VACATION RAMBLES 261 



you nearly everything that one glacier can teach. After- 

 wards you can go on, if you are enough of a mountaineer, 

 and cross the snowfields upon which the Schreckhorn and 

 the Finsteraarhorn look down. That one valley will teach 

 you more than all Switzerland could do, if you were to 

 move over the ground as so many do at the rate of forty 

 miles a day, in a personally conducted party. To find 

 out your own way, to puzzle out your own problems, and 

 to work at your own rate are the first elements of pro- 

 ductive investigation, whether you are trying to master 

 the scenery of Switzerland or a new science. Of course 

 there are many people who find the only true method 

 hopelessly slow. Switzerland in three weeks, chemistry 

 in twenty lectures, is the programme for them. They 

 will learn in time that lasting knowledge is not got by 

 any such facile expedients. The rapid method is inviting 

 enough at the outset. We go in a party because we love 

 society. One of the party knows the way while the rest do 

 not, what then can be more natural than that he should 

 lead ? One knows the elements of a science of which 

 the rest are ignorant. What more natural than that he 

 should speak while the others listen ? The answer is in 

 each case the same. Knowledge that we get without 

 personal effort is knowledge in appearance only ; it strikes 

 no root, and soon withers. 



Most of the people who visit Norway do just what the 

 naturalist should avoid. They steam up one fjord after 

 another, smoke twice as much as they do at home, eat 

 heavy and frequent meals with no better intervals of 

 exercise than are possible on an encumbered deck, vary 

 the steamer only by driving from one hotel to another, 

 and are guided all the way either by Baedeker or an ex- 

 perienced friend. This may be tolerable for the first 

 week, but the second week is very like the first, and one 

 fjord very like another. It is always somebody else, and 

 not the tourist himself, who does whatever is done, manages 

 the engine, manages the horses, cooks the dinner, chooses the 



