i6 THE HOME OF A NATURALIST. 



Our father, the "Naturalist" of the last chapter, 

 bore his father's name; followed his profession, and in 

 1824 settled in Baltasound, Unst, the most northerly 

 island of the Shetland group, where an elder brother, 

 Thomas, the laird of Buness, resided. 



The laws of heredity were very marked in our race. 

 There had been naturalists and physicians in the family 

 for generations, and they had had a free and most 

 favourable field for the pursuit of science in their 

 native isles. 



The following quotation from our father's writing 

 will show that " the family-craze " went hand-in-hand 

 with that more romantic but not less ennobling passion. 

 Love of Home : — 



"Who that has ever looked upon them can forget 

 these naked and primitive isles of the Northern Atlantic 

 — their melancholy moors and lonely valleys — their 

 stupendous precipices and foaming surges, lowering 

 clouds, and rushing maelstroms, where the ancient 

 lullaby of the infant Viking was the hurricane, and 

 his play - ground the ocean ! In these wild and 

 sequestered solitudes, unbroken by the tumults of 

 faction and the inroads of civilisation, is to be found 

 that untrammelled freedom about which philosophers 

 reason and poets sing ; and it is well to refresh our- 

 selves, in this agitated period of the march of matter, 

 with those pure and ennobling sentiments which the 

 presence of Nature in her sublimer aspects is calculated 

 to inspire." 



Baltasound is a fine land-locked bay or fiord on the 



