6 GLAUCUS ; OR, 
evidently cost him in the collecting the spare hours 
of many busy years, and many a pound, too, out of 
his small salary, were you not a little puzzled to 
make out what spell there could be in those “use- 
less” moths, to draw out of his warm bed, twenty 
miles down the Eastern Counties Railway, and into 
the damp forest like a deer-stealer, a sober white 
headed Tim Linkinwater like him, your very best 
man of business, given to the reading of Scotch 
political economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear 
notions on the currency question ? 
It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these 
pages help you somewhat toward solving the puzzle. 
We shall agree at least that the study of Natural 
History has become now-a-days an honourable one. 
A Cromarty stonemason was till lately—God rest 
his noble soul !—the most important man in the 
City of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil 
fishes ; and the successful investigator of the 
minutest animals takes place unquestioned among 
men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old 
Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit 
