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plants by the Linnaean system, and had necessarily
Nuttall for his elementary manual of birds.
Like all observers, he left whole realms uncultivated; thus he puzzles in his journal over the great brown paper cocoon of the
Attacus Cecropia, which every village boy brings home from the winter meadows.
If he has not the specialized habit of the naturalist of to-day, neither has he the polemic habit; firm beyond yielding, as to the local facts of his own
Concord, he never quarrels with those who have made other observations elsewhere; he is involved in none of those contests in which palaeontologists, biologists, astronomers, have wasted so much of their lives.
His especial greatness is that he gives us standing-ground below the surface, a basis not to be washed away.
A hundred sentences might be quoted from him which make common observers seem superficial and professed philosophers trivial, but which, if accepted, place the realities of life beyond the reach of danger.
He was a spiritual ascetic, to whom the simplicity of nature was luxury enough; and this, in an age of growing expenditure, gave him an unspeakable value.
To him, life itself was a source of joy so great that it was only weakened by diluting it with meaner joys.
This was the standard to which he constantly held his contemporaries.
