Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 84:335 (Jul 1927)
Article: Mares’-Nests
Author: Philip Wendell Crannell

BSac 84:335 (July 1927) p. 297

Mares’-Nests

Philip Wendell Crannell

“Nidification” is an interesting and useful activity of the animate world. “There be” nests many, of kinds many, in places many; nests curious, clumsy, comely, simple or ingenious; “in the heavens (or at least in the tree-tops and the cliffs) above, and in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth”; nests of birds and of fishes and of beasts, sometimes quadruped and sometimes biped. But the most curious and most significant of all is the variety known as the “mares’-nests.”

A traveler over the prairie notes with interest the ground nest of the meadowlark, or high up in some tree on the border of a stream, the nest of the oriole. He notes, perhaps, where some small animal, after the observed canine fashion, has turned himself round and round in the grass and nestled down for the night. Presently he comes upon a larger circle, depressed in the center, and with the grasses bending round in curvilinear fashion like the others. It cannot be a bird’s nest, though it is spring, there are no eggs, it is too big, even for the dodo, even if that were not extinct. He dismounts and investigates; he discovers here and there a few horsehairs, and leaps to his conclusion: “It’s a mares’-nest.” Enthusiastically he announces to a waiting world his rare discovery.

In the world of thought, a “mares’-nest” is a supposed more or less startling discovery—or it may be a conviction, a theory, the product of long, slow growth—based on some newly (once newly, at any rate) observed fact or aspect of fact, and on some fancied analogy or law of nature, but in reality unjustified by the full body of fact and nature’s real underlying laws.” “There ain’t no sich animile,” in truth, but the fascinated discoverer and a believing world, or circle, accepts it.

“Mares’-nests,” in whatsoever realm found, are, as I have suggested, the product of an active but tethered mind, centered at one point by a dominating theory, mov-

BSac 84:335 (July 1927) p. 298

ing in a circular orbit amid the tall grass of a luxuriant imagination. Every region of human thought is studded thick with them.

There are mares’-nests political. Very likely that was one some years ago, when the conspiracy of the money power to get the whole nation in its grip and crucify us all on a cross of gold was discovered. Many undoubted facts lent color to the charge. Money is tyrannous, money does work with money, possibly the gold standard at that time did lend itself to the dominance of the financial powers that were, but the conspiracy itself was a Chi-maera. The current announcements of groups of Roman Catholic youth engaged ...