32 LEISURE-TIME STUDIES. 



Highland tour, our sea-side stay, in our holiday time wherever 

 spent it is high time we should be taught to see the fairness 

 and fulness of the earth. For no more humanising influence 

 than that of the beautiful and good in nature can operate on 

 man. And to remain as one of the dull, unperceiving 

 objects of this world, with no sense of aught beyond the 

 narrow round of our daily life, were surely a practice 

 unworthy the name of humanity and reason. Whilst when 

 we contrast with this latter state that of the mind aided by 

 science to peer into the secrets of Nature's working ; when we 

 imagine the never-ending sources of delight and instruction, 

 which in the study of plant or animal life, or in the world 

 itself, are continually appearing, we may well maintain that 

 such a mind must live its short life over and over again, in 

 the fulness of its enjoyment and in its contemplation of the 

 wonders of the universe. 



In thus pleading for natural-science studies as initiating 

 a feasible and pleasant system of mental gymnastics, do 

 not, I pray you, mistake the meaning I attach to the term 

 " natural-science studies." By the sciences of natural objects 

 I do not mean the dry bones, and bare, hard details of any 

 scientific system. I do not in any sense wish you to think 

 of science only as a collection of dry, hard facts, arranged in 

 a certain order, and as presenting nothing more attractive 

 than this. No ! There is an aspect of science commonly 

 present to the popular mind, in which it appears like the 

 dry skeleton of the museum uninteresting and unin- 

 telligible, save to the initiated few. But science has also its 

 warm, living aspect. The dry facts form, like the skeleton, 

 the mere framework which gives support to the active, 

 pulsating, life-retaining parts of the scientific organism. 

 And if science be taught to you as it should be, you will be 

 led to its valued facts through their connection and relations 

 with the interesting and captivating body of the study. 

 Generalisations will act as the ligaments and muscles to 

 bind the parts together; and throughout the scientific, as 

 throughout the actual living organism, you will be led to 



