Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 169, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1918 — Knowledge, Without Love of Nature Does Not Stick, Says an Authority on the Subject. [ARTICLE]

Knowledge, Without Love of Nature Does Not Stick, Says an Authority on the Subject.

“Once started In pursuit of nature lore, we are pretty sure to keep on*” says John Burroughs in the Century Magazine. “When people ask me, ‘How shall we teach our children to love nature?’ I reply: ‘Do not try to teach them at all. Just turn them loose in the country and trust to luck.’ It is time enough to answer children’s questions when they are interested enough to ask them. Knowledge without love does not stick; but if love comes first, knowledge is pretty sure to follow. I do not know how I first got my own love for nature, but I suppose it was because I was born and passed my youth on the farm, and reacted spontaneously to the natural objects about me. I felt a certain privacy and kinship with the woods and fields and streams long before the naturalist awoke to self-consciousness within me/ A feeling of companionship with nature came long prior to any conscious desire for accurate and specific knowledge about her works. I loved the flowers and the wild creatures, as most healthy children do, long before I knew there was such a study as botany or natural history. And when I take a walk now, thoughts of natural history play only a secondary part; I suspect it is more to bathe the spirit in natural influences than to store the mind with natural facts. I think I know what Emerson means when he says in his journal that a walk in the woods is one of the secrete for dodging old age.”