1901-1902. | Presidential Address. 391 
might never have ruled the waves as she now does had not a 
Scottish observer—James Watt——improved, if he did not 
actually invent, the steam-engine; and had the object- 
lesson of the duck’s foot not suggested the paddle, as did the 
tail of the fish the screw-propeller of the ocean - going grey- 
hounds. That marvellously-constructed and skilled navvy— 
the mole’—has taught our engineers how to tunnel through 
great mountains and under broad rivers. Careful observation 
of its cylindrical form, of the shape and working of its ex- 
cavating forepaws and propelling hind-legs, show how admirably 
the mole has been adapted to tunnel-boring. It also, I would 
remind you, affords us a warning to use and exercise all our 
faculties, lest by disuse any of them becomes atrophied. It 
has the organs of vision, but, as burrowing underground does 
not call them into exercise, they have all but died out. Let 
each of us then, as naturalists, use our eyes, and not become 
“blind as a mole” as we walk through this beautiful world. 
I fear I may have been presenting too low, too sordid a 
view of nature-study in thus linking it with trade, commerce, 
politics, and suchlike worrying, care - begetting items of the 
daily struggle of modern life. We who are immersed in them 
would rather seek relief from them and find refreshment by 
going out into the wilderness, where, in the hallowed calm, we 
would be alone with Nature, to hear and to see what can be 
neither heard nor seen in the roar and rush of city business 
life. Fortunately, we are so constituted that, when otherwise 
confined, we have only to close our eyes and abstract our mind 
from the “business” in hand to find ourselves, in memory 
and in imagination, living over again pleasant and profitable 
rambles of past and sunnier days. We can thus, almost by a 
mere effort of the will, bring in to our pent-up business life a 
glint of the blue sky, a breath of the heath-clad hill, a whisper 
of the murmuring stream, and an echo of the music of some 
feathered songster, which will revive and send us on our way 
rejoicing—the pleasant past uniting with the hopeful future 
in carrying us cheerily through present, if arduous, toil. 
Robert Burns, as did many another, got his poetry out of 
his daily toil. While others saw nothing but the brown earth 
yielding to the relentless plough, he held sweet converse with 
1 See ‘Transactions,’ vol. iv. pp. 150 et seq. 
VOL: LV. 205 
