said he was always anxious to learn, and from fields and trees he could learn nothing.

It has, I know, been said that botanists

"Love not the flower they pluck and know it not. And all their botany is but Latin names." Contrast this, however, with the language of one who would hardly claim to be a master in botany, though he is certainly a loving student. Consider," says

Ruskin, “what we owe to the meadow grass, to the covering of the dark ground by that glorious enamel, by the companies of those soft, countless, and peaceful spears of the field! Follow but for a little time the thought of all that we ought to recognise in those words. All spring and summer is in them-the walks by silent scented paths, the rest in noonday heat, the joy of the herds and flocks, the power of all shepherd life and meditation; the life of the sunlight upon the world, falling in emerald streaks and soft

blue shadows, when else it would have struck on the dark mould or scorching dust; pastures beside the pacing brooks, soft banks and knolls of lowly hills, thymy slopes of down overlooked by the blue line of lifted sea; crisp lawns all dim with early dew, or smooth in evening warmth of barred sunshine, dinted by happy feet, softening in their fall the sound of loving voices."

My own tastes and studies have led me mainly in the direction of Natural History and Archæology; but if you love one science, you cannot but feel intense interest in them all. How grand are the truths of Astronomy! Prudhomme, in a sonnet, beautifully translated by Arthur O'Shaugnessy, has pictured an Observatory. He says

""Tis late; the astronomer in his lonely height,
Exploring all the dark, descries afar

Orbs that like distant isles of splendour are."

He notices a comet, and calculating its

orbit, finds that it will return in a

thousand years—

"The star will come. It dare not by one hour

Cheat Science, or falsify her calculation; Men will have passed, but, watchful in the tower, Man shall remain in sleepless contemplation; And should all men have perished in their turn, Truth in their place would watch that star's return.'

Ernest Rhys well says of a student's chamber

"Strange things pass nightly in this little room,
All dreary as it looks by light of day;
Enchantment reigns here when at evening play
Red fire-light glimpses through the pallid gloom."

And the true student, in Ruskin's words, stands on an eminence from which he looks back on the universe of God and forward over the generations of men.

Even if it be true that science was dry when it was buried in huge folios, that is certainly no longer the case now; and Lord Chesterfield's wise wish, that Minerva might have three graces as well as Venus, has been amply fulfilled.

66

The study of natural history indeed seems destined to replace the loss of what is, not very happily I think, termed sport;" engraven in us as it is by the operation of thousands of years, during which man lived greatly on the produce of the chase. Game is gradually becoming "small by degrees and beautifully less." Our prehistoric ancestors hunted the Mammoth, the woolly-haired Rhinoceros, and the Irish Elk; the ancient Britons had the wild ox, the deer, and the wolf. We have still the pheasant, the partridge, the fox, and the hare; but even these are becoming scarcer, and must be preserved first, in order that they may be killed afterwards. Some of us even now -and more, no doubt, will hereafter— satisfy instincts, essentially of the same origin, by the collection of birds, or insects, or even infusoria-of creatures which more than make up by their variety what they want in size.

Emerson avers that when a naturalist has "got all snakes and lizards in his phials, science has done for him also, and has put the man into a bottle." I do not deny that there are such cases, but they are quite exceptional. The true naturalist is no mere dry collector.

I cannot resist, although it is rather long, quoting the following description from Hudson and Gosse's beautiful work on the Rotifera :

"On the Somersetshire side of the Avon, and not far from Clifton, is a little combe, at the bottom of which lies an old fish-pond. Its slopes are covered with plantations of beech and fir, so as to shelter the pond on three sides, and yet leave it open to the soft south-western breezes, and to the afternoon sun. At the head of the combe wells up a clear spring, which sends a thread of water, trickling through a bed of osiers, into the upper end of the pond. A stout stone