ripe, it becomes sentimentalism. The sentiment
for nature which has been so assiduously cultivated in our times is
fast undergoing this change, and is softening into sentimentalism
toward the lower animals. Many a wholesome feeling can be pushed so
far that it becomes a weakness and a sign of disease. Pity for the
sufferings of our brute neighbors may be a manly feeling; and then
again it may be so fostered and cosseted that it becomes maudlin and
unworthy. When hospitals are founded for sick or homeless cats and
dogs, when all forms of vivisection are cried down, when the animals
are humanized and books are written to show that the wild creatures
have schools and kindergartens, and that their young are instructed
and disciplined in quite the human way by their fond parents; when we
want to believe that reason and not instinct guides them, that they
are quite up in some of the simpler arts of surgery, mending or
amputating their own broken limbs and salving their wounds,--when, I
say, our attitude toward the natural life about us and our feeling for
it have reached the stage implied by these things, then has sentiment
degenerated into sentimentalism, and our appreciation of nature lost
its firm edge.

No doubt there is a considerable number of people in any community
that are greatly taken with this improved anthropomorphic view of wild
nature now current among us. Such a view tickles the fancy and touches
the emotions. It makes the wild creatures so much more interesting.
Shall we deny anything to a bird or beast that makes it more
interesting, and more worthy of our study and admiration?

This sentimental view of animal life has its good side and its bad
side. Its good side is its result in making us more considerate and
merciful toward our brute neighbors; its bad side is seen in the
degree to which it leads to a false interpretation of their lives. The
tendency to which I refer is no doubt partly the result of our growing
humanitarianism and feeling of kinship with all the lower orders of
creation, and partly due to the fact that we live in a time of
impromptu nature study, when birds and plants and trees are fast
becoming a fad with half the population, and when the "yellow"
reporter is abroad in the fields and woods. Never before in my time
have so many exaggerations and misconceptions of the wild life about
us been current in the popular mind. It is becoming the fashion to
ascribe to the lower animals nearly al