foregoing is one way to interpret or explain natural facts.
Everything has its reason. To hit upon this reason is to interpret it
to the understanding. To interpret it to the emotions, or to the moral
or to the aesthetic sense, that is another matter.

I would not be unjust or unsympathetic toward this current tendency to
exalt the lower animals into the human sphere. I would only help my
reader to see things as they are, and to stimulate him to love the
animals as animals, and not as men. Nothing is gained by
self-deception. The best discipline of life is that which prepares us
to face the facts, no matter what they are. Such sweet companionship
as one may have with a dog, simply because he is a dog, and does not
invade your own exclusive sphere! He is, in a way, like your youth
come back to you, and taking form--all instinct and joy and adventure.
You can ignore him, and he is not offended; you can reprove him, and
he still loves you; you can hail him, and he bounds with joy; you can
camp and tramp and ride with him, and his interest and curiosity and
adventurous spirit give to the days and the nights the true holiday
atmosphere. With him you are alone and not alone; you have both
companionship and solitude. Who would have him more human or less
canine? He divines your thought through his love, and feels your will
in the glance of your eye. He is not a rational being, yet he is a
very susceptible one, and touches us at so many points that we come to
look upon him with a fraternal regard.

I suppose we should not care much for natural history, as I have
before said, or for the study of nature generally, if we did not in
some way find ourselves there; that is, something that is akin to our
own feelings, methods, and intelligence. We have traveled that road,
we find tokens of ourselves on every hand; we are "stuccoed with
quadrupeds and birds all over," as Whitman says. The life-history of
the humblest animal, if truly told, is profoundly interesting. If we
could know all that befalls the slow moving turtle in the fields, or
the toad that stumbles and fumbles along the roadside, our sympathies
would be touched, and some spark of real knowledge imparted. We should
not want the lives of those humble creatures "interpreted" after the
manner of our sentimental "School of Nature Study," for that were to
lose fact in fable; that were to give us a stone when we had asked for
bread; we should want only a truthful record from th