stored during the summer. The fire of life still burns, but very faintly and slowly, as with the draughts all closed and the ashes heaped up. Respiration is continued, but at longer intervals, and all the vital processes are nearly at a standstill. Dig one out during hibernation . . . and you find it a mere inanimate ball, that suffers itself to be moved and rolled about without showing signs of awakening. But bring it in by the fire, and it presently unrolls and opens its eyes, and crawls feebly about, and if left to itself will seek some dark hole or corner, roll itself up again, and resume its former condition.1

Taken by itself, this might be regarded as either description or exposition. The general purpose of the essay from which it is taken, however, is descriptive; hence it ought, perhaps, to be called description. In the following example, we have description frankly and openly passing into exposition:

Perhaps the most beautiful deception known to the desert is the one oftenest seen mirage. Every one is more or less familiar with it, for it appears in some form wherever the air is heated, thickened, or has strata of different densities. It shows on the water, on the grass plains, over ploughed fields or gravel roads, on roadbeds of railways; but the bare desert with its strong heat-radiation is primarily its home. The cause of its appearance or at least one of its appearances is familiar knowledge, but it may be well to state it in dictionary terms: "An optical illusion due to excessive bending of light-rays in traversing adjacent layers of air of widely different densities, whereby distorted, displaced, or inverted images are produced." 2

1 John Burroughs, Pepacton, p. 181.

2 Van Dyke, The Desert, p. 117.

tions given above, it is obvious that, while in most cases the main aim of description is portrayal, in much of what is ordinarily called description the purpose is no less distinctly explanatory. Hence, according as one or other of these purposes is most prominent, we may have two kinds of description. If the aim of the writer is to convey information, mainly, we have ordinary or, as it is sometimes called, scientific description. If, on the other hand, his aim is portrayal, mainly, that is, if he seeks to stimulate the reader's imagination in such a way as to enable him to form a mental picture of the thing described, we have description proper, or, as it is sometimes termed, artistic description.

64. Scientific description. What we have called ordinary or scientific description occupies a sort of midway position between exposition and description proper. No hard and fast lines can be drawn on either side. In general, whenever we have a composition dealing with things or persons, and dealing with them mainly for the purpose of giving us information about them, then we have ordinary or scientific description.

Compositions of this kind are very common. They fill our newspapers and magazines, comprise most of our books of travel, and form, perhaps, the greater part of our reading. They never rank very high as literature. Their aim is, for the most part, practical; their business is to serve the everyday needs of life.

65. The method of scientific description. - The method of scientific description is, in the main, an enumeration of the parts or characteristics of the thing to be described according to some simple or obvious plan. It aims to give us such an account of the thing as will satisfy our interest or curiosity; it appeals to the intellect, and never, as a rule, attempts to stimulate the imagination. Hence, in description of this kind, the writer never makes any particular effort to select or group details with a view to producing in the reader's mind an image of the thing described.

As an illustration of the method, the following will suffice:

The redwood is the glory of the Coast Range. It extends along the western slope, in a nearly continuous belt about ten miles wide, from beyond the Oregon boundary to the south of Santa Cruz, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, and in massive, sustained grandeur and closeness of growth surpasses all the other timber woods of the world. Trees from ten to fifteen feet in diameter and three hundred feet high are not uncommon, and a few attain a height of three hundred and fifty or even four hundred, with a diameter at the base of fifteen to twenty feet or more, while the ground beneath them is a garden of fresh, exuberant ferns, lilies, gaultheria, and rhododendron. This grand tree, Sequoia sempervirens, is surpassed in size only by its near relative, Sequoia gigantea, or Big Tree, of the Sierra Nevada, if, indeed, it is surpassed. The sempervirens is certainly the taller of the two. The gigantea attains a greater girth, and is heavier, more noble in port, and more sublimely beautiful. These two Sequoias are all that are known to exist in the

world, though in former geological times the genus was common and had many species. The redwood is restricted to the Coast Range, and the Big Tree to the Sierra.1

66. Artistic description. - In description proper, or artistic description, the main aim is not, as in ordinary description, to give information, but to portray. To a certain extent, the writer here seeks to produce by means of words what the painter produces by means of colors an illusion.

That is, he seeks to

reader an image or

Hence his appeal is

conjure up in the mind of the picture of the thing described. not to the intellect primarily, but to the imagination. An illustration will make the point clear:

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed. Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapor, like a cloudy sky — a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far away were the hilltops like little 1 John Muir, Our National Parks, p. 349, ff.

islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains. The color of that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all. Even in its gentlest mood the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a sound.1

It is not Stevenson's purpose here to make any explanation of the phenomenon he has observed; rather, he wishes to present us with the vision as it appeared to him. In other words, he tries to portray or picture it for us.

67. Selection and arrangement of details. — In description of the kind just exemplified, the aim is, as we have seen, to portray or picture for us the object as a whole. The materials used are, of course, the same as those used in description of the ordinary kind, namely, details associated in space or in thought. These individual details have not here, however, as is the case in scientific description, any interest in and for themselves. Their sole value lies in their power to aid the reader's imagination in forming a picture of the whole; and this power depends to a certain extent upon the way in which the details are related. Hence in selecting the details to be used in a description of the artistic kind care should be taken, in 1 R. L. Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters.