Notices respecting New Books. 65 



details, and hold communion with " the great universal thought 

 which pervades the one great creative action." This man is master 

 of his materials, and handles them with the audacity of one who 

 knows his own power ; the rocks are plastic in his hand, and the 

 fossils live again. Two grand qualifications are necessary in an 

 educator — the ability to provoke and the ability to instruct; the 

 former, though often forgotten, is the more important of the two. 

 There is merit in the smoothing away of a difficulty, but far greater 

 merit in arousing an amount of force able to cope with and to over- 

 come it. These two qualifications are, if we mistake not, possessed 

 by the man before us. There is life in his sentences which propa- 

 gates itself to those who read them. Who could resist the follow- 

 ing ? — " In conducting the business of this class, I look forward to 

 the holding of field excursions, regarding them to be quite as essen- 

 tial as lectures for the instruction of the student, who, to benefit by 

 his studies, must become a practical fossilist, and learn to observe 

 carefully fossils in situ, and appreciate on the spot the evidence 

 afforded by their associations. During the progress of our Winter 

 Courses this can be done effectually in the neighbourhood of London, 

 or by means of the facilities of transport afforded by lines of railroad. 

 I trust that before the end of this session a compact band of un- 

 daunted investigators, belted, strapped, and bag-bearing, armed with 

 stout hammers and sharp chisels, under the veteran generalship of 

 our Director-in- chief, and officered by my mineral and geological 

 colleagues and myself, will make the rocks shake and yield up their 

 treasures for many a mile around the great metropolis." Such ap- 

 peals thrill the heart of the student like electric fire, and awaken an 

 ardour which renders his task heroic. 



The lecturer assigns a high vocation to the naturalist. " It is not 

 an uncommon fancy to suppose that naturalists are occupied entirely 

 with the naming and describing of the kinds of animals and plants ; 

 that provided they can enumerate, in clear though technical lan- 

 guage, the characteristics or features of a being submitted to their 

 examinations, usually in the state of a preserved specimen, and, on 

 discovery of the species being one hitherto unnoticed, give it a name 

 by which it may be remembered by their brother naturalists to the 

 end of time, or thereabouts, they have attained all their aim and ful- 

 filled all their ambition. This notion of their offices and duties is a 

 libel. It takes notice of only a fragment of their labours. To name 

 and describe are but to enrol an object with a true spelling and cor- 

 rect definition, in the great dictionary of science. Words in diction- 

 aries are exhibitions of the raw materials out of which literature is 

 made ; and species arranged in zoological and botanical systems are 

 orderly and beautiful displays of the raw materials of natural history 

 science. Words may be wasted and species misused. But the study 

 of species, which is the basis of all natural history science, does not 

 take note merely of their external, or even their internal organiza- 

 tion. It deals also with their relation to conditions in time and 

 space. It seeks out the epoch of their first appearance, and traces 

 them through their diffusion under favouring, or limitation and ex- 



Phil. Mag. S. 4. Vol. 3. No. 15. Jan. 1852. F 



