the meaning of the fossils
in the rocks? or of the carving and sculpturing of the landscape? or
of a thousand and one other things in the organic and inorganic world
about us? Science alone can answer. But if we mean by interpretation
an answer to the inquiry, "What does this scene or incident suggest to
you? how do you feel about it?" then we come to what is called the
literary or poetic interpretation of nature, which, strictly speaking,
is no interpretation of nature at all, but an interpretation of the
writer or the poet himself. The poet or the essayist tells what the
bird, or the tree, or the cloud means to him. It is himself,
therefore, that is being interpreted. What do Ruskin's writings upon
nature interpret? They interpret Ruskin--his wealth of moral and
ethical ideas, and his wonderful imagination. Richard Jefferies tells
us how the flower, or the bird, or the cloud is related to his
subjective life and experience. It means this or that to him; it may
mean something entirely different to another, because he may be bound
to it by a different tie of association. The poet fills the lap of
Earth with treasures not her own--the riches of his own spirit;
science reveals the treasures that are her own, and arranges and
appraises them.

Strictly speaking, there is not much in natural history that needs
interpreting. We explain a fact, we interpret an oracle; we explain
the action and relation of physical laws and forces, we interpret, as
well as we can, the geologic record. Darwin sought to explain the
origin of species, and to interpret many palaeontological phenomena. We
account for animal behavior on rational grounds of animal psychology,
there is little to interpret. Natural history is not a cryptograph to
be deciphered, it is a series of facts and incidents to be observed
and recorded. If two wild animals, such as the beaver and the otter,
are deadly enemies, there is good reason for it; and when we have
found that reason, we have got hold of a fact in natural history. The
robins are at enmity with the jays and the crow blackbirds and the
cuckoos in the spring, and the reason is, these birds eat the robins'
eggs. When we seek to interpret the actions of the animals, we are, I
must repeat, in danger of running into all kinds of anthropomorphic
absurdities, by reading their lives in terms of our own thinking and
consciousness.

A man sees a flock of crows in a tree in a state of commotion; now
they all caw, th