chiefly as medicine. The honey of Mount Hymettus
owes its fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia and in
Florida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated honey of
Narbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of rosemary.
In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather.

California honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and now
takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and the
bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler, "may
forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactories may fail,
and commodities be debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the
wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will continue
without change or derogation."

II. SHARP EYES AND OTHER PAPERS

CONTENTS

SHARP EYES

THE APPLE

A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH

WINTER NEIGHBORS

NOTES BY THE WAY.

I. The Weather-wise Muskrat
II. Cheating the Squirrels
III. Fox and Hound
IV. The Woodchuck

SHARP EYES.

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amused
myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on opening
eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would he see?
Perhaps not the invisible--not the odors of flowers nor the fever
germs in the air--not the infinitely small of the microscope nor the
infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more eyes
so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but would
he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? At
any rate some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they
see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the
tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a spent or impotent
bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did Henry
Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching his
sight against the keen and alert sense of a deer or a moose, or a fox
or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another eye whenever we
see beyond the first general features or outlines of things--whenever
we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask
covers. Science confers new powers of vision.

Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or
the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes
were added.

Of c