Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 May 1904 — WILD LIFE OBSERVATION [ARTICLE]

WILD LIFE OBSERVATION

Most of Us See More or Less than the Truth. Good observers are probably about as rare as good poets. Accurate seeing —an eye that takes in the whole truth, and nothing but the truth —how rare indeed it is! $o few persons know or can tell exactly what they see; so few persons can draw a right inference from an observed fact; so few persons can keep from reading their own thoughts and preconceptions into what they sec; only a person with the scientific habit of mind can be trush'd to report things as they are. Most of us, in observing tile wild life nbout us, see more or less of the truth. We see less when our minds are dull, or preoccupied, or blunted by want of Interest. This Is true of most country people. We see more when we rend the lives of me wild creatures aliout us in the light of our human experience, and Impute to the birds nnd beasts human motives and methods. Tills is too .often true of the eager city man or woman who sallies out Into the country to study nature. The tendency to sentimentalize nature lias, in our time, largely taken the place of the old tendency to demonize and spiritiz.e it. It Is anthropomorphism in another form, less fraught with evil to us, but equally In the way of a clear understanding of the life about us.—J6llll Burroughs In the Century.