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n with Nature, while we are merely seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually occurring before our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual endowment. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant persons--that is, observant in all things intimately related with their own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education--who, with all the pains they could take in after life, have never been able to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so many, of our British singing-birds; while as to knowing them by their song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a shilfa chants to them like a yellow yoldrin. On seeing a small bird peeping out of a hole in the eaves, and especially on hearing him chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the "auld clay bigging" in the window-corner, he cannot mistake Mistress Swallow, yet when flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever and anon dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that he misnames her Miss Marten. What constant caution is necessary during the naturalist's perusal even of the very best books! From the very best we can only obtain knowledge at second-hand, and this, like a story circulated among village gossips, is more apt to gain in falsehood than in truth, as it passes from one to another; but in field-study we go at once to the fountain-head, and obtain our facts pure and unalloyed by the theories and opinions of previous observers. Hence it is that the utility of books becomes obvious. You witness with your own eyes some puzzling, perplexing, strange, and unaccountable--fact; twenty different statements of it have been given by twenty different ornithologists; you consult them all, and getting a hint from one, and a hint from another, here a glimmer of light to be followed, and there a gloom of darkness to be avoided--why, who knows but that in the end you do yourself solve the mystery, and absolutely become not only happy but illustrious? People sitting in their own parlour with their feet on the fender, or in the sanctum of some museum, staring at stuffed specimens, imagine themselves naturalists; and in their pre
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