OBSERVATION OF BIRDS. 179 



of seeking safety by escape from our view, as is the case 

 with all those animals which cannot fly, and which 

 are not too formidable or too repulsive to our pre- 

 judices for our remaining to examine them, seek it by 

 rising and spreading themselves out, as it were, for 

 our examination in the free atmosphere. Hence, 

 when we are abroad, be it for pleasure, for health, or 

 for business, the birds are an ever-open book, in which 

 every one may read as he walks or rides ; and thus 

 turn to a means of acquiring the most useful know- 

 ledge those hours which to them who have not this 

 habit are not only utterly lost, but which are even 

 painful in the passing. 



There is in this last circumstance, and it is one 

 the pain of which is felt by every one who is not 

 absolutely seared to indifference, a most useful lesson. 

 If we throw idly away those portions of time which 

 we cannot employ in our ordinary business, they fail 

 not in galling us for the neglect, and if we persevere 

 in the idle habit till it ceases to be galling, the mind 

 is thereby so unnerved and broken down that, if we 

 do not seek ruinous escape in dissipation, we become 

 unfit for those very avocations, our eagerness for 

 success in which is the cause why we neglect that 

 nature which should afford employment to our minds 

 in the necessary pauses. 



It is worthy of remark and remembrance that, in 

 all those revivals in which nations have come back 

 from a state of listlessness and decline to vigorous 

 action and improvement, the study of natural history 

 has always formed an early and a prominent part ; 

 and that, in all the fallings-off, that study has been 

 among the first to be neglected. As it is with 

 nations, so it must be with individuals ; for the one 

 is merely the sum of the other, and the sum can 



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