18 GLAUCUS; OE, 



.may be observed, great as these pleasures are. 

 I speak of the scenery, the weather, the geological 

 formation of the country, its vegetation, and the 

 living habits of its denizens. A sportsman out in 

 all weathers, and often dependent for success on 

 his knowledge of "what the sky is going to do," 

 has opportunities for becoming a meteorologist which 

 no one beside but a sailor possesses; and one has 

 often longed for a scientific gamekeeper or hunts- 

 man, who, by discovering a law for the mysterious 

 and seemingly capricious phenomena of "scent," 

 might perhaps throw light on a hundred dark pas- 

 sages of hygrometry. The fisherman, too, — what 

 an inexhaustible treasury of wonders lies at his 

 feet, in the subaqueous w^orld of the commonest 

 mountain burn ! All the laws which mould a world 

 are there busy, if he but knew it, fattening his 

 trout for him, and making them rise to the fly, by 

 strange electric influences, at one hour rather than 

 at another. Many a good geognostic lesson too, 

 both as to the nature of a country's rocks, and as 

 to the laws by which strata are deposited, may an 



