10 MY LIFE AS A NATURALIST 



These sights and sounds interested me. Contact with them 

 cemented the inherited love I possessed for outdoor recreation. 

 Mr R. J. Campbell has, in his recent autobiography, conveyed 

 an impression of my own youthful feelings when he writes : 



" I had a perfect passion for Nature in all its moods, and a 

 sort of mystic feeling about it. I never felt less alone than when 

 in communion with the holy presence of which I was conscious 

 everywhere in those habitual retreats. I knew what Words- 

 worth's Nature -worship meant long before I knew T Wordsworth : 

 it was exactly my own. I used to feel that the whole landscape 

 was mysteriously alive, and every minutest object in it, every 

 tiny flower and brook, became to my naive perceptions instinct 

 with Heaven. Nor have I lost this entirely. It gave me a view 

 of life which I can only call sacramental, and which has remained 

 with me all through my maturer years." 



FIG. 4. PERCH. 



Those boyish angling experiences, and whole days in quiet wood- 

 land and meadow, afforded me pleasant hours of quiet medita- 

 tion. It was a relief to get away from the work-a-day world, 

 to be alone with Nature. They were not idle hours, for they gave 

 constant opportunity for meditation, which, as has been well 

 said, is " the science of the Saints." 



Quiet meditation, and the acquirement of self-knowledge, telf- 

 respect, self-restraint, go hand-in-hand with the study of Nature, 

 and is preferable to the dictum of the taxi-cab driver who delivered 

 the following eloquent little treatise on driving in the dark : 

 " If we hear a smash we know we have hit something, and if we 

 don't we know it is all right." The study of Nature must not 

 be left to such a chance as this. So, what with rambling, angling, 

 gardening, and cricketing, life was very full to me in those earlier 

 days, and, truth to tell, my scholastic studies at St Albans 

 Grammar School made little impression upon a youthful mind 



