Then with the coming of a little knowledge the observation is enriched, transfigured, glorified. Hear what Thoreau says of even the apparently dry and profitless acquisition of nomenclature: ‘With the knowledge of the name comes a distincter recognition and knowledge of the thing. That shore is now more describable and poetic even. My knowledge was cramped and confined before, and grew rusty because not used—for it could not be used. My knowledge now becomes communicable and grows by communication.’[58] Knowledge in one branch amplifies and steadies observation in that branch. Knowledge of many branches connects them and makes each one throw light on all the others. Record of others’ observations or of your own through several years give each new year double significance and fruitfulness. As Thoreau again puts it: ‘I soon found myself observing when plants first blossomed and leafed, and I followed it up early and late, far and near, several years in succession, running to different sides of the town and into the neighboring towns, often between twenty and thirty miles in a day.’[59] If your attention gets fixed upon some special point to be elucidated, every walk you take, and almost every step brings out some development which you did not consider or imagine before. In short the enrichment of knowledge doubles, triples, quintuples your vision, since it teaches you what to look for, and even while it sometimes betrays, teaches you what to see. But if mere general scientific knowledge is so stimulating and so enlarging in the realm of observation, how infinitely more fruitful is the Darwinian view of the interrelated development of all life including that of man. Whatever may be said, whatever we may have to say later, of the injurious action of this view upon the status of man himself, there can be no question as to the transforming, magical effect of it upon the study of the natural world. Before the evolutionary attitude, the observation of plants and animals was at best a mere gratification of curiosity. The proper study of mankind was man, and the investigation of birds and insects was only distraction and diversion. But the instant it appeared that all the threads of life were intertwined and that in disentangling even the slightest of them you might be getting the clue to the riddle of the whole, all was changed. When it comes to be felt that the history of man, of his instincts, of his passions, of his powers, of his future, of his fate, is written in his past, and that past is to be studied, if at all, in the history of the humblest creatures who are animated by the same mysterious impulse of life that moulds and governs him, the interest of natural observation is increased a thousandfold. It is not exaggerating to say that the study of natural history is an entirely different pursuit since Darwin from what it was before.