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Show 545 need to attend the University of Wisconsin, but recognize the limits of a merely academic view of Nature. In the end, when he returned to the wild world of his boyhood, he was changed, and able to appreciate it as an older and wiser being. The idea is interesting, but the book is dull. Strange to say, the method of composition which Harriman hoped would result in spontaneity had the opposite effect. The spark of inspiration never caught. More important, Muir failed to catch the true significance of his past in shaping him, if that was indeed his aim. Though the book sometimes succeeded in harking back to a vision of childhood, when everything seemed to be brother, when the young boy was green and carefree and ran his heedless ways, the later chapters were superficial. Muir wrote to one friend that it did not contain much that was likely to interest anybody but children. One doesn't find much serious self-analysis in this book. What about the question of men's relationship with animals? Muir mourned the extinction of the passenger pigeons. He expressed a fear of the dominion of men who thought they were civilized. Whether they killed wild animals whom they perceived as enemies, or tame dogs who relished the taste of chickens, nineteenth century farmers lived by the justice of Manifest Destiny. So too they robbed the Indians of their lands, and justified themselves by claiming only more efficient farming methods. Muir called this the "rule of might." A modern writer has tried to deal with this dilemma, and has gone a step further than Muir did, by realizing that |