850 BIOLOaiCA-L TRAINING AND STUDIES. 



special vocations, to give the talent thus entrusted to them fair 

 scope for development, and to render smaller the risk of their dying 

 mute and inglorious. A young man who is possessed of a talent 

 for Natural Science and Physical Inquiry generally, may have the 

 knowledge of this predisposition made known to himself and to 

 others, for the first time, by his introduction to a well-arranged 

 Local Museum. In such an institution, either all at once, or 

 gradually, the conviction may spring up within him that the in- 

 vestigation of physical problems is the line of investigation to 

 which he should be content to devote himself, relinquishing the 

 pursuit of other things ; and then, if the museum in question is 

 really a well-arranged one, a recruit may be thereby won for the 

 growing army of physical investigators, and one more man saved 

 from the misery of finding, when he has been taken into some other 

 career, that he has, somehow or other, mistaken his profession, and 

 made of his career one life-long mistake. 



Here comes the question, What is a well-arranged museum? 

 The answer is, a well-arranged museum, for the particular purpose 

 of which we are speaking, is one in which the natural objects which 

 belong to the locality, and which have already struck upon the eye 

 of such a person as the one contemplated, are clearly explained in a 

 well-arranged catalogue. The curiosity which is the mother of 

 science is not awakened for the first time in the museum, but out 

 of doors, in the wood, by the side of the brook, on the hillside, by 

 scarped cliff and quarried stone ; it is the function of the museum, 

 by rendering possible the intellectual pleasure, which grows out of 

 the surprise with which a novice first notes the working of his 

 faculty of inspiration, to prevent this curiosity from degenerating 

 into the mere woodman's craft of the gamekeeper, or the rough 

 empiricism of the farmer. The first step to be taken in a course of 

 natural instruction is the providing of means whereby the faculties 

 of observation and of verification may be called into activity ; and 

 the first exercise the student should be set down to is that of recog- 

 nising, in the actual thing itself, the various properties and pecu- 

 liarities which some good book or some good- catalogue tells him 

 are observable in it. This is the first step, and, as in some other 

 matters, ce rCest que le premier pas qui coute. And it need not cost 

 much. There is a name familiar to Section D, and, indeed, not 

 likely for a long while to be forgotten by members of the British 



