Tin.] THE HISTOEY OF NATURE. 183 



lecture, that I am only going to recommend them to 

 collect weeds and butterflies, " rats and mice, and such 

 small deer." Far from it. The honourable title of 

 Natural History has, and unwisely, been restricted too 

 much of late years to the mere study of plants and 

 animals. I desire to restore the words to their original 

 and proper meaning the History of Nature ; that is, 

 of all that is born, and grows in time ; in short, of all 

 natural objects. 



If any one shall say By that definition you make 

 not only geology and chemistry branches of natural 

 history, but meteorology and astronomy likewise I 

 cannot deny it. They deal each of them, with realms 

 oO Nature. Geology is, literally, the natural history of 

 soils and lands ; chemistry the natural history of 

 compounds, organic and inorganic; meteorology the 

 natural history of climates; astronomy the natural 

 history of planetary and solar bodies. And more, you 

 cannot now study deeply any branch of what is 

 popularly called Natural History that is, plants and 

 animals without finding it necessary to learn some- 

 thing, and more and more as you go deeper, of those 

 very sciences. As the marvellous interdependence of 

 all natural objects and forces unfolds itself more and 

 more, so the once separate sciences, which treated of 

 different classes of natural objects, are forced to inter- 

 penetrate, as it were; and to supplement themselves 

 by knowledge borrowed from each other. Thus to 

 give a single instance no man can now be a first-rate 

 botanist unless he be also no mean meteorologist, no 

 mean geologist, and as Mr. Darwin has shown in his 

 extraordinary discoveries about the fertilisation of 

 plants by insects no mean entomologist likewise. 



