In the end justice will prevail.  Thus, in this matter before us, it will naturally take a few years for Congress to realize that a genuine demand exists for the creation of these refuges in every State, East as well as West, but the interest in wild creatures, and the desire for their protection, if not a clamorous demand, is one almost universally felt.  All men, except a meager few of the dwarfed and strictly city-bred, partake of this, and it is so much a sign of the times that no Sunday edition is complete without its column devoted to wild creatures, their traits, their habits, or their eccentricities.  One could hardly name, outside of money-making and politics, an interest which all men more generally share.

Every lad is a born naturalist, and the true wisdom, as all sensible people know, is to carry unfatigued through life the boy’s power of enjoyment, his freshness of perception, his alertness and zest.  Where the child’s capacity for close observation survives into manhood, supplemented by man’s power of sustained attention, we have the typical temperament of the lover of the woods, the mountains, and the wild—­of the naturalist in the sense that Thoreau was a naturalist, and many another whose memory is cherished.

It is not impossible for a man to be deeply learned and still to lack the power of awakening enthusiasm in others; as a matter of fact, to be so heavily freighted with information that he forgets to nourish his own finer faculties, his intuition, his sympathy, and his insight.  One must have lived for a time in the California mountains to realize how great is the service to the men of his own and to succeeding generations of him who more than any one else has illuminated the study of the Sierras and of all our forest-clad mountains, our glacier-formed hills, valleys and glades.  Not by any means do all lovers of nature, however faithful their purpose, come to its study with the endowment of John Muir.  In him we see the trained faculties of the close and accurate observer, joined to the temperament of the poet—­the capacity to think, to see and to feel—­and by the power of sustained and strong emotion to make us the sharers of his joy.  The beauty and the majesty of the forest to him confer the same exaltation of mind, the same intellectual transport, which the trained musician feels when listening to the celestial harmonies of a great orchestra.  In proportion as one conceives, or can imagine, the fineness of the musical endowment of a Bach or Beethoven, and in proportion as he can realize in his own mind the infinity of training and preparation which has contributed to the development of such a master musician—­in such proportion may he comprehend and appreciate the unusual qualities and achievements of a man like Muir.  He will realize to some degree—­indistinctly to be sure, “seeing men as trees walking”—­the infinity of nice and accurate observation, the discriminating choice of illustration, the infallible tact and unvarying