The literary magazines now began to print articles of open-air observation, most of which, then as now, dealt with bird life. This was not only because birds are singularly attractive, and the most easily studied of all animal groups, but largely because the United States has been very fortunate in the ornithologists that first made American birds known to the people. Instead of beginning with mere classifiers of dull, unimaginative mind, we were truly blessed in having such pioneers in our ornithology as Wilson and Audubon--one a true poet, to whom birds were emblems of the graces, and the other a painter, whose descriptions are imbued with color and vivacity. [Illustration: THE HOUSE OF JOHN MUIR--in California] [Illustration: THE MUIR VINEYARDS AND ORCHARDS Near Martinez, California] _John Burroughs_ Of the new writers of the end of the last century, none has become more deservedly popular and beloved than John Burroughs, who, on April third, 1919, entered his eighty-third year. Ever since "Wake Robin" was issued in 1870, he has been giving us a succession of essays, at intervals crystalized into books, that have seemed like so many windows opening on ever-new vistas of a world whose delight had hardly been suspected by the general reader. They deal not only with wild beasts, birds and flowers, but with the homely facts of rural life; and they tell of experiences that make us long to take to the woods and the streams, to track the weasel through the winter snows, surprise the secrets of the birds and the bees, launch our boat upon river or lake, and drift or fish, and then rest through the long summer nights upon a couch of boughs beside a mountain fireplace. The very titles of Burroughs' books are aromatic with the fragrance of woods and fields: "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Signs and Seasons," "Winter Sunshine," "Birds and Poets." As he has advanced in years Mr. Burroughs has become more and more of a philosopher, discussing deep questions with copious information and illuminating thought. _Popular Nature Writers of Today_