic is to cease to be science; and for literature to be anything else is to 190 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE fail as literature. Accordingly, the poet is poet by virtue of his power to make himself the centre and focus of the things about him, but the scienlific mind is such by virtue of its power to emancipate itself from human and personal consideration, and rest with the naked fact. There is no art without the play of personality, and there is no science till we have escaped from personality, and from all forms of the anthropomorphism that doth so easily beset us. It is not that science restricts the imagination; it is that it sterilizes nature, so to speak, reducing it to inorganic or non-human elements. This is why the world as science sees it is to so many minds a dead world. When we find fault with science, and accuse it of leading us to a blank w^all of material things, or of deadening our aesthetic sensibilities, we are finding fault w4th it because it looks upon the universe in the light of cold reason, and not through that of the emotions. But our physical well-being demands the dehumanization of the physical world; until we see our true relation to the forces amid which we live and move, — our concrete bodily relations, — we are like children playing with fire, or with edged tools, or with explosives. Man made no headway against disease, against plague and pestilence, till he outgrew his humanistic views, dissociated them from evil spirits and ofi'ended deities, and looked upon them as within the pale of natural causation. 191 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES Early man saw and felt and heard spirits on all sides of him — in fire, in water, in air; but he controlled and used these things only so far as he was practi- cally scientific. To catch the wind in his sails he had to put himself in right physical relation to it. If he stayed the ravages of flood or fire, Ye was compelled to cease to propitiate these powers as offended dei- ties, and fight them with non-human forces, as he does to-day. And the man of to-day may have any number of superstitions about his relations to the things around him, and about theirs to him, but he is successful in dealing with them only when he forgets his superstitions and approaches things on rational grounds. Our fathers who held that every event of their lives was fixed and unalterable, according to the decrees of an omnipotent being, could not have sur- vived had their daily conduct been in harmony with their beliefs. But when ill, they sent for the doctor; if the house got afire, they tried to put the fire out; if crops failed, they improved their husbandry. They slowly learned that better sanitation lessened the death-rate; that temperate habits prolonged life; that signs and wonders in the heavens and in the earth had no human significance; that wars abated as men grew more just and reasonable. We come to grief the moment that we forget that Na- ture is neither for nor against us. We can master her forces only when we see them as they are in and of 192 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE themselves, and realize that they make no exception in our behalf. The superstitious ages, the ages of religious wars and persecutions, the ages of famine and pestilence, were the ages when man's humanization of Nature was at its height; and they were the ages of the great literature and art, because, as we have seen, these things thrive best in such an atmosphere. Take the gods and devils, the good and bad spirits, fate, and foreknowledge, and the whole supernatural hier- archy out of the literature and art of the past, and what have we left? Take them out of Homer and iEschylus and Virgil and Dante and Milton, and we come pretty near to making ashes of them. In mod- ern literature, or the literature of a scientific age, these things play an insignificant part. Take them out of Shakespeare, and the main things are left; take them out of Tennyson, and the best remains; take them out of Whitman, and the effect is hardly appreciable. Whitman's anthropomorphism is very active. The whole universe is directed to Whitman, to you, to me; but Whitman makes little or no use of the old stock material of the poets. He seeks to draw into himself and to assimilate and imbue with tlie hu- man spirit the entire huge materialism of the modern democratic world. He gives the first honors to sci- ence, but its facts, he says, are not his dwelling; — "I but enter by them to an area of my dwelling." 193 UNDER THE APPLE-TREES Being a poet, he must live in the world of the emo- tions, the intuitions, the imagination, — the world of love, fellowship, beauty, religion, the super- scientific world. As practical beings with need of food, shelter, transportation, we have to deal with the facts within the sphere of physical science; as social, moral, and sesthetic beings, we live in the super-scientific world. Our house of life has upper stories that look off to the sky and the stars. We are less as men than our fathers, have less power of character, but are more as tools and vehicles of the scientific intellect. Man lives in his emotions, his hopes and fears, his loves and sympathies, his predilections and his affin- ities, more than in his reason. Hence, as we have more and more science, we must have less and less great literature; less and less religion; less and less superstition, and should have less and less racial and political antagonisms, and more and more free- dom and fellowship in all fields and with all peoples. Science tends to unify the nations and make one family of them. The antique world produced great literature and great art, but much of its science was childish. We produce great science, but much of our literature and art is feeble and imitative. Science, as such, neither fears, nor dreads, nor wonders, nor trembles, nor scoffs, nor scorns; is not puffed up; thinketh no evil; has no prejudices; turns 194 LITERATURE AND SCIENCE aside for nothing. Though all our gods totter and fall, it must go its way. It dispels our illusions because it clears our vision. It kills superstition because it banishes our irrational fears. Mathematical and scientific truths are fixed and stable quantities; they are like the inorganic com- pounds; but the truths of literature, of art, of reli- gion, of philosophy, are in perpetual flux and trans- formation, like the same compounds in the stream of life. How much of the power and the charm of the poetic treatment of nature lies in the fact that the poet reads himself into the objects he portrays, and thus makes everything alive and full of human interest ! He sees — "The jocund day Stand tip-toe on the misty mount