1 192 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



submit that Natural Historj' meets the modern demand for pictures, 

 the desire of enhanced visual life. Much of the deeper happiness of 

 many of us, those who are eye-minded rather than ear-minded, 

 depends on our pTivate picture gallery, which we enjoy with our 

 inner eye. The quaint tragedy is that so many prefer photographs 

 to reality, and a cinematograph to observation. Yet it requires only 

 earnestness of desire to collect a Natural History picture-gallery of 

 masterpieces. We should all cultivate the habit of visualising and 

 seeing things with our eyes shut. 'T scrutinise Nature," Fabre said; 

 but when we have scrutinised an interesting sight it is well to shut 

 our eyes and see it all over again, like W^ordsworth on his couch re- 

 seeing the dancing daffodils. The more we see with our eyes shut 

 the more will we see next time with our eyes wide open. 



Our collection of interesting Natural History pictures leads on 

 into the culture of our sense of beauty, for in animate Nature the 

 fact of Beauty is ever insurgent. Apart from exceptions that prove 

 the rule, like parasites and foe-tuses, every living creature that man 

 has not tampered with is in its natural surroundings a thing of 

 beauty and a joy for ever. Not that everything is as brilliant as a 

 peacock's feather, yet all independent unfingered living creatures 

 are artistic harmonies, evoking the esthetic emotion. Moreover, the 

 pictures we may collect every day are not only interesting and 

 beautiful; they often have the thrill of the dramatic. These migrants 

 changing their climate in a night ; these winter-sleepers in their snug 

 retreats ; these mountain hares putting on a snow-white cloak ; these 

 gossamer-spiders borne in hundreds through the air on their silken 

 parachutes — why, the whole web of life is shot through and through 

 with threads of drama. We were told in childhood of the fairy gold 

 that turned by morning into withered leaves; but when we know 

 even a little about the vast work of the summer foliage, of its 

 surrender of its hard-won food-material from leaf to store in stem, 

 of the breaking down of the leaf-pigments from green to red and 

 gold, and thus with new beauty before ashes, and of the foisting 

 off of the dead leaf, and thus after the bandaging of the wound, we 

 get a fuller glimpse of the drama of autumn, with its "flowers of the 

 forest". The withering leaves we gather are thus indeed turning 

 into fairy gold! And though they moulder, they make the soil on 

 which their successors rise anew. 



Another gift we owe to Natural History, to reading in Nature's 

 book, consists of great ideas which enrich man's mind. There is the 

 idea of individual development, the " minting and coining of the 

 chick out of the egg", as Harvey said, a process entirely different 

 from anything outside the realm of organisms. There is the idea of 

 the perpetual circulation of matter, from one embodiment or in- 

 carnation to another ; and there is the idea of evolution, more clearly 

 illustrated among living creatures than elsewhere — a scientific idea 



