oots
were probably thrown out equally in all directions; on all sides but
one they reached the water and stopped growing; the water checked
them; but on the land side, the root on the top of the log, not
meeting with any obstacle of the kind, kept on growing, and thus
pushing its way toward the shore. It was a case of survival, not of
the fittest, but of that which the situation favored,--the fittest
with reference to position.

So with the pine-tree on the side of the hill. It probably started its
roots in all directions, but only the one on the upper side survived
and matured. Those on the lower side finally perished, and others
lower down took their places. Thus the whole life upon the globe, as
we see it, is the result of this blind groping and putting forth of
Nature in every direction, with failure of some of her ventures and
the success of others, the circumstances, the environments, supplying
the checks and supplying the stimulus, the seed falling upon the
barren places just the same as upon the fertile. No discrimination on
the part of Nature that we can express in the terms of our own
consciousness, but ceaseless experiments in every possible direction.
The only thing inexplicable is the inherent impulse to experiment, the
original push, the principle of Life.

[Illustration: BEECHNUTS
(Mr. Burroughs's boyhood home seen in the distance)]

The good observer of nature holds his eye long and firmly to the
point, as one does when looking at a puzzle picture, and will not be
baffled. The cat catches the mouse, not merely because she watches for
him, but because she is armed to catch him and is quick. So the
observer finally gets the fact, not only because he has patience, but
because his eye is sharp and his inference swift. Many a shrewd old
farmer looks upon the milky way as a kind of weathercock, and will
tell you that the way it points at night indicates the direction of
the wind the following day. So, also, every new moon is either a dry
moon or a wet moon, dry if a powder-horn would hang upon the lower
limb, wet if it would not; forgetting the fact that, as a rule, when
it is dry in one, part of the continent it is wet in some other part,
and _vice versa_. When he kills his hogs in the fall, if the pork be
very hard and solid he predicts a severe winter; if soft and loose,
the opposite; again overlooking the fact that the kind of food and
the temperature of the fall make the pork hard or make it s