It is an important part, but by no means the main part of what ornithology holds for us, to be able to name every bird on sight or call. To love the bird, to appreciate its place in the landscape and in the season, to relate it to your daily life, to divine its character, to know it emotionally in your heart--that is much more. To know the birds as the sportsman knows his game; to experience the same thrill, purged of all thoughts of slaughter; to make their songs music in your life--this is indeed something to be desired.
The same with botany. I regard its class-room uses as very slight. The educational value of the technical part is almost _nil_. But the humanizing value of a love of the flowers, the hygienic value of a walk in their haunts, the æsthetic value of the observation of their forms and tints--these are all vital. The scientific value which attaches to your knowledge of the names of their parts or of their families--what is that? Their habits are interesting; their means of fertilization are interesting; the part insects play in their lives--the honey-yielders, the pollen-yielders, their means of scattering their seeds, and so forth--all are interesting. To know their habitats and seasons; to have associations with them when you go fishing; to land your trout in a bed of bee-palm or jewel-weed; to pluck the linnæa in the moss on the Adirondack mountain you are climbing; to gather pond-lilies from a boat with your friend; to pluck the arbutus on the first balmy day of April; to see the scarlet lobelia lighting up a dark nook by the stream as you row by in August; to walk or drive past vast acres of purple loosestrife, looking like a lake or sea of color--this is botany with something back of it, and the only place to learn it is where it grows. The botany that trails the days and the season and the woods and the fields with it--that is the kind that has educational value in it.
I confess I have not much sympathy with the laboratory study of nature, except for economic purposes. Nature under the dissecting knife and the microscope yields important secrets to the students of biology, but the unprofessional students want but little of all this. I know a young woman who took a post-graduate course in biology at a noted summer school, and the one thing she learned was that certain bacilli were found only in the aqueous humor of the eyes of white mice. The world is full of curious facts like that, that have no human interest or educational value whatever.