eyes so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but
would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of
vision? At any rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than
others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision
penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a
spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how
many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter,
matching his sight against the keen and alert sense of a deer or a
moose, or fox or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another
eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of
things,--whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic
markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.
Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or
the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes
were added.

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees.
The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like
written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the
writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was
one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse
from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn
fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable,
dark and cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she
wanted outside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently
captured by the farmer. What did she want? was the query. What but a
horsehair for her nest which was in an apple-tree near by? and she was
so bent on having one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked one
out of the horse's tail had he been in the stable. Later in the season
I examined her nest, and found it sewed through and through with