The finding-out process begins in childhood. That is why teaching is so great a profession. We intellectual animals have a long period in which to learn our wings. The teacher’s role is to bring us toward our highest capacity, and the tortures of that are immeasurable, on both sides. The field of learning is as wide as the sand flats, and the results as hard to catch as the waves; but a teacher has help from his pupils in ways over which they themselves have little control. Children have new fingers and new eyes and have to be coaxed into using them, but the touch and sight they bring cannot be taught in the schools. I have found out lately, after some attempts at teaching natural history, that nature springs in a child and a child in nature. You learn that you are teaching both. Why is one so proud of ignorance, and another of hiding what he knows? Some make a violent effort to be noticed; others, to retreat from view. You have an ambivalent and groping world to deal with, as hard to tape or tie as some of the phenomena you lead it to. But life is present tense to them, neither past nor future. They seem to pick up its manifestations not with adult skill but on the fly, like a boy casually catching a ball after missing ten, and then being surprised at himself. How did it happen? Memories, complexities, prejudices, risks taken on behalf of the future are largely unknown to them. It is enough to be new. There is not even any choice, since all choices are open, being new. Children are the unpredicting and the unpredictable. The one thing in which they never fail is growth, like the natural environment which never fails in its variations on the theme of fertility. One mild afternoon two of us take out a group of boys on a field trip along the shore, a beginners collecting expedition. The class runs ahead. They find a dead loon on the beach, with rove beetles, lovers of carrion, roaming through its body. These beetles have black and white stripes, suggesting a skunk to one boy, who is still young enough to admit all affinities. They run on, with erratic energy. They lend a puzzled ear to our explanations of how life forms are related to the places in which we find them. They are not quite certain of our terms. What is “environment?” What, for that matter, is “life?” Classifications come hard to them at first. Certain types of recognition take a long time to learn. When I think that at the age of thirty I didn’t know the difference between one gull and another, not to speak of their different calls, I am hardly surprised.