PREFACE. 



These essays deal for the most part with Science in 

 Arcady. 'Tis my native country : for I am not of those 

 f lie ' praise the busy town.' On the contrary, in the 

 words of the gi-eat poet who has just departed to join 

 Milton and Shelley in a place of high collateral glory, I 

 'love to rail against it still,' with a naturalist's bitterness. 

 For the town is always dead and lifeless. There are who 

 admire it, they say—poor purblind creatures— because, 

 forsooth, ' there is so much Ufe there.' So much life, 

 indeed ! No grass in the streets ; no flowers in the lanes ; 

 no beetles or butterflies on the dull stone pavements ! 

 ft-ick and moriar have killed out all life over square 

 miles of Middlesex. For myself, I love better the densely- 

 peopled fields than this human desert, this beflagged and 

 no^cadamised man-made solitude. The country teems 

 wfth life on every hand; a thousand diffemt plants and 

 fl|wers in the spangled meadows ; a thousand varied 

 #iizen8 of pond, and air, and heath, and copses. Their 



