ect or to modify the
observations of others. If what you report is antecedently improbable,
I shall want concrete proof before accepting it, and I shall
cross-question your witness sharply. If you tell me you have seen
apples and acorns, or pears and plums, growing upon the same tree, I
shall discredit you. The thing has never been known and is contrary to
nature. But if you tell me you have seen a peach tree bearing
nectarines, or have known a nectarine-stone to produce a peach tree, I
shall still want to cross-question you sharply, but I may believe
you. Such things have happened. Or if you tell me that you have seen
an old doe with horns, or a hen with spurs, or a male bird incubating
and singing on the nest, unusual as the last occurrence is, I shall
not dispute you. I will concede that you may have seen a white crow or
a white blackbird or a white robin, or a black chipmunk or a black red
squirrel, and many other departures from the usual in animal life; but
I cannot share the conviction of the man who told me he had seen a red
squirrel curing rye before storing it up in its den, or of the writer
who believes the fox will ride upon the back of a sheep to escape the
hound, or of another writer that he has seen the blue heron chumming
for fish. Even if you aver that you have seen a woodpecker running
down the trunk of a tree as well as up, I shall be sure you have not
seen correctly. It is the nuthatch and not the woodpecker that hops up
and down and around the trees. It is easy to transcend any man's
experience; not so easy to transcend his reason. "Nobody has seen so
many things as everybody," yet a dozen men cannot see any farther than
one, and the truth is not often a matter of majorities. If you tell me
any incident in the life of bird or beast that implies the possession
of what we mean by reason, I shall be very skeptical.

Am I guilty, then, as has been charged, of preferring the deductive
method of reasoning to the more modern and more scientific inductive
method? But I doubt if the inductive method would avail one in trying
to prove that the old cow really jumped over the moon. We do deny
certain things upon general principles, and affirm others. I do not
believe that a rooster ever laid an egg, or that a male tiger ever
gave milk. If your alleged fact contradicts fundamental principles, I
shall beware of it; if it contradicts universal experience, I shall
probe it thoroughly. A college professor wrote me t