ulae and measurements, we may pass by,
but the natural truths they disclose are of interest to the healthy
mind for their own sake. It is not the ethics of chemical reactions
and combinations--if there be ethics in them--that arrests our
attention, but the light they throw on the problem of how the world
was made, and how our own lives go on. The method of Nature in the
physical world no doubt affords clues to the method of Nature in the
non-physical, or supersensuous world. But apart from that, it is
incredible that a mind like Emerson's took no interest in natural
knowledge for its own sake. The fact that two visible and inodorous
gases like hydrogen and oxygen--one combustible and the other the
supporter of combustion--when chemically combined produce water, which
extinguishes fire, is intensely interesting as affording us a glimpse
of the contradictions and paradoxes that abound everywhere in Nature's
methods. If there is any ethics or any poetry in it, let him have it
who can extract it. The great facts of nature, such as the sphericity
of the cosmic bodies, their circular motions, their mutual
interdependence, the unprovable ether in which they float, the blue
dome of the sky, the master currents of the ocean, the primary and the
secondary rocks, have an intellectual value, but how they in any way
illustrate the moral law is hard to see. The ethics, or right and
wrong, of attraction and repulsion, of positive and negative, have no
validity outside the human sphere. Might is right in Nature, or,
rather, we are outside the standards of right and wrong in her sphere.
Scientific knowledge certainly has a poetic side to it, but we do not
go to chemistry or to geology or to botany for rules for the conduct
of life. We go to these things mainly for the satisfaction which the
knowledge of Nature's ways gives us.

So with natural history. For my own part I find the life-histories of
the wild creatures about me, their ways of getting on in the world,
their joys, their fears, their successes, their failures, their
instincts, their intelligence, intensely interesting without any
ulterior considerations. I am not looking for ethical or poetic
values. I am looking for natural truths. I am less interested in the
sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The
significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does
not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar
weaves her cocoon an