18 MY LIFE AS A NATURALIST 



Burton, George Chapman, William Cowper, Gerald Massey, 

 Bulwer Lytton, Owen Meredith (Robert, first Earl of Lytton), 

 Henry Peacham, and many others too numerous to mention. 



Dr Young resided for many years quite close to my home at 

 Letch worth, and there wrote his famous " Night Thoughts " ; 

 Charles and Mary Lamb knew the county intimately ; and Izaak 

 Walton has immortalised the country around Hoddesdon in his 

 memorable classic concerning his brothers of the angle. 



Earlier on, I mentioned that for many years birds appealed 

 strongly to me, and, as a matter of fact, the study of these win- 

 some creatures in the field mostly occupied the first twenty-six 

 years of my life, but about the year 1900 I found that a know- 

 ledge of mammals, fishes, insects, reptiles, pond dwellers, the 

 seashore, plants, geology, and a little elementary astronomy and 

 microscopy, were necessary to afford me a connected idea of the 

 relationship which, I was gradually being convinced, existed in 

 the animal, plant, and mineral worlds. I became automatically, 

 as it were, interested in, nay, enraptured with, Nature Study, a 

 willing convert to the fascinating pursuit of Ecology, which 

 Haeckel has defined as the science treating of the reciprocal 

 relations of organisms and the external world. Now, after thirty- 

 seven years' continuous study, I find that it is difficult to consider 

 any creature individually, for it has a collective and co-operative 

 relationship with other sentient beings. Everything that lives 

 I have long since determined has its use in the economy of Nature, 

 each unit, as it were, dovetails into something equally important 

 and arresting. 



I have always tried to hand on any acquired knowledge to 

 others who were interested, and, whilst endeavouring to be 

 scientific, to so impart information in my classes, lectures, and 

 books as to be fully understood by the tiniest child, or the merest 

 tyro. Whilst recognising the importance of technical terms and 

 dry-as-dust lore, I have tried to steer clear of, or amplify and make 

 lucid, such statements for the readier acceptance of the multitude, 

 who would be unwilling, for example, to accept such a dictum as 

 I recently came across in one of my scientific journals as follows : 

 , " The stem is protostelic, with parenchyma among the 

 tfacheides ; the peripheral xylem-strands and leaf-traces are 

 mesarch ; the meta-xylem and secondary tracheides have multi- 

 seriate bordered pits. There are plates of sclereides in the cortex, 

 and the hypoderma consists of alternating radial bands of fibres 

 and parenchyma.' 1 



