If one could number all the trees of the forest and all the leaves upon the trees, what would it profit him? To know the different kinds of trees when you see them, and the function of the leaves upon them--that were more worth while. I have read studies of leaves that were just as profitless as to know their numbers. I have heard discourses upon the changes in the plumage of certain water-fowl from youth to age, and from one moult to another, that were as profitless and wearisome as studying the variations of the leaves or their numbers.
I hardly know why I am impatient when people come to me with their hands full of different leaves and ask me what tree is this from, and this, and this? If your business is not with trees, if you live in the city and care mainly for city things, why bother about the trees, unless for the pleasure of it during your summer excursions into the country; and if it affords you pleasure, you will not want any one to tell you: you will want to identify the trees themselves.
The same with the birds. The main profit of this branch of natural history is in the pursuit--not in the name, but in the bird. It is the chase that allures the sportsman, and it is the chase that profits the nature-student. Did you ever receive a gift of brook-trout by express? How pitiful they look--stale fish only! But the trout you brought in at night after threading for miles the mountain stream: its voice all day in your ears; its sparkle all day in your eyes; the love of its beauty and purity all day in your heart; wading through bee-balm or jewel-weed; skirting wild pastures; starting the grouse or the woodcock with their young; surprising bird and beast at their home occupations--these were trout with a flavor.
Whatever opens up new doors or windows for us into the world about us, whatever widens the field of our interests and sympathies, has some sort of value--moral, intellectual, or æsthetic. But much of the so-called nature-study opens no new doors or windows; it affords no mental satisfaction, or illumination, or æsthetic pleasure; it is mainly pottering with dry, unimportant facts and details. Do you know the edelweiss of our own matchless arbutus after you have merely analyzed and classified them? No more than you know a man after having weighed and measured him. The function of things is always interesting. What do they do? How do they pay their way in the rigid economy of nature? How do they survive? How does the bulb of the common fawn-lily[1] get deeper and deeper into the ground each year? Why does the wild ginger hide its blossom when nearly all other plants flaunt theirs? Why are the plants of the common mouse-ear (_antennaria_)[2] always in groups, one sex here, another there, as if prohibited from mingling by some moral code in nature? Why do nearly all our trees have a twist to the right or the left--hard woods one way, and soft woods the other? Why do the roots of trees flow through the ground like "runnels of molten metal," often separating and uniting again while the branches are thrust out in right lines or curves? Why is our common yellow birch more often than any other tree planted upon a rock? Why do oaks or chestnuts so often spring up where a pine or hemlock forest has been cleared away? Why does lightning so commonly strike a hemlock tree or a pine or an oak, and rarely or never a beech? Why does the bolt sometimes scatter the tree about, and at others only plow a channel down its trunk? Why does the bumblebee complain so loudly when working upon certain flowers? Why does the honey-bee lose the sting when it stings a person, while the wasp, the hornet, and the bumblebee do not? How does the chimney-swallow get the twigs it builds its nest with? From what does the hornet make its paper?