128 



It would not do to draw the conclusion that all bites would 

 terminate as in this case. The spider was evidently irritated and 

 bit hard, and the full effects of any venom ought to have been 

 seen but there was none, I think. Perhaps had the wound 

 inflicted been on a vein, or in a more tender j)art than the heel, 

 Avorse effects than the foregoing might have ensued. 



C. W. MEADEN". 



22nd November, 1892. 



THE STUDY OF NATtJBAL HISTORY. 



The study of Natural History has always had its votaries 

 even in the earliest times, indeed the account of the first Man, as 

 related in the Biblical story, implies that Adam was an ardent 

 Naturalist. In fact it is difficult to understand how primitive 

 Man could have been otherwise than a naturalist. Endowed 

 with an intellect of a higher order than any other created living 

 thing, deprived of all the ordinary food, liealthy and unhealthy, 

 which modern civilization affords the mind in such abundance, 

 2)rimeval Man, unconsciously perhaps, made Nature his book, 

 and there read, in order to provide food for his ever-hungry 

 brain. Weaker than many scores of the monstrous animals 

 Avhich roamed through the forests and grazed on the plains at a 

 time when time had not begun, so to speak ; when marsh, swamp, 

 river and sea teemed with A^oracious reptiles, compared to which 

 St. George's fabled dragon or the most formidable crocodile of 

 to-day is almost as harmless as the tin}' anoles which chase each 

 other on our garden walls, or spring from bough to bough in 

 pursuit of the flies which constitute their food ; Man, 

 threatened by dangers such as these in the woodland 

 and the savannah, in the water and the air ; in the earliest 

 stnges of his history, in order to obey his first instinct — 

 self-preservation — was forced to study the habits of the appalling 

 brutes which menaced the existence of his species with extinc- 

 tion from all sides, and so became a Naturalist. The necessity 

 of supplementing his food supplies from the vegetable woidd 

 \aught him how to distinguish among the roots, berries, leaves 

 and grains growing around him those which were deleterious to his 

 well-being from those which might be eaten Avith advantage, and 



