Ways of Nature — Background and Themes

Instinct versus Reason

Burroughs draws a sharp line between instinct and reason. He concedes to animals “perception, sense memory, and association of memories,” but little else. Nearly all behavior that looks like thought, he argues, is the “adaptiveness and plasticity of instinct.” He illustrates this with the rooster’s wind-pointing and the anchored vessel’s adjustment to currents—actions that appear intelligent but are automatic responses. Even man, he notes, often obeys unseen currents of race or history while believing he acts on initiative. The distinction is crucial: animals have impulses and impressions; humans have ideas and concepts. Burroughs does not deny animals a faint gleam of reflection, but he limits it to dogs, apes, and possibly elephants, and even then only feebly.

The Perils of Humanizing Wildlife

Burroughs is particularly critical of nature writers who project human motives onto animals. He cites a recent British book that treats salt and gravel as animal medicine, and a French work on the “Industries of Animals.” He dismisses Michelet’s claim that birds can puff themselves lighter than air. The tendency to humanize, he warns, is most marked in popular nature books. He targets Romanes’s Animal Intelligence as a lawyer’s plea, not a scientific work, pointing to the absurd story of a jackdaw tried by a jury of rooks. Burroughs insists that the serious student wants truth, not romance, and that casual observers, Indians, trappers, and backwoodsmen are unreliable because they interpret animal lives in terms of their own motives.

Evidence and Its Misuse

Burroughs scrutinizes the quality of evidence in animal intelligence studies. He recounts Romanes’s reliance on Jesse’s tale of swallows tearing down a sparrow’s nest in revenge—a feat physically impossible for swallows. Jesse did not see the act; he only saw dead young sparrows and assumed the nest fell by revenge. Burroughs calls such reasoning “antecedently improbable.” He contrasts this with the patient, honest work of Darwin, whom he holds up as a model. The lesson is clear: anecdotes from irresponsible observers cannot substitute for careful, skeptical observation. Burroughs’s own method is to test stories against physical possibility and to demand direct evidence.

The Horse’s Plunge and the Limits of Analogy

One of Burroughs’s most striking examples is the horses that dashed themselves down precipices in Alaska to escape suffering on the White Pass trail. He asks: did they commit suicide? In effect, yes, but not in intention. A horse cannot know death or self-destruction; it was maddened by hardship and plunged blindly. The analogy to human suicide is false. Burroughs uses this to underscore his central point: we must not read our own concepts into animal actions. The same caution applies to the log that seems to struggle in an eddy—it is uncanny but not alive. By refusing to anthropomorphize, Burroughs aims for a clearer, more honest natural history.

Burroughs does not offer a definitive answer to the question of animal intelligence; instead, he models a disciplined approach to observation. Readers will find a writer willing to revise his own earlier views and to challenge popular sentimentality. The essays reward those who value precision over charm and who prefer a skeptical naturalist to a romantic one. Burroughs’s voice—direct, self-critical, and grounded in the physical world—makes Ways of Nature a useful corrective to the nature-writing excesses of his time and ours.

Reading Burroughs’ Ways of Nature, I keep returning to how gently he strips away our need to make animals feel like us. That patient correction reminded me of another quiet reckoning with sentiment—A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, An Essay on Slavery — Reading Companion—which untangles feeling from fact in a similar, unhurried way. Both made me sit a little longer with my own assumptions.