22 INTRODUCTION. 



The effects which the pursuit of Natural History should pro- 

 duce upon the moral faculties, are not less valuable than those 

 which have been adverted to in regard to the intellectual powers. 

 And these may be recognised at the very outset of the study, if 

 it be commenced in a right spirit. Well has the great Bacon 

 remarked upon the " felicity wherewith God hath blessed a 

 humility of mind, such as rather laboureth to spell, and so by 

 degrees to read, in the volumes of his creation, than to solicit and 

 urge." " It is no less true," he elsewhere says, " in this human 

 kingdom of knowledge, than in God's kingdom of heaven, that 

 no man shall enter into it, * except he become first as a little 

 child. 1 r And this humility of spirit is encouraged, rather than 

 repressed, by the subsequent progress of the inquirer ; since his 

 prospect becomes wider, every step that he takes ; and his feel- 

 ing of his own insignificance, in comparison with the vastness of 

 Creation, should be continually increasing. No frame of mind 

 can be more advantageous than this, for the reception of those 

 other influences which the study of Nature is calculated to exert. 

 The Naturalist who has cherished it, and who possesses also that 

 openness to conviction which is its almost necessary result, can 

 scarcely fail to perceive that Infinite Love is displayed in the 

 works of the Creator, as well as boundless Wisdom and Almighty 

 Power. In everything which he can trace to its causes in 

 which he can detect the mode of their operation of which he 

 can discover the design, he sees the evidence of the same attri- 

 butes ; and hard indeed must be the heart, and proud the spirit, 

 and blind the understanding, that does not pass from the known 



O" * 



to the unknown ; and, trusting where it cannot trace, feel an 

 assured conviction, that the same Almighty Power, the same 

 boundless Wisdom, and the same Infinite Love, are as fully 

 exercised in those instances in which they are to him least evident, 

 as in those where they are most clearly manifested. 



And thus is laid a good foundation for the reception of those 

 truths, regarding the peculiar concern of the Creator in the welfare 

 of his human offspring, which Revelation discloses to us. The 



