become one of the popular standard works of America.

The story of the American Indian is--despite taboos and squalor--a story
of harmonizations with nature. "Wolf Brother," in _Long Lance_, by Chief
Buffalo Child Long Lance, is a poetic concretion of this harmony. As
much at ease with the wilderness as any Blackfoot Indian was George
Frederick Ruxton, educated English officer and gentleman, who rode
horseback from Vera Cruz to the Missouri River and wrote _Adventures
in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains_. In this book he tells how a lobo
followed him for days from camp to camp, waiting each evening for his
share of fresh meat and sometimes coming close to the fire at night. Any
orthodox American would have shot the lobo at first appearance. Ruxton
had the civilized perspective on nature represented by Thoreau and Saint
Francis of Assisi. Primitive harmony was run over by frontier wrath to
kill, a wrath no less barbaric than primitive superstitions.

But the coyote's howl is more tonic than all theories about nature; the
buck's whistle more invigorating; the bull's bellow in the canyon more
musical; the call of the bobwhite more serene; the rattling of the
rattlesnake more logical; the scream of the panther more arousing to the
imagination; the odor from the skunk more lingering; the sweep of the
buzzard in the air more majestical; the wariness of the wild turkey
brighter; the bark of the prairie dog lighter; the guesses of the
armadillo more comical; the upward dartings and dippings of the
scissortail more lovely; the flight of the sandhill cranes more fraught
with mystery.

There is an abundance of printed information on the animal life of
America, to the west as well as to the east. Much of it cannot be
segregated; the earthworm, on which Darwin wrote a book, knows nothing
of regionalism. The best books on nature come from and lead to the
Grasshopper's Library, which is free to all consultants. I advise the
consultant to listen to the owl's hoot for wisdom, plant nine bean rows
for peace, and, with Wordsworth, sit on an old gray stone listening for
"authentic tidings of invisible things." Studies are only to "perfect
nature." In the words of Mary Austin, "They that make the sun noise
shall not fail of the sun's full recompense."

Like knowledge in any other department of life, that on nature never
comes to a stand so long as it has vitality. A continuing interest
in natural history is nurtured by _Natural History_,