THE FELICITY OF NATURALISTS. 823 



air and amid natural beauties, but the naturalist is never out of tliem ; 

 he is hcky who adds aught to the knowledge of his fellow-man, but 

 the naturalist can not stir without making an addition to it ; he is 

 most favored whose occupation forces him to think of greater things 

 than itself, who, like the astronomer, must, in order to learn, for ever 

 look upward and where is the naturalist without ever-present j)iety 

 of some kind? It is very comic to hear that Mr. Buckland rejected 

 evolution, because " my father was Dean of Westminster ; I was bred 

 in the principles of Church and state, and I will never admit it " ; but 

 the thought which prompted that half -humorous, half-serious expres- 

 sion of his faith was not comic at all. He could not, as naturalist, 

 stand a theory which struck him (quite erroneously) as dispensing 

 with, or even affronting, a sentient First Cause. The child in him 

 which in Mr. Buckland, as in every man who loves Nature with a 

 single heart, was very strong revolted, and grew pettish. 



There is something, however, in the naturalist's pursuit besides hap- 

 piness which gives him his tribal qualities, those always found with his 

 pursuit, and it is a little difficult to decide quite satisfactorily what it is. 

 It is not the pursuit of knowledge in itself. Scholars and metaphy- 

 sicians, and men of the sciences which relate to other things than out- 

 door nature, physicians, for instance, and electricians, are not like the 

 naturalists at all. Indeed, we do not quite know why the pursuit of 

 knowledge of itself should tend to good any more than any other 

 indulgence of curiosity. Nor is it all the open air, for the men who 

 next to the naturalists live most in that, agricultural peasants, belong 

 to a far removed type of men. Nor is it a certain innocence and per- 

 manent absence of sinister temptation which attaches to the pursuit, for 

 many pursuits antiquarianism, for instance are quite as innocent yet 

 evolve a totally different order of mind, a mind often very much more 

 reflective and less simple. Naturalists, too, are of necessity incessantly 

 killing, and constant though innocent killing seems, as in butchers, 

 rather to brutalize than to refine the general character. Butchers' 

 boys are not breezy people at all, nor, for that matter, are fishmongers 

 or poulterers. The goodness of naturalists, like the serenity of Arctic 

 voyagers, is of a kind je;- se, a quality which we scarcely discover in 

 any other class, a benevolence quite unfailing and almost Christlike in 

 persons otherwise very human indeed. 



May it not be that the instinct of mankind is true that Nature, 

 an undeteriorated work of God, has in it something better than man, 

 and in close contact with the mind gives that something out ? It may 

 be said that we do not find this result in the savasre, even if he be 

 Hawaian or Guacho that is, even if he lives always amid scenes of 

 unfailing beauty ; but that is because the savage's mind is closed to 

 the necessary contact. But we do find it in the sportsman, who, even 

 if in other ways objectionable, or even brutalized by the constant and 

 objectless slaughter of things more beautiful than himself, has often in 



