Page:Natural history of the farm.djvu/15

11 now one may live without knowing anything useful, if he only possess a few coins of the realm and have access to a department store.

"Back to nature" has therefore become the popular cry, and vacations are devoted to camping out, and to "foraging off to the country" as a means of restoration. But fortunately it is not necessary to go to the mountains or to the frontier in order to get back to nature; for nature is ever with us at home. She raises our crops with her sunshine and soil and air and rain, and turns not aside the while from raising her own. While we are engrossed with "developing" our clearings and are planting farms and cities and shops, she goes on serenely raising her ancient products in the bits of land left over: in swamp and bog, in gulch and dune, on the rocky hillside, by the stream and in the fence row. There she plants and tends her cereals and fruits and roots, and there she feeds her flocks. Wherever we leave her an opening, she slips in a few seeds of her own choosing, and when we abandon a field, she quickly populates it again with wild things. They begin again the same old lusty struggle for place and food, and of our feeble and transient interference, soon there is hardly a sign.

As for the wild things, therefore,—the things that so largely made up the environment of the pioneer and the red man—we need but step out to the borders of our clearing to find most of them. If any one would share in the experience of primeval times, he must work at these things with his own hands. To gain an acquaintance he must apply first his senses and then his wits. He must test them to find out what they are good for, and try them to find out what they are like: he must sense the qualities that have made them factors in the struggle for a place in the world of life. Thus, one may get back to nature. Thus, one may re-acquire some of that ancient fund of real knowledge that was once necessary to