The nature-writer deserves, maybe, his dubious reputation; he is more or less of a fraud, perhaps. And perhaps everybody else is, more or less. I am sure of it as regards preachers and plumbers and politicians and men who work by the day. Yet I have known a few honest men of each of these several sorts, although I can’t recall just now the honest plumber. I have known honest nature-writers, too; there are a number of them, simple, single-minded, and purposefully poor. I have no mind, however, thus to pronounce upon them, dividing the sheep from the goats, lest haply I count myself in with the wrong fold. My desire, rather, is to see what nature-writing, pure and undefiled, may be, and the nature-writer, what manner of writer he ought to be. For it is plain that the nature-writer has now evolved into a distinct, although undescribed, literary species. His origins are not far to seek, the course of his development not hard to trace, but very unsatisfactory is the attempt, as yet, to classify him. We all know a nature-book at sight, no matter how we may doubt the nature in it; we all know that the writer of such a book must be a nature-writer; yet this is not describing him scientifically by any means. Until recent years the nature-writer had been hardly more than a variant of some long-established species--of the philosopher in Aristotle; of the moralizer in Theobaldus; of the scholar and biographer in Walton; of the traveler in Josselyn; of the poet in Burns. But that was in the feudal past. Since then the land of letters has been redistributed; the literary field, like every other field, has been cut into intensified and highly specialized patches--the short story for you, the muck-rake essay for me, or magazine verse, or wild animal biography. The paragraph of outdoor description in Scott becomes the modern nature-sketch; the “Lines to a Limping Hare” in Burns run into a wild animal romance of about the length of “The Last of the Mohicans”; the occasional letter of Gilbert White’s grows into an annual nature-volume, this year’s being entitled “Buzz-Buzz and Old Man Barberry; or, The Thrilling Young Ladyhood of a Better-Class Bluebottle Fly.” The story that follows is how she never would have escaped the net of Old Man Barberry had she been a butterfly--a story which only the modern nature-writing specialist would be capable of handling. Nature-writing and the automobile business have developed vastly during the last few years.