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NA TURE 



\Feb. 20, 1890 



lost glass, a hovering kestrel, a sudden gust of wind, a roving 

 dog, or a summer shower, robs the unlucky naturalist of his 

 due ; nay, it sometimes happens that, startled by some rare 

 sight, or lost in admiration of it, he himself lets the happy 

 moment slip, and is obliged to be contented with a sketch from 

 memory, when he might have had one from life. 



But I have not yet got to the bottom of my budget — the 

 heaviest trouble still remains ; and that is, that the result of a 

 day's watching will often go into a few lines, or even into a few 

 words ; and so it happens, that the writer of the history of a 

 natural group of animals is too frequently driven to fill up his 

 space with minute analysis of structure, discussions on classifica- 

 tion, disputes on the use of obscure organs, or descriptions of 

 trifling varieties ; which, exalted to the rank of species, fill his 

 pages with wearisome repetitions ; for were he, before he writes 

 his book, to endeavour to make himself acquainted with the 

 habits of all the creatures he describes, his own life-time might 

 be spent in the pursuit. 



We will now take a different case, and suppose that many 

 years have been spent in the constant and successful study of the 

 animals themselves ; and that the time has come, when the 

 naturalist may write his book, with the hope of treating, with 

 due consideration, the most interesting portion of his subject. He 

 is now beset with a new class of difficulties, and finds that pub- 

 lishers and scientific fashion alike, combine to drive him into the 

 old groove : for the former limit his space, by naturally demur- 

 ring to a constantly increasing number of plates and an ever 

 lengthening text ; while the latter insists so strongly on having a 

 complete record of the structure, and points of difference, of 

 every species, however insignificant, that it is hardly possible to 

 do much more than give that record — a mere dry shuck, emptied 

 of nearly all that makes natural history delightful. 



And so we come round again to the point that I have already 

 glanced at, viz. " Ought natural history to be delightful ? " 



Ought it to be delightful ! Say, rather, ought it to exist ? 

 What title has the greater part of natural history to any existence 

 but that it charms us ? It is true that this study may help — does 

 help many — to worthier conceptions of the unseen, to loftier 

 hopes, to higher praise ; that it gives us broader and sounder 

 notions of the possible relation of animals, not only to one 

 another, but also to ourselves ; that it provides us with the 

 material for fascinating speculations on the embryology of our 

 passions and mental powers ; and that it may even serve to sug- 

 gest theories of the commencement and end of things, of matter, 

 of life, of mind, and of consciousness — ^grave questions, scarcely 

 to be dealt with successfully by human faculties, but in a condi- 

 tion to be discussed with infinite relish. 



When I speak, then, of the pleasure we derive from the study 

 of natural history, I include these graver and higher pleasures 

 in the word. 



Here and there, too, no doubt, the knowledge of the powers 

 and habits of animals is materially useful to us ; and, indeed, 

 in the case of some of the minuter organisms, may be of terrible 

 importance ; but, in that of the large majority of creatures, we 

 might go out of the world unconscious of their existence (as, 

 indeed, very many people do), and yet, unlike the little jackdaw, 

 not be "a penny the worse." For what is a man the better for 

 studying butterflies, unless he is delighted with their beauty, their 

 structure, and their transformations? Why should he learn any- 

 thing about wasps and ants, unless their ways give him a thrill 

 of pleasure ? What can the living plumes of the rock-zoophytes 

 do for us, but 'witch our eyes with their loveliness, or entrance 

 us with the sight of their tiny fleets of medusa- buds, watery 

 ghostlets, flitting away, laden with the fate of future generations? 



When, at dusk, we steal into the woods to hear the nightin- 

 gale, or watch the night-jar, what more do we hope for than to 

 delight our ears with the notes of the one, or our eyes with the 

 flight of the other? When the microscope dazzles us with the 

 sight of a world, whose inhabitants and their doings surpass the 

 wildest flights of nightmare or fairy tale, do we speculate on 

 what possible service this strange creation may render us ? Do 

 we give a thought to the ponderous polysyllables that these mites 

 bear in our upper world, or to their formal marshalling into 

 ranks and companies, which are ever being pulled to pieces, to 

 be again re-arranged ? No ! it is the living creature itself which 

 chains us to the magic tube. For there we see that the 

 dream of worlds peopled with unimagined forms of life — with 

 sentient beings whose ways are a mystery, and whose thoughts 

 we cannot even guess at — is a reality that lies at our very feet ; 

 that the air we breathe, the dust that plagues our nostrils, the 



water we fear to drink, teem with forms more amazing than any 

 with which our fancy has peopled the distant stars ; and that the 

 actions of some of the humblest arouse in us the bewildering 

 suspicion, that, even in these invisible specks, there is a faint 

 foreboding of our own dual nature. 



If, then, we make some few exceptions, we are entitled to say 

 that the study of natural history depends for its existence on the 

 pleasure that it gives, and the curiosity that it excites and 

 gratifies : and yet, if this be so, see how cruelly we often treat 

 it. Round its fair domain we try to draw a triple rampart of 

 uncouth words, elaborate, yet ever-changing classifications, and 

 exasperatingly minute subdivisions ; and we place these diffi- 

 culties in the path of those whose advantages are the least, those 

 who have neither the vigorous tastes that enable them to clear 

 such obstacles at a bound, nor the homes whose fortunate position 

 enables them to slip round them. For modern town life forces a 

 constantly increasing number of students to take their natural 

 history from books ; and too often these are either expensive 

 volumes beyond their reach, or dismal abridgments, which have 

 shrunk, under examination pressure, till they are little else than 

 a stony compound of the newest classification and the oldest 

 woodcuts. 



But the happier country lad wanders among fields and 

 hedges, by moor and river, sea-washed cliff^ and shore, learn- 

 ing zoology as he learnt his native tongue, not in paradigms 

 and rules, but from Mother Nature's own lips. He knows the 

 birds by their flight, and (still rarer accomplishment) by their 

 cries. He has never heard of the CEdicnemus crepitans, the 

 CJiuradrius pluvialis, or the Sqtiatarola cinerea, but he can find 

 a plover's nest, and has seen the young brown peewits peering 

 at him from behind their protecting clods. He has watched the 

 cunning flycatcher leaving her obvious, and yet invisible young, 

 in a hole in an old wall, while it carried off" the pellets that might 

 have betrayed their presence ; and has stood so still to see the 

 male redstart, that a field-mouse has curled itself up on his 

 warm foot and gone to sleep. He gathers the delicate buds of 

 the wild rose, happily ignorant of the forty-odd names under 

 which that luckless plant has been smothered ; and if, perchance, 

 his last birthday has been made memorable by the gift of a 

 microscope, before long he will be glorying in the transparent 

 beauties of Asplanchna, unaware that he ought to crush his 

 living prize, in order to find out which of some half-dozen equally 

 barbarous names he ought to give it. 



The faults, indeed, of scientific names are so glaring, and the 

 subject is altogether so hopeless, that I will not waste either 

 your time or my patience by dilating on it. But, while admitting 

 that distinct creatures must have different names, and very re- 

 luctantly adm.itting that it seems almost impossible to alter the 

 present fashion of giving them, I see no reason why these, as 

 well as the technical names of parts and organs, should not be 

 kept as much as possible in the background, and not suffered to 

 bristle so in every page, that we might almost say with Job, 

 "There are thistles growing instead of wheat, and cockle instead 

 of barley." 



We laughed at the droll parody in which the word change was 

 defined as " a perichoretical synechy of pamparallagmatic and 

 porroteroporeumatical differentiations and integrations," yet it 

 would not be a difficult matter to point out sentences, in recent 

 works on our favourite pursuits, that would suggest a similar 

 travesty. No doubt, new notions must often be clothed in new 

 language, and the severer studies of embryology and develop- 

 ment require a minute precision of statement that leads to the 

 invention of a multitude of new terms. Moreover, the idea that 

 the meaning of these terms should be contained in the names 

 themselves is excellent ; but I cannot say that the result is happy — 

 I might almost say that it is repulsive; and if we suffer this language 

 to invade the more popular side of natural history, I fear that 

 we shall only write for one another, and that our scientific 

 treatises will run the risk of being looked at only for their 

 plates, and of being then bound up with the Russian and 

 Hungarian memoirs. 



The multiplication of species, too, is a crying evil, and the 

 exasperating alterations of their names, in consequence of 

 changing classifications, is another. The former, of course, is 

 mainly due to the difficulty, no doubt a very great one, of deter- 

 mining what shall be a species, and what a variety. How" 

 widely experts may differ on this question, Darwin has shown, 

 by pointing out that, excluding several polymorphic genera and 

 many trifling varieties, nearly two hundred British species, which 

 are generally considered varieties, have all been ranked by 



