4 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE. 



a wonderful charm of this half-historical sort I 

 around every beast or bird or plant in the 

 meadows about us. These fallow deer are 

 no longer mere accidental animals happening 

 to live in the park here at the present day : 

 they are creatures with a whole past history 

 of their own, as interesting to the eye of the 

 evolutionist as a castle or an earthwork to the 

 eye of an archaeologist, and as a cathedral or 

 a temple to the eye of Mr. Freeman or Mr. 

 Fergusson. We have all been living all our 

 lives in the midst of a veritable prehistoric 

 Ilium, with all its successive deposits and 

 precious relics lying loose about us, and we 

 needed only a Schliemann to tell us what it 

 all meant. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer have read the riddle for us, and in 

 doing so they have given us a key which will 

 help us to unlock, each for himself, a thousand 

 little secrets of nature that meet us every day, 

 on our way through the world, at every turn. 

 These fallow deer, for example, have a quite 

 ^ recoverable pedigree, which shows us just by 



