APPENDIX IT 



NATURALISTS AT WORK 



Though the world needs far more biology than it yet knows, pro- 

 gress towards this has always been going on outside our special 

 departments in universities, and other technical studies and publi- 

 cations. Thus zoological gardens arose from travellers' home-bring- 

 ings, and public as well as princely interest in them; and so evenB 

 botanic gardens, of which the first in Europe arose from the 

 high appreciation of the city of Venice, then richest in foreign 

 commerce, but poorest of all in land, which yet gave its best 

 unbuilt area as home not only for its doctors' herbs, but for the 

 useful, the beautiful or strange plants gathered in seed or shoot 

 by its far-travelled citizens. Next (1593) the Montpellier Garden, 

 whence ours. 



Whoever goes out for a woodland or seashore walk — ^when not 

 too preoccupied to enjoy it — is already something of a naturalist; 

 and yet more his child-companion, who may run about well-nigh 

 as actively as their dog, and not merely after the rabbits, but 

 gathering shells or pebbles, picking up here a feather and there a 

 flower. Indeed, what are the most productive of naturalists, and 

 even of biological thinkers, but such children, who, instead of 

 losing these interests, or having them repressed, as more commonly, 

 have continued and developed them in larger growth? Thus the 

 truant Darwin — albeit later the greatest of naturalists and of 

 nature-thinkers in one — is typical, and even as normal type: for 

 his vagaries in youth were necessary for such naturalist's life, 

 voyaging and thought, as education yet allows. Even his super- 

 normal "genius" admits of intelligible interpretation. For books 

 like Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, and biographies 

 of naturalists less favoured by good fortune, like Thomas Edwards, 

 Charles Mackintosh, and more, illuminate Darwin's: indeed, the 

 latter prove how often Nature is mothering such village Darwins, 

 mute inglorious though they may commonly remain. The life of Sir 

 William Flower — a late eminent Director of the Hunterian treasure 

 and tradition of the London College of Surgeons, and then of the 

 British (Natural History) Museum — blinks together all extremes 

 between villager and Darwin, between pretty feathers and world- 

 museums, by his own story of the origins of his career as greatest 

 of curators and collectors, telling how this all began for him as a 

 small schoolboy gloating over a battered but still bright stuffed 

 bird in a shop-window comer, and attaining the state of ecstasy 



