The Adventures of a Grain of Dust Part 25

[28] That's the name of the Englishman I've just been quoting. He's a famous artist, but, like most cultivated Englishmen, can also write a good book when he feels like it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From "Bugs, b.u.t.terflies and Beetles," by Dan Beard. By permission of J. B. Lippincott_

IF BEETLES WERE AS BIG AS BOYS

Our six-footed brothers are wonderfully strong in proportion to their size, and it would go hard with us if beetles, for example, were as big as boys.]

Do you know what I felt like saying, back there in Chapter IX, when we were speaking of kingfishers, and how certain parties had given it out that kingfishers eat big fish that otherwise might be caught with a hook or a seine? This is what I _felt_ like saying:

"What if they do? Who's got a better right?"

Then they'd say--these men--I suppose:

"Why, _we_ have; _we're_ sportsmen!"

"Oh, yes," I'd say, "you're the kind of sportsman that's so afraid somebody else will see and kill something before you do; particularly if that somebody is itself a wild creature that has to earn its living that way and only takes what it needs for its family!"

And they're so good-natured about it, most of these country cousins of ours, that we walked right in on and ordered out, Cousin Woodchuck, for instance.

"The woodchuck can no more see the propriety of fencing off--though he admits that stone walls are fine refuges, in case he has to run for it--a s.p.a.ce of the very best fodder than the British peasant can see the right of shutting him out of a grove where there are wild rabbits, or forbidding him to fish in certain streams. So he climbs over, or digs under, or creeps through, the fence, and makes a path or a playground for himself amid the timothy and the clover, and laughs, as he listens from a hole in the wall or under a stump, to hear the farmer using language which is good Saxon but bad morals, and the dog barking himself into a fit."[29]

[29] Ingersoll: "Wild Neighbors."

II. THE SCHOOL OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS

I don't mean to say, mind you, that the farmer hasn't any rights in his own fields, and that he should turn everything over to the woodchuck and the rest, but I do mean to say that our wild kinsmen have rights and that there is a lot more to be got out of them than their flesh or their hides or the pleasure of killing them.

For one thing, the ant and the angleworm, the birds and the woodchucks, the little lichens and the big trees, the winds and the rains, are all teachers in the Great School of Out-of-Doors, and in this school you can learn almost everything there is to be learned. It's really a university. Nature study, as you call it in the grades, besides all the facts it teaches you, trains the eye to see, and the ear to listen, and the brain to reason, and the heart to feel.

STORY OF THE LONDON BANKER AND HIS ANTS

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIR JOHN LUBBOCK

The great London banker who carried ants in his pocket.]

Once there was a London banker who used to go around with--what do you think--in his pockets? Money? Yes, I suppose so; but what else? You'll never guess--ants! He was a lot more interested in ants than he was in money; and so, while the business world knew him as a big banker, all the scientific world knew him as a great naturalist. He wrote not only nature books but other books, including one on "The Pleasures of Life,"

and among life's greatest pleasures he placed the "friendship," as he puts it, of things in Nature. He said he never went into the woods but he found himself welcomed by a glad company of friends, every one with something interesting to tell. And, in speaking of the wide-spread growth of interest in Nature in recent years, he said:

"The study of natural history indeed, seems destined to replace the loss of what is, not very happily, I think, termed 'sport.'"

And isn't it curious, when one comes to think of it, why a man should take pleasure in seeing a beautiful deer fall dead with a bullet in its heart? You'd think there would be so much more pleasure in seeing him run--the very poetry of motion. Or, why should a boy want to kill a little bird? You'd think it would have been so much greater pleasure to study its flight or to listen to the happy notes pour out from that "little breast that will throb with song no more."

WHY MAN KILLS AND CALLS IT "SPORT"

Among other animals that this banker naturalist studied was man himself; man when he was even more of an animal than he is to-day, and he came to the conclusion that this curious killing instinct is a survival of the long ages when man had to earn his living by the chase.

"Deep in the gloom of a fireless cave When the night fell o'er the plain And the moon hung red o'er the river bed, He mumbled the bones of the slain.

Loud he howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered his kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast The clan came trooping in.

O'er joint and gristle and padded hoof, They fought and clawed and tore."[30]

[30] Adapted from Langdon Smith.

Not a very pretty picture, is it? Yet it's true. But, fortunately, so is this one of the happiest hours of the caveman's grandchild.

"Oh, for boyhood's painless play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools: Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild flower's time and place; Flight of fowl, and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his sh.e.l.l, How the woodchuck digs his cell And the ground-mole sinks his well.

Of the black wasp's cunning way, Mason of his walls of clay And the architectural plans Of gray hornet artisans.

For, eschewing books and tasks, Nature answers all he asks."[31]

[31] Whittier's "Barefoot Boy."

Some boy wrote to John Burroughs once, and asked how to become a naturalist. In his reply, Burroughs said:

"I have spent seventy-seven years in the world, and they have all been contented and happy years. I am certain that my greatest source of happiness has been my love of nature; my love of the farm, of the birds, the animals, the flowers, and all open-air things.

"You can begin to be a naturalist right where you are, in any place, in any season."[32]

[32] "Pictured Knowledge."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHOSE AUTOGRAPH IS THIS?

If you're a boy scout you will probably recognize this autograph in the snow. If not look it up in the Boy Scout Handbook.]

It is the wholesomest, most inspiring reading in all the world, this Book of Nature. And there is simply no end to it. Just see what all we've been led into merely in following out the story of a grain of dust; and even then, I've only dipped into it here and there, as you can see by the hints of things to be looked up in the library. If we had gone into all the highways and byways of the subject--for it's all one continued story, from the making of the planets, circling in the fields of s.p.a.ce, to the making of the little dust grains that are whirled along in the winds of March--if we followed the story all through we would have to have learned professors to teach us Astronomy, Geology, Chemistry, Zoology, with its subdivisions of Paleontology, Ornithology, Entomology, and so on; a whole college faculty sitting on a grain of dust!

III. THE WORLD BROTHERHOOD

An obvious thing in Nature is what is called "the struggle for existence"; animals and plants fighting among themselves and against enemies of their species in the universal struggle for food. What is not so obvious, is how the whole world of things works together toward the common good.

HOW THE LICHENS AND THE VOLCANOES WORK TOGETHER

For example, working with those quiet little people, the lichens, is one of the biggest and noisiest things in the world--the volcano. The volcanoes not only pour into the air vast quant.i.ties of carbon-gas, which is the breath of life to plants, but help the lichens and the rest of the soil-makers with their work in other ways. And as the volcanoes help the lichens get their breath, the lichens forward the world service of the volcanoes by turning their lava into soil; in course of time, hiding the most desolate of these black iron wastes under a rich garment of green. It is thus the dead lava comes to life, and it is the very smallest of the lichen family that starts the process.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Courtesy of the Northern Pacific Railway_

HOW THE DEAD LAVA COMES TO LIFE

Lava, after it has been converted into soil, by the agents of decay, makes the richest land in the world. This picture shows a vineyard on the fertile plains overlooked by Mt. Ranier, which is an extinct volcano. In the days when Mt. Rainer was being built these plains were covered with molten lava.]

Among the two princ.i.p.al gases of the air there is a working brotherhood; just as there is between the plants and the animals in their great breath exchange. The oxygen in the air makes a specialty of crumbling up rock containing iron. It rusts this iron into dust; while the CO_{2}, as the High School Boy calls what I have called carbon, for short, goes after the rocks that contain lime, potash, and soda.

Working with both these gases is the frost that, with its prying fingers, enlarges the cracks in stones, and so allows the gases of the water and the air to reach in farther than they could otherwise do.