I think it is well for you to have some one thing in which you are particularly interested. It may be flowers or birds or shells or minerals. But as the whole is greater than any of its parts, so a love and knowledge of nature, of the earth and the sky over your head and under your feet, with all that lives with you there, is more than a knowledge of its birds or trees or reptiles.
But be on your guard against the purpose to spread yourselves over too much. Don't be thin and superficial. Don't be satisfied with learning the long Latin names of things while never watching the ways of the things that have the names. As they sat on the porch, so the story goes, the school trustee called attention to a familiar little orange-colored bug, with black spots on his back, that was crawling on the floor.
"I s'pose you know what that is?" he said.
"Yes," replied the applicant, with conviction; "that is a _Coccinella septempunctata_."
"Young man," was the rejoinder, "a feller as don't know a ladybug when he sees it can't get my vote for teacher in this deestrict."
The "trustee" was right; for what is the use of knowing that the little ladybug is _Coc-ci-nel'-la sep-tem-punc-ta'-ta_ when you do not know that she is a ladybug, and that you ought to say to her:--
"Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home; Your house is on fire, your children alone"?
Let us say, now, that you are spending your vacation in the edge of the country within twenty miles of a great city such as Boston. That might bring you out at Hingham, where I am spending mine. In such an ordinary place (if any place _is_ ordinary,) what might you expect to see and watch during the summer?
Sixty species of birds, to begin with! They will keep you busy all summer. The wild animals, beasts, that you will find depend so very much upon your locality--woods, waters, rocks, etc.--that it is hard to say how many they will be. Here in my woods you might come upon three or four species of mice, three species of squirrels, the mink, the muskrat, the weasel, the mole, the shrew, the fox, the skunk, the rabbit, and even a wild deer. Of reptiles and amphibians you would see several more species than of fur-bearing animals,--six snakes, four common turtles, two salamanders, frogs, toads, newts,--a wonderfully interesting group, with a real live rattler among them if you should go over to the Blue Hills, fifteen miles away.