Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/304

270 well between his traits as naturalist and as anatomist. The thoughts of dissection were, in the main, revolting to his fine-grained, poetic nature; moreover, he lived before the modern methods of science had demonstrated the comparatively brief suffering and the vast benefits from careful vivisection. When a friend suggested that he could best study the structure of a bird after it had been killed, his answer was characteristic,—"Do you think I should shoot you if I wanted to study you?" In quite similar vein, he wrote in his journal, November 1, 1853, an excerpt included in "Autumn":—"Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have seen the elephant? No, these are petty and accidental uses Every creature is better alive than dead, both men and moose and pine-trees, as life is more beautiful than death." The spy-glass and the flute were his media for allurement and for study. He found music a strong attraction to bird and fish, as well as animal, and, as he quietly played like a modern Pan, he could best watch and study the form, movement, and subtle traits of these friends of woods and lakes. In his lecture on "Walking," he said,—"The highest that we can attain to is not knowledge, but sympathy with intelligence." In such a statement how surely he predicted the new