294 HOW TO STUDY NATUKAL HISTORY. [xn. 



them; we read to be amused and instructed, not to 

 study cases like so many barristers. So is history read. 

 And so, alas, is history written, too often, for want of a 

 steady and severe training which would enable people 

 to judge dispassionately of facts. In politics the case 

 is the same. In poetry, which appeals more directly 

 to the feelings, it must needs be still worse ; as has 

 been shown sadly enough of late by the success of 

 several poems, in which every possible form of bad 

 taste has only met with unbounded admiration from 

 the many who have not had their senses exercised to 

 discern between good and evil. 



Now what seems to me to be wanted for young 

 minds, is a study in which no personal likes or dislikes 

 shall tempt them out of the path of mental honesty ; a 

 study in which they shall be free to look at facts 

 exactly as they are, and draw their conclusions 

 patiently and dispassionately. And such a study I 

 have found in that of natural history. 



Do not fancy it, I beg you, an easy thing to judge 

 fairly of facts ; even to discover the facts at all, when 

 they are staring you in the face ; and to see what it is 

 that you do see. Any lawyer will tell you, that if you 

 ask three honest men to bear testimony concerning an 

 event which happened but yesterday, none of them, if 

 he be at all an interested party, will give you exactly 

 the same account of it : not that he wishes to say what 

 is untrue ; but that different parts of the whole matter 

 having struck each man with different force, a different 

 picture has been left on each man's memory. I have 

 been utterly astounded of late, in investigating these 

 strange stories of table-turning and spirit-rapping, to 

 find how even clear-headed and well-instructed persons 



