in
their heads, and have ever had to do with them. And Pliny names
authors who had devoted their whole lives to the study of the subject.

But the ancients, like women and children, were not accurate
observers. Just at the critical moment their eyes were unsteady, or
their fancy, or their credulity, or their impatience, got the better
of them, so that their science was half fact and half fable. Thus, for
instance, because the young cuckoo at times appeared to take the head
of its small foster mother quite into its mouth while receiving its
food, they believed that it finally devoured her. Pliny, who embodied
the science of his times in his natural history, says of the wasp that
it carries spiders to its nest, and then sits upon them until it
hatches its young from them. A little careful observation would have
shown him that this was only a half truth; that the whole truth was,
that the spiders were entombed with the egg of the wasp to serve as
food for the young when the egg shall have hatched.

What curious questions Plutarch discusses, as, for instance, "What is
the reason that a bucket of water drawn out of a well, if it stands
all night in the air that is in the well, is more cold in the morning
than the rest of the water?" He could probably have given many reasons
why "a watched pot never boils." The ancients, the same author says,
held that the bodies of those killed by lightning never putrefy; that
the sight of a ram quiets an enraged elephant; that a viper will lie
stock still if touched by a beechen leaf; that a wild bull grows tame
if bound with the twigs of a fig-tree; that a hen purifies herself
with straw after she has laid an egg; that the deer buries his
cast-off horns; that a goat stops the whole herd by holding a branch
of the sea-holly in his mouth, etc. They sought to account for such
things without stopping to ask, Are they true? Nature was too novel,
or else too fearful, to them to be deliberately pursued and hunted
down. Their youthful joy in her, or their dread and awe in her
presence, may be better than our scientific satisfaction, or cool
wonder, or our vague, mysterious sense of "something far more deeply
interfused;" yet we cannot change with them if we would, and I, for
one, would not if I could. Science does not mar nature. The railroad,
Thoreau found, after all, to be about the wildest road he knew of, and
the telegraph wires the best aeolian harp out of doors. Study of nature
deepens the