BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 849 



educators ; you must start from some previously existing basis of 

 knowledge, and keep your communications with it uninterrupted if 

 your knowledge is not to be unreal. And my concrete application 

 of these generalities is contained in the advice that no sudden jump 

 be made from observations carried on with the naked eye to ob- 

 servations carried on with the highest powers of the microscope. 

 I am speaking of the course to be pursued by beginners, and 

 beginners we all were once ; and if our places are to be filled (and 

 filled they will be) by better men, as we hope, than ourselves, they 

 will have to be filled, we also hope, by men who have yet to become 

 beginners. It is in their interest I have been speaking ; and I say 

 that a beginner does not ordinarily get an intelligent conception of 

 the revelations of the microscope except in Bacon's words, Ascen- 

 clench continenter et gradatirriy by progressing gradually from ob- 

 servations with the naked eye through observations dependent upon 

 dissecting-lenses, doublets by preference, and the lower powers of 

 the compound microscope, up to observations to be made w^ith the 

 higher and highest magnifying-powers. Unless he ascends by 

 gradations from organs and systems to structures and tissues and 

 cells, his wonder and admiration at the results of the ultimate 

 microscope analysis, of what he had but a moment before knowledge 

 of only in the concrete and by the naked eye, is likely to be but 

 unintelligent. 



There are three other agencies which can be set into activity 

 with nearly as little trouble and difficulty as the simple apparatus 

 of which I have just been speaking, and which will, like it, secure 

 for us the necessary preliminary discipline or ' Propdcleutik ' for the 

 rational comprehension of Biology. These are Local Museums, 

 Local Field Clubs, and Local Natural Histories. Local authorities, 

 persons of local influence, should engage and interest themselves in 

 the starting into life of the two former of these agencies ; and if 

 some such person as Gilbert White could be found in each county 

 to write the Natural History of its Selborne, I know not at what 

 cost it would not be well to retain his services. As the world is 

 governed, upon each' particular area of its surface there is to be 

 found a certain percentage of the population occupying it who have 

 special calls for particular lines of study. It is the interest of each 

 country to have such means and such institutions in being as will 

 render it possible to detect the existence of persons gifted with such 



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