“You didn’t know a dog was put together so beautifully, did you?” said the professor, frankly enjoying the sight of the marvelous system of nerves laid bare by the knife. “Now, see here,” he went on, eyeing me keenly, “doesn’t a revelation like that take all the moonshine about the ‘beauties of nature’ clean out of you?” I looked at the lifeless lump upon my table, and answered very deliberately: “No, it doesn’t. That’s a fearful piece of mechanism. I appreciate that. But what is any system of nerves or muscles—mere dead dog—compared with the love and affection of the dog alive?” The professor was trying to make a biologist out of me. He had worked faithfully, but I had persisted in a very unscientific love for live dog. Not that I didn’t enjoy comparative anatomy, for I did. The problem of concrescence or differentiation in the cod’s egg also was intensely interesting to me. And so was the sight and the suggestion of the herring as they crowded up the run on their way to the spawning pond. The professor had lost patience. I don’t blame him. “Well,” he said, turning abruptly, “you had better quit. You’ll be only a biological fifth wheel.” I quit. Here on my table lies the scalpel. Since that day it has only sharpened lead pencils. Now a somewhat extensive acquaintance with scientific folk leads me to believe that the attitude of my professor toward the out-of-doors is not exceptional. The love for nature is all moonshine, all maudlin sentiment. Even those like my professor, who have to do with out-of-door life and conditions,—zoölogists, botanists, geologists,—look upon naturalists, and others who love birds and fields, as of a kind with those harmless but useless inanities who collect tobacco tags, postage stamps, and picture postal cards. Sentiment is not scientific. I have a biological friend, a professor of zoölogy, who never saw a woodchuck in the flesh. He would not know a woodchuck with the fur on from a mongoose. Not until he had skinned it and set up the skeleton could he pronounce it _Arctomys monax_ with certainty. Yes, he could tell by the teeth. Dentition is a great thing. He could tell a white pine (_strobus_) from a pitch pine (_rigida_) by just a cone and a bundle of needles,—one has five, the other three, to the bundle. But he wouldn’t recognize a columned aisle of the one from a Jersey barren of the other. That is not the worst of it: he would not see even the aisle or the barren,—only trees. As we jogged along recently, on a soft midwinter day that followed a day of freezing, my little three-year-old threw his nose into the air and cried: “Oh, fader, I smell de pitch pines, de scraggly pines,—’ou calls ’em Joisey pines!” And sure enough, around a double curve in the road we came upon a single clump of the scraggly pitch pines. Our drive had taken us through miles of the common white species.