Madison, State of Wisconsin, 1898. Inscribed to "Mr John Burroughs/Compliments of the authors" on the front pastedown, and with John Burroughs' Riverby bookplate on the front flyleaf. Burroughs has marked more than 20 pages of the text, including correcting plate numbers, adding one annotation (p. 130) and a subtitle ("a world of liliputs [?]"), and writing a 180 word essay on the rear two blanks using solitary wasps as a metaphor for Man: "The solitary wasps are evidently more individual than the social wasps. Is their solitary habits the cause? Evidently it is. They are always alone. They have no one to imitate/ they are uninfluenced by their fellows/ the innate tendency to variation has full play. How fickle they are, how many times they change their minds. The community interests override or check individual whims or peculiarities. The social bees must be all alike in dispositions and habits. Whole swarms vary, some being crosser than others, but probably the individual bees vary not at all. But apparently no two solitary bees are alike. Mr & Mrs P. saw one Ammophila use a pebble as a tool, & only one. So it is with man: solitude makes them peculiar. The more a man lives alone, the more he becomes unlike other men - hence the original racy flavor of woodsmen, pioneers, craftsmen [?], etc. Isolated communities develop characteristics of their own. Constant intracommunication/ the friction of travel, of books, of newspapers, make men alike, all are pebbles upon the same beach, washed by the same waves." These paragraphs serve as an early draft for a portion of Burroughs' essay "Nature's Way," first published in Harper's Magazine in 1904, in which he gives full credit to "George W. Peckham and his wife" for his education on the matter; later published in Burroughs' Ways of Nature in 1905. Offsetting from the wasp plates; moderate dirt to boards; about a very good copy, lacking the dust jacket. A good association copy, and an extraordinary piece of original writing by one of the preeminent American naturalists, whose name is attached to an annual award for a distinguished work of nature writing. [#033327] SOLD