THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST, 



from the little interest of his shop or counting-house, from the small 

 details of his law cases, the quips and quibbles of the courts, the 

 monotony of ever recurring disease, or the narrow lines of his theologi- 

 cal beliefs. But this broadening influence will not be experienced 

 if a man's studies become too specialised. If for example he 

 determines to make only one single form his study, takes as the 

 all absorbing subject of waking thought and nightly dream shall we 

 say a slug, he soon knows more about the brute than any living- 

 man, but with no other object in life than slug, his sympathy in 

 subjects of common and wider interest becomes sluggish. This is 

 not a man either to be envied or admired. And such men we meefc 

 not unfrequently ; men with one pet subject, to them the most im- 

 portant in the universe, they get a kind of mental short-sightedness 

 ^nd see but in a most limited area. That is a specialism to be 

 deprecated. But the specialism I want to impress on the members 

 of our club is the working out some special and particular depart- 

 ment of natural science, and that in relation to the grand whole. 

 Desultory study of natural science is better than no study at all, but 

 the end of scientific study is, as 1 reminded you last year in the 

 words of Lord Bacon, "to enrich human life with useful arts and 

 inventions," and this can only be attained by earnest and persistent 

 endeavour in some one particular line. If our members will only 

 do this, they will soon create for themselves the much needed 

 literature. Would-be students in the country r\'ho now almost 

 despair of learning would find in our transactions the very help 

 they crave for. 



I have sometimes thought that our Club might be made still more 

 useful, if sections, as in the Royal iSociety, were formed. That our 

 botanists, ornithologists, entomologists, and so on might have, not 

 in the place of our monthly meetings, but in addition to them, their 

 own gatherings. 



Aa I have before said, what I want to impress^ more particularly 

 on those who are not too old to learn, is the necessity of special definite 

 study, I suppose that it is the want of books that deters so many^ 

 especially in the country, from the study of natural history. My 

 life for the last few years has taken me continually away from this 

 marvellous Melbourne of ours, and over and over again I have met 

 intelligent men and women who have plenty of leisure time, and hardly 

 know how sometimes to kill that time, yet never seem to dream of the 

 garden of delight, the doors of which are wide open before them. 

 Gentlemen belonging to the learned professions who are letting all their 

 previous training save in theline of their profession, go for nothing, who 

 spend their spare time little better than the illiterate loafer, men of 

 my own profession included, who have lamented to me that their lot 

 was cast in places where the possibilities of doing anything worth 

 the doing were so few, men who have looked at me with no little 



