Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/552

536 knowledge he must roam far and wide, and to do this with safety he must learn the physical geography and topography of the country; he must know the trend of the coast, the course of the rivers, the valleys, and the mountains, and the extent of the different water-sheds; he must discover the location and character of all the varieties of vegetation upon which animals feed; he must learn all their methods of capture and escape in all cases where they feed upon each other; he must become an expert in the study of all their tracks and the traces of their movements. The broken twig, the cropped grass, the grazed log, the pressed or upturned leaf must each reveal to him a whole series of facts in which a determination of the lapse of time is always most difficult; he must study the movements of the sun and moon and planets, and the position of the stars; he must learn to determine direction by the growth of mosses, the leaning of trees and the appearance of the foliage, and many other things equally important.

It is true that some part of this vast amount and variety of information may be communicated and so handed down from one generation to another, but the larger part must be acquired in the field and by each individual for himself. Much of it to be of practical use must be accompanied by the most wonderful skill and adroitness in its application. A practiced eye, an acute sense of hearing, deftness in movement, promptness in decision, coolness in execution are indispensable, and can not be taught orally or communicated. No civilized man could equal a savage hunter in this whole department of knowledge.

But comparisons of this sort are unsatisfactory to the last degree, because the probability of deriving a reasonable and fair conclusion from them depends more upon the ability of the mind to grasp and value details, to weigh justly many considerations, and to deal fairly and wisely with the facts, than it does upon the facts themselves. One thing is certain, however, that the savage would exercise the same amount of mental activity in obtaining all this knowledge for the purpose of getting a living by it, that a student of natural history would exercise in obtaining it for the purposes of a scientific classification. Moreover, the strength of motive, depth of desire, and intensity of emotion of the savage in his work would be as much greater than that of the student as it is more important to sustain life than it is to make a scientific classification; for the student, admitting that he works for bread or for fame or for gratification, may find many other ways if he fails in this to obtain either, while the savage must succeed in this one way or die in the attempt. Lastly, the savage obtains and applies his knowledge by the Baconian method of experience and experiment, while the student obtains his largely from books, and