Having an outdoor book in hand, when and how should it be read? It is no doubt very tempting to think of a shady nook, or babbling brook, or both, in connection with the latest outdoor volume. Possibly, as you start out for a quiet day, you string together a bit of rhyme concerning the book, as Leigh Hunt did and others have done since. It is a common practice to carry a book into the fields, but not a logical one. How can a book, even one of outdoor topics, compete with Nature? Certainly if Nature is to the reader but a convenient room, a lighter and more airy one than any at home, does it not signify a serious lack in the mind of that person? From a notice of a recent publication I clip the following: “A capital book to slip into one’s pocket when taking an outing.” If, because of its size, it could be readily slipped into one’s pocket, then it was a capital way of getting rid of it. What sort of an outing can one have who reads all the while? Is not the cloud-flecked sky something more than a ceiling, the surrounding hills more than mere walls, the grass and flowers more than carpet? There is one pleasure even greater than that of reading, and that is being out of doors. To read at such a time seems to imply one of two things: either that the reader knows Nature thoroughly, or is indifferent to such knowledge. The former phenomenon the world has never seen; the latter, to speak mildly, deserves our pity. To escape ridicule, which is something, to insure happiness, which is more, to avoid great dangers, which is of even greater importance, one must know something of Nature. In one sense she is our persistent foe. She mantles with inviting cover of rank grass her treacherous quicksands; she paints in tempting colors her most poisonous fruits; she spreads unheralded the insidious miasma from the meadow and the swamp; but neither the quicksand, the unwholesome fruit, nor noxious vapors is an unmixed evil. Let us take them as they are, see them as parts and parcels of a complete whole, and each hour of every outing is an unclouded joy. Nature never excuses our ignorance. Whatever one’s position in life, does a knowledge of Nature prove unneeded? Should we not know that potatoes grow beneath the sod, as well as apples grow upon trees? Gather a crowd at random on the streets, or corner a half-dozen at some social gathering, and how many can tell you the life-history of a mushroom or a truffle? “Do potatoes grow upon bushes?” was asked not long since. This was positively painful, but worse things have happened. A young lady, from a city renowned for its schools, startled her country cousins by asking, while toying with an ear of corn, “Which end, when you plant, do you put in the ground, the blunt or the pointed one?” If botany is impracticable in the curriculum of the public schools, ought not, at least, the natural history of our common articles of food to be taught? Can not such ignorance as this implied be banished from the land?