302 HOW TO STUDY NATURAL HISTORY. [xn. 



its hundred species of plants, each different and each 

 beautiful ; and when you tire of them if you ever can 

 tire a trip into the meadows by the Thames, with the 

 rich vegetation of their dikes, floating flower-beds of 

 every hue, will bring you as it were into a new world, 

 new forms, new colours, new delight. You ask why this 

 is ? And you find yourself at once involved in questions 

 of soil and climate, which lead you onward, step by step, 

 into the deepest problems of geology and chemistry. In 

 entomology, too, if you have any taste for the beauties 

 of form and colour, any fondness for mechanical and 

 dynamical science, the insects, even to the smallest, 

 will supply endless food for such likings ; while their 

 instincts and their transformations, as well as the 

 equally wondrous chemical transformation of salts and 

 gases into living plants, which agricultural chemistry 

 teaches you, will tempt you to echo every day Mephi- 

 stopheles's magic song, when he draws wine out of the 

 table in Auersbach's cellar : 



Wine is grapes, and grapes are wood 

 The wooden board yields wine as good: 

 It is but a deeper glance 

 Into Nature's countenance. 

 All is plain to him who seeth ; 

 Lift the veil and look beneath, 

 And behold, the wise man saith, 

 Miracles, if you have faith. 



Believe me you need not go so far to find more than 

 you will ever understand. An hour's summer walk, 

 in the company of some one who knows what to look 

 for and how to look for it, by the side of one of those 

 stagnant dikes in the meadows below, would furnish 

 you with subjects for a month's investigation, in the 



