JOHN BUEEOUGHS 85 To Burroughs, the call of the wild" does not mean that he shall live in seclusion, and adopt the idiosyncrasies of the her- mit, but that to study nature intelligently he must go where nature is ; out in the open ; out in God 's golden sunlight ; in the deep, dark shade of the forest; out on the great, silent prairie; up on the great, lordly mountains, or down in the beautiful valleys between. Burroughs has accomplished great things in his nature study; but if he had accomplished nothing more than the dif- ferentiation of the field of endeavor of the true naturalist from the realm of the technical scientist, his work would stand for ages. I look in vain through all his writings for a single technical term ; but in, and through, and over all I find his de- scriptions and interpretations clothed in the plain, simple lan- guage of every day. He may have a vocabulary of thousands of technical terms, for aught I know, but in the message he brings to us, he studiously avoids using a single one of them. The writer would not disparage the anchorage of the names of orders, families, species and genera in fixed and changeless foreign nomenclature. This must needs be. But he who can interpret the life habits of plants and animals in terms so plain and simple that a child can understand, is a benefactor indeed to ninety-nine out of every hundred people. But there is another phase of scientific inquiry that per- meates the work of Burroughs more deeply than it does the work of most naturalists and scientists. In all his delinea- tions, in all of his deductions, throughout all of his messages to the world there breathes a pure spirit of Christianity, and the recognition of a merciful, purposeful, and All-Wise Creator. Too often the smattering technologist permits the deductions of the chemical laboratory and the microscope to lead him into agnosticism, and atheism; but not so with John Burroughs; with Tennyson he thinks :
- Yet I doubt not through the Ages
One increasing purpose runs And the thoughts of men are widened With the process of the suns.'* Speaking of this world and his relations to it. Burroughs
