2 The Study of Animal Life PART i 



flowers. And if we are discontented with our opportunities, 

 let us read Gilbert White's History of Selborne, or how 

 Darwin watched earthworms for half a lifetime, or how 

 Richard Jefferies saw in the fields and hedgerows of Wilt- 

 shire a vision of nature, which seemed every year to grow 

 richer in beauty and marvel. It is thus that the study 

 of Natural History should begin, as it does naturally begin 

 in childhood, and as it began long before there was 

 any exact Zoology, with the observation of animal life in 

 its familiar forms. The country schoolboy, who watches 

 the squirrels hide the beech nuts and pokes the hedgehog 

 into a living ball, who finds the nest of the lapwings, 

 though they decoy him away with prayerful cries, who 

 catches the speckled trout in spite of all their caution, and 

 laughs at the ants as they expend hours of labour on booty 

 not worth the having, is laying the foundation of a naturalist's 

 education, which, though he may never build upon it, is 

 certainly the surest. For it is in such studies that we get 

 close to life, that we may come to know nature as a friend, 

 that we may even hear the solemn beating of her heart. 



The same truth has been vividly expressed by one 

 .whose own life-work shows that thoroughness as a zoologist 

 is consistent with enthusiasm for open-air natural history. 

 Of the country lad Dr. C. T. Hudson says, in a Presi- 

 dential Address to the Royal Microscopical Society, that he 

 " wanders among fields and hedges, by moor and river, sea- 

 washed cliff and shore, learning zoology as he learnt his 

 native tongue, not in paradigms and rules, but from Mother 

 Nature's own lips. He knows the birds by their flight and 

 (still rarer accomplishment) by their cries. He has never 

 heard of CEdicnemus crepitans^ the Charadrius pluvialis^ or 

 the Squatarola cinerea, but he can find a plover's nest, and 

 has seen the young brown peewits peering at him from 

 behind their protecting clods. He has watched the cun- 

 ning flycatcher leaving her obvious and yet invisible young 

 in a hole in an old wall, while she carries off the pellets 

 that might betray their presence ; and has stood so still to 

 see the male redstart that a field-mouse has curled itself on 

 his warm foot and gone to sleep." 



