1 86 Country Rambles, 



The particular nature must be learned by special in- 

 quiry. Though the yellow dead-nettle, for example, is 

 shown by its general structure to be devoid of anything 

 bad, it cannot be told whether it is fit to eat until tasted 

 and tried. To persons who have an idea of emigrating, 

 or whose children are likely to go abroad, botany is of 

 the very highest service, for in foreign countries men are 

 thrown upon their own resources, and to be compelled 

 by ignorance to look upon every leaf as a possible poison 

 is helplessness of the most wretched kind. 



The railway up the Agecroft valley is interesting as the 

 first that was constructed after the Liverpool and Man- 

 chester, and perhaps the "Grand Junction." People used 

 to go to the Prestwich hills to watch the trains scudding 

 along. The scenery here is certainly not spoiled by it. 

 For our own part, we consider that scenery is scarcely 

 ever spoiled by the presence of railways, and would 

 contend rather that they are a capital addition; for 

 those spectacles are always most salutary to the mind, 

 and therefore most truly pleasing, where along with 

 rural beauties are combined the grand circumstances of 

 human life and human enterprise. Railways count with 

 bridges, ships, gardens, the castles and abbeys of the 

 past, and the mansions of the present. Nature is 

 beautiful, even in its most retired and lonely solitudes, 

 just in the proportion that we connect with it, though 

 unconsciously, the interests, the feelings, the aspirations 

 of humanity; the more of what is noble and comely in 

 human life we are able to assimilate with the outer world, 



