Study of Natural History. 463 



ing above his London, no Western Islands spotting the ocean 

 firths beside his Manchester. Field sports, with the invaluable 

 training which they give, if not 



" The reason firm," 

 yet still 



'* The temperate will, 

 Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill," 



have become impossible for the greater number; and athletic 

 exercises are now, in England at least, so artificialized, so expen- 

 sive, so mixed up with drinking, gambling, and other evils of 

 which we need say nothing here, that one cannot wonder at any 

 parents' shrinking from allowing their sons to meddle much with 

 them. And yet the young man who has had. no substitute for 

 such amusements will cut a very sorry figure in Australia, Ca- 

 nada, or India ; and, if he stays at home, will spend many a pound 

 in doctors' bills, which could have been better employed elsewhere. 

 " Taking a walk " as one would take a pill or a draught, seems 

 likely soon to become the only form of out-door existence possible 

 for us of the British Isles. But a walk without an object, unless 

 in the most lovely and novel of scenery, is a poor exercise, and as 

 a recreation utterly nil. We never knew two young lads go out 

 for a " constitutional," who did not, if they were commonplace 

 youths, gossip the whole way about things better left unspoken • 

 or, if they were clever ones, fall on arguing and brainsbeating on 

 politics or metaphysics from the moment they left the door, and 

 return with their wits even more heated and tired than they were 

 when they set out. We cannot help fancying that Milton made 

 a mistake in a certain celebrated passage ; and that it was not 

 " sitting on a hill apart," but tramping four miles out and four 

 miles in along a turn-pike road, that his hapless spirits discoursed 



" Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, 

 And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." 



Seriously, if we wish rural walks to do our children any good^ 

 we must give them a love for rural sights, an object in every walk j 

 we must teach them — and we can teach them — to find wonder in 

 every insect, sublimity in every hedgerow, the records of past 

 worlds in every pebble, and boundless fertility upon the barren 

 shore ; and so, by teaching them to make full use of that limited 

 sphere in which they now are, make them faithful in a few things, 

 that they may be fit hereafter to be rulers over much. 



