THE BOY AND THE WILD 315 



country lad who thought to induct a town visitor 

 into rural pursuits. He showed him some specks on 

 his fishing-bag, telling him that they were scales of a 

 fish he had once caught. " Yes," said the town boy, 

 " and I see they came from a perch." He had taken 

 the trouble, never dreamed of by his cousin, to devote 

 five minutes to learning the difference between the 

 scales of a roach and a perch. The stimulus that can 

 lead a boy to make such observations for himself 

 cannot be an unuseful one. Neither can it be wholly 

 external. Neither, we admit, does it often achieve so 

 much as in this case. One of the keenest young 

 naturalists we know is the son of one of the new 

 small-holders, a real " back-to-the-lander " that is, 

 one who returned after a whole generation spent in a 

 town, one who, by direct experience, knew nothing 

 of -the soil, but whose country instinct had been 

 quickened by the increased mentality that town life 

 can give. 



Our young friend walked round the school museum, 

 and found that the schoolmaster and his class of 

 country boys had mislabelled many of the commonest 

 objects of the country-side. It was he who, paddling 

 in the brook and not heeding a nip or two, discovered 

 that the crayfish carries her eggs about with her till 

 they hatch. It was he who added not a few birds to 

 the list of local inhabitants that had for years been 

 considered complete, and it was he who opened a 

 quite unexpected source of interest in the doings of 

 sundry solitary bees and wasps. Again, having tried 

 the matter by sundry painful experiments, he could 

 tell you with certainty which bees are able to sting 

 and which cannot But, much as he excited the 



