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                         TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.

The words phoebe, manoeuvre, manoeuvring, Pooecetes and phoeniceus use
"oe" ligature in the original text.

The printer's inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, hyphenation,
and ligature usage have been retained.




                            WAYS OF NATURE


                    [Illustration: A BIRD IN SIGHT]




                            WAYS OF NATURE

                                  BY

                            JOHN BURROUGHS


                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                     The Riverside Press Cambridge


                   COPYRIGHT 1905 BY JOHN BURROUGHS
                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
                       _Published October 1905_




                                PREFACE


My reader will find this volume quite a departure in certain ways from
the tone and spirit of my previous books, especially in regard to the
subject of animal intelligence. Heretofore I have made the most of
every gleam of intelligence of bird or four-footed beast that came
under my observation, often, I fancy, making too much of it, and
giving the wild creatures credit for more "sense" than they really
possessed. The nature lover is always tempted to do this very thing;
his tendency is to humanize the wild life about him, and to read his
own traits and moods into whatever he looks upon. I have never
consciously done this myself, at least to the extent of willfully
misleading my reader. But some of our later nature writers have been
guilty of this fault, and have so grossly exaggerated and
misrepresented the every-day wild life of our fields and woods that
their example has caused a strong reaction to take place in my own
mind, and has led me to set about examining the whole subject of
animal life and instinct in a way I have never done before.

In March, 1903, I contributed to "The Atlantic Monthly" a paper called
"Real and Sham Natural History," which was as vigorous a protest as I
could make against the growing tendency to humanize the lower
animals. The paper was widely read and discussed, and bore fruit in
many ways, much of it good and wholesome fruit, but a little of it
bitter and acrid. For obvious reasons that paper is not included in
this collection. But I have given all the essays that were the outcome
of the currents of thought and inquiry that it set going in my mind,
and I have given them nearly in the order in which they were written,
so that the reader may see the growth of my own mind and opinions in
relation to the subject. I confess I have not been fully able to
persuade myself that the lower animals ever show anything more than a
faint gleam of what we call thought and reflection,--the power to
evolve ideas from sense impressions,--except feebly in the case of the
dog and the apes, and possibly the elephant. Nearly all the animal
behavior that the credulous public looks upon as the outcome of reason
is simply the result of the adaptiveness and plasticity of instinct.
The animal has impulses and impressions where we have ideas and
concepts. Of our faculties I concede to them perception, sense memory,
and association of memories, and little else. Without these it would
be impossible for their lives to go on.

I am aware that there is much repetition in this volume, and that the
names of several of the separate chapters differ much more than do the
subjects discussed in them.

When I was a boy on the farm, we used to thrash our grain with the
hand-flail. Our custom was to thrash a flooring of sheaves on one side,
then turn the sheaves over and thrash them on the other, then unbind
them and thrash the loosened straw again, and then finish by turning
the whole over and thrashing it once more. I suspect my reader will
feel that I have followed the same method in many of these papers. I
have thrashed the same straw several times