No. 4.] LOVE AND STUDY OF NATURE. 135 



borazo, trying to settle the vexed problem of canals in Mars ; 

 the late Dr. Gould, in his long years of voluntary exile from 

 homo in South America; Professor Todd, on his eclipse 

 expeditions, — all are animated by this great love, and the 

 whole science of astronomy was created by its saints, martyrs 

 and hermits smitten, by the great passion to push knowledge 

 to its remotest bounds, that mankind might know something 

 concerning infinite space and its stellar population. 



Physics and chemistry, to those who know their history 

 from Roger and Sir Francis Bacon through the period of 

 alchemy and the black arts ; botany, which has tempted men 

 into inhospitable lauds, sometimes dangerous, and generally 

 involving more or less hardship ; biology, consecrated by 

 the service of all sorts and conditions of devotees, from 

 Linna?us, Lamarck, Cuvier, St. Hilaire and Audubon, down 

 to Darwin, Hagen, and all the Challenger and other expedi- 

 tions ; geography, from Marco Polo to Stanley and Nansen ; 

 geology, from Pliny down ; anatomy, from Haller and the 

 great anatomists of the seventeenth century, — all these are 

 the creations of men who have abjured an easy life, and have 

 more or less sacrificed the dilettante's love of general knowl- 

 edge and become specialists with an enthusiasm not all un- 

 like that of Simon Stylites or the Trappists, and who really 

 deserve all the honor which Comte sought to bestow upon 

 them by renaming every day throughout the year from such 

 creators of science, as the Catholic calendar had made each 

 day sacred to the name of some saint selected from the many 

 thousands whose lives constitute that great arsenal of virtue, 

 to the further elaboration of which one Catholic sect, the 

 Bollandists, devotes all its work. 



II. Just so nature has in all ages been the muse that has 

 inspired every artist in every line of art. Landscapes from 

 Claude Lorrain and Turner down can be painted in a way to 

 bring out their whole meaning onh r by those who see with 

 the heart. Architecture, which originated in the forest, 

 from trees and the acanthus ; sculpture, which still takes its 

 canons from Greek art, which was closest to nature ; poetry, 

 which originated in description and narrative ; music, which 

 developed from the songs of birds, the noises of the waves 

 and winds and other sounds of nature, — all suggest, both 



