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JOHN BURROUGHS By Edward Babbett THERE is a difference between the naturalist and the scientist. Or rather, there is a difference between the naturalist and most scientists. A naturalist must needs be a scientist, but not all scientists are naturalists. Most naturalists eschew the laboratory and ding to the field. Most scientists eschew the field and cling to the labo- ratory. The naturalist studies nature in all its relations in its own habitat — the woods, the field, the water, the air. The scien- tist removes nature from its own realm and studies it in the laboratory under the microscope. The naturalist would study the bird in all its relations to the things about it — its habits, its food, its adaptability, its color, its migration, its song, its instinct, its limitations, and delimitations. The scientist would study the bird under the knife and microscope — its cells and the nuclei of its protoplasm ; its classification in some established f aunal system, with its unpronounceable scientific nomenclature. These are the two fields for thought that spread out before John Burroughs, one of which he must choose in which to glean, and he chose the field of the naturalist. He determined to live a life — * * Exempt from public haunt, to find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.'* John Burroughs is a bom naturalist. He communes with nature, and to him she speaks a varied language. If close dis- crimination and fine interpretation are marks of a true nat- uralist and scientist, then John Burroughs is a true disciple of nature, for he possesses these faculties, preeminently. No student of nature has, by his work, more clearly set out, and more clearly defined the limits of the two fields of endeavor described above, than Mr. Burroughs. A study of his Summit of the Tears and his Ways of Nature lifts one out of the realm of the purely technical up into the plane of the practical, the real, the natural. ^