Professor Geddes's Address 117 



great mountains, to have roamed in the tropical 

 forest, to have seen the icy and the coral sea, and 

 to have watched and wondered at their Protean 

 strangeness and beauty of Hfe: it is good also to 

 have had experience of museums and laboratories, 

 libraries and herbaria, of zoological stations and 

 botanic gardens; and this not only for themselves, 

 but for their help and preparation for the fuller 

 appreciation of each of these great nature-scenes in 

 turn. Yet let no one say because he has not had all 

 or any of these experiences (much less the means of 

 giving them to his pupils) that he and they cannot be 

 naturalists. Fortunate though the trained naturalist 

 is in his relative wealth of opportunities, any nature- 

 impulse and nature-appreciation he personally may 

 have goes far back beyond these university and 

 maturer experiences: it is ultimately a question of 

 early, indeed earliest facilities of Nature-study in 

 everyday life and experience — in boyhood — in child- 

 hood itself 



In so far as I may be a professor, an examiner, 

 my laboratory and library, my garden and museum 

 experiences are all of value, their geographic variety 

 also. But in so far as I may be a naturalist, that is, 

 a nature-student, I have often found my match, my 

 master, among those who have had no such higher 

 education or facilities at all. Grateful though I am 

 to many teachers and masters, impulses and guides 

 to Darwin, to Huxley and Haeckel, to Lacaze and 

 Dohrn, to Dickson and Flahault — among the truest 

 naturalists I have ever known there have been also 

 at least three fishermen, two or three gardeners, a 

 village mole-catcher, a town-shopman, an artisan, an 



