A GARDEN DIARY 3 



least as much as to the explorers themselves. 

 If we have not thridded Amazonian forests in 

 our own persons with Mr. Bates, or Nicaraguan 

 jungles with Mr. Belt, we know all that those 

 indefatigable travellers have seen, done, dis- 

 covered, experienced, and only need to take 

 down their books from the shelf to be in the 

 thick of those experiences once more. 



So too, with the rest the botanists, zoolo- 

 gists, paleontologists greater, as well as less 

 great. With the prince of them all one starts 

 once more upon that immortal Voyage of the 

 Beagle, which, besides circumnavigating the 

 world, enables one to accumulate those pro- 

 digious stores of observation, destined by-and- 

 by to make one's own name famous to the 

 world's end, and to endow that world itself 

 with one or two practically new departments. 

 With Professor Wallace, one spends years in 

 the Malay Archipelago, till the geography of 

 even the obscurer members of that bewildering 

 group becomes rather more familiar than that 

 of the next parish. With Collingwood one 

 pores over the rock-pools of Chinese seas, which 

 never before reflected human face, or at most 

 that of some shore-haunting Mongolian, unin- 

 terested in zoology. With the savants of the 

 Challenger one sets forth, with all the pomp of 

 subsidised science, upon a three years' cruise, 

 in search of Globigerina:;, of blind Decapoda, of 



