t.] EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF NATURAL HISTORY SCIENCES. 91 



courage and submission ; and will, at any rate, view with 

 suspicion those weakly amiable theories of the Divine 

 government, which would have us believe pain to be an 

 oversight and a mistake, — to be corrected by and by. 

 On the other hand, the predominance of happiness 

 among living things — their lavish beauty — the secret and 

 wonderful harmony which pervades them all, from the 

 highest to the lowest, arc equally striking refutations of 

 that modern Manichean doctrine, which exhibits the 

 world as a slave-mill, worked with many tears, for mere 

 utilitarian ends. 



There is yet another way in which natural history 

 may, T am convinced, take a profound hold upon practical 

 life, — and that is, by its influence over our finer feelings, 

 as the greatest of all sources of that pleasure which is 

 derivable from beauty. I do not pretend that natural- 

 history knowledge, as such, can increase our sense of the 

 beautiful in natural objects. I do not suppose that the 

 dead soul of Peter Bell, of whom the great poet of nature 

 says, — 



A primrose "by the river's brim, 

 A yellow primrose was to liini, — 

 And it was nothing more, — 



would have been a whit roused from its apathy, by the 

 information that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous 

 Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and central placen- 

 tation. But I advocate natural-history knowledge from 

 this point of view, because it would lead us to seek the 

 beauties of natural objects, instead of trusting to chance 

 to force them on our attention. To a person uninstructed 

 in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk 

 through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, 

 nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. 

 Teach him something of natural history, and you place 

 in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth 



