The Audubons spent their lives in studying the animals and birds of North America and their books have been a source of intense delight and instruction to all those that have been privileged to read them and see their marvelous illustrations. Michelet, the great French scholar, studied the bee and then wrote a book about this busy insect that is as fascinating as a romance and as thrilling and interesting as a drama. John Ward Stimson studied the various forms of snow crystals, salts, of rock substances; the natural forms of leaves, their systems of veins; the spines of the various cactuses; the marking on the furs of animals and the backs of reptiles, snakes, lizards, toads, etc.; indeed, all the multi-form shapes, spirals, curves, angles, lines, etc., of Nature, and wrote a book on them entitled _The Gate Beautiful_ which one great critic and poet affirms is the greatest book, outside of the Bible and Shakspere, the world has ever known. And thus might I go on page after page, merely suggesting what men with the seeing eye and understanding heart have given to the world as the result of their observations of Nature. Who would not observe in this fashion? Who would not like thus to fill up the mind and the soul with such wonderful facts and beautiful truths deduced therefrom? Henry D. Thoreau, John Burroughs, Philip Gilbert Hamerton, John Muir, John C. Van Dyke, and W. C. Bartlett have studied Nature in the trees, grasses, the birds, the animals, and the sunrises and sunsets until they have been able to thrill the world with the record of those things that they have seen and felt. Ernest Thompson Seton, W. J. Long, and C. G. D. Roberts have studied the wild life of animals until they have written books that have charmed perhaps millions of readers by revealing to them phases of animal life that they had never believed existed. Jack London goes up into Alaska and with trained eye observes the wild wastes of snow and winter desolation and comes back and writes books that win him fame and wealth, because of his power to see and tell what his seeing makes him feel. This world is full of beauty, of knowledge, of joy, to the hungry mind and soul, and its treasures are all free, are all to be had merely for the asking, for the seeing, for the reaching out. Nothing repays every effort more abundantly than does Nature. She preaches more eloquently, because more simply, purely, and directly than any divine that ever occupied pulpit. She is the direct voice of God to mankind, ordained by the Infinite himself. Few men in sacerdotal robes ever come to us with this divine song upon their lips. Joaquin Miller never wrote truer words than: The woods keep repeating The old sacred sermons whatever you ask.