Needed: a better tool for studying nature

 Francis Bacon again: “The human understanding, owing to its own peculiar nature, easily supposes more order and regularity in things than it finds.”

I see cypress trees changing colors and shedding needles and want to know what schedule they’re on. But I’ve found individual trees in January that are brown, others that are bare and still others that are green.

I see cardinals quarreling and want to make generalizations about territorial behavior. But one day two males are fighting like Vikings and the next they are sitting quietly on the same limb.

I see ducks that ride deep in the water, like buffleheads, and think that they leave longer wakes than those that ride high in the water, like mallards. Do I imagine that, or is it so?

Bacon keeps pointing out that we comprehend the world with the only instrument we have, and it’s flawed. “And though there be many singular things in nature, yet it (human understanding) devises for them parallels and analogies and relatives which do not exist.”