Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/49

Rh floating in a placid, smooth, open place in the river, when it was frozen for a mile each side, looking at first like a bit of stump or frozen meadow, but showing its whole upper outline from nose to end of tail, perfectly still till he observed me, then suddenly diving and steering under the ice toward some cabin's entrance or other retreat half-a-dozen or more rods off.

As some of the tales of our childhood, the inventions of some Mother Goose, will haunt us when we are grown up, so the race itself still believes in some of the fables with which its infancy has amused and imposed on it, e. g., the fable of the Cranes and Pygmies which learned men endeavored to believe or explain in the last century.

Aristotle being almost, if not quite, the first to write systematically on animals, gives them of course only popular names, such as were common with the hunters, fowlers, fishers, and farmers of his day. He used no scientific terms. But he having the priority, and having, as it were, created science, and given it its laws, those popular Greek names, even when the animal to which they were applied cannot be identified, have been in great part preserved, and make the learned, far-fetched, and commonly unintelligible names of genera to-day, e. g.,, etc. His &quot;History of Animals&quot; has thus become a very storehouse of scientific nomenclature.