ON THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 7 
never-ending experience of new pleasures— pleasures, which should 
not pall our satiated appetites, which have the very least alloy of 
disappointment in them, is it not worth while to pay a little atten- 
tion to it? Imay be said to be exaggerating, to be enthusiastic in 
my own mode of recreation; but I appeal to all naturalists to bear 
me out in what I have said, and I confidently leave it to the ex- 
perience of others. 
The subject is one, not so much for the library and the study, 
as for the theatre of Creation itself—you will bear in mind the 
view with which I am now regarding it—we shall learn most by 
personal examination, and what we so learn we shall seldom 
forget. 
Nature probably is most fascinating, subjectively, in the season 
of youth, the mind being then most capable of pure enjoyment, 
for its own sake; all things then wear a fairy garb; it was then, 
says Wordsworth, that 
“‘ The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colours and their forms, were then to me 
An appetite ; a feeling and a love 
That had no need of a remoter charm 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye.”’ 
And as riper years steal upon us the same love retains its hold, 
but there is a change in the mode of regarding it; we, like the 
poet, learn 
“To look on Nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity, 
Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
To chasten and subdue. And we have felt 
A presence that disturbs us with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things.” 
To come to something practical: let us draw a comparison 
between a lover of nature and one who thinks nothing of her. 
Take the case of a simple ramble through the fields: most people 
are in the habit of ‘doing a constitutional” occasionally. This 
