THE EDINBURGH 



JOUKNAL OF NATUEAL HISTOEY, 



AND OF 



THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 



APRIL, 1810. 



THE DELIGHTS OF NATURAL BISTORT. 



The charms associated with the study of Natural History have been 

 expatiated upon by many, and, as might have been expected, most de- 

 lightfully by those who have assiduously cultivated its extensive and 

 varied fields. The following paragraphs so strikingly embody the innate 

 and enraptured feelings of a meritorious and ardent lover of nature, 

 that we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of introducing them into 

 our pages. There is scarce any study, says the anonymous but dis- 

 tinguished author, through which more quiet pleasure can be enjoyed 

 than the study of Natural History. It forms a kind of back-garden to 

 the crowded work-shop of busy life — a retreat, still, calm, and refresh- 

 ingly green, into which one can occasionally escape from the smoke, 

 and dust, and turmoil of ordinary occupation. It is a good breathing- 

 place. We remember reading, some years ago, that remarkable book, 

 Chateaubriand on Revolutions ; and we still retain a vivid recollection 

 of the chapter in which the writer addresses himself, from his own ex- 

 perience, to such unfortunate victims of popular convulsion as, strip- 

 ped of their possessions, may have to wear out life as exiles in foreign 

 countries. Get rid, says the writer, of the associations which lead you 

 into the past — travel into a new field ; acquaint yourself with the na- 

 ture of Insects, study the properties of Plants, explore Rocks, analyze 

 Minerals — forget yourselves and your misfortunes amid the inexhaust- 

 ible wonders of Nature. Rut there is no need to restrict the advice, for 

 it may suit those who live in their own country, and who have no signal 

 misfortunes to deplore. 



Dr Johnson could congratulate himself, in his seventieth year, that 

 his curiosity was still as active as when he first awoke in the dawn of 

 intellect. The love of novelty is inherent in man ; it is one of the grand 

 distinctions of his nature over that of the brutes, that he should go 

 on adding idea to idea, and one species of knowledge to another; and, 

 in accordance with this principle, there are, perhaps, few men who 

 would not be travellers if they could. Rut in most cases the desire 

 cannot be indulged. The great bulk of mankind are fixed down to 

 some one particular locality ; and the original feeling so wisely and be- 

 neficially implanted, becomes languid for lack of exercise. This, how- 

 ever, need not be, and there is no locality in which the love of novelty 

 may not be gratified — in which we may not become travellers, and pass 

 into a new field, not by changing place, but by changing, in our own 

 minds, the relations of the place, by connecting it with some newly ac- 

 quired science. The study of plants, of insects, of fishes, of birds, of 

 quadrupeds, of minerals, and fossils, may be pursued in almost every 

 locality; and the life must be very long, and its leisure hours very man}', 

 which can thoroughly exhaust even a limited district in connection with 

 these pursuits. We question, too, whether the actual traveller ever feels 

 the interest of novelty more thoroughly gratified, than he who travels into a 

 new district without changing his ground. How wonderfully objects, before 

 unnoticed, or but slightly regarded, rise into interest. How even the spiky 

 leaves, and light florets of the thirty or forty varieties of the humble family 

 of the grasses, which one meets with in his shortest walks, grow up into 

 beauty and importance ; how intently the eye follows the light happy 

 creature that goes darting on its wings of gauze through the air, or flut- 

 14 



ters over the stream in which it had so lately pursued its first set of 

 instincts as a denizen of another element ; how much more completely 

 the song of the bird fills the ear, and how its notes heighten and im- 

 prove when the history of the little singer is known ; what wonders 

 open to the mind in studying the diverse characters, and the marvellous 

 instincts of the beasts of the field, those instincts so very similar, and 

 yet so very unlike the workings of the human intellect ! Instinct and in- 

 tellect seem the asymptotes of creation, ever approaching and never 

 meeting. Above all, how powerfully does the science address itself to 

 the imagination, which, passing from the present state of things, con- 

 verts the often explored, but ever novel locality, into a rich museum 

 of the remains of former creations. We find in this department the 

 wildest fictions more than realized. The more prominent and well- 

 known features of the scene become at once strange from their new 

 relations with the terrific convulsions of an earlier time. A new subli- 

 mity invests the lofty mountain and the solitary valley ; the one glows a 

 high mass of molten fire, shot up from below by volcanic agency; the 

 tides of a vast ocean roll irresistibly through the other. And then 

 those strange shapes, that lived and moved in the hoar antiquity of the 

 world — those mummies of the rock, whose very tjpes have perished. 

 We enter on the study, and find that the dragons and griffins and uni- 

 corns of what we may call a mythological Zoology, were unnatural in- 

 ventions, — but, compared with the real existences of the geologist, not at 

 all extraordinary ones. We become acquainted with forms the most 

 amazing — with creatures that constituted the connecting links which 

 united tribes and families apparently the farthest 3part. We find the 

 crocodile mounted in one instance on the paddles of the whale ; in an- 

 other, on the wings of the bat ; we find the neck of the swan uniting the 

 head to the body of the Saurian. 



It is only in this late age of the world, that one of the simplest in- 

 stincts of our nature seems to be settling on its proper objects. The 

 true and the marvellous have hitherto been too much dissociated. We 

 sought in science for the one, and in fiction for the other. Rut why is 

 it that the child, simple and unsophisticated, is never pleased to find 

 them apart, — that mere truth is nothing to it separated from the won- 

 derful, nor the wonderful disunited from the true. The feeling arises 

 from a right instinct, and, like every right instinct, has its legitimate ob- 

 ject on which to rest " Witness" Newspaper. 



THE Ca'iNG WHALE, A VISITANT OF THE IRISH COAST. 



Although it might reasonably have been presumed that the Ca'ing 

 Whale visited the Emerald Isle, yet it has only recently been ascertained 

 to be a fact, on satisfactory ground, supplied in a paper lately published 

 by that active Zoologist, William Thompson, Esq., Vice-President of the 

 Natural History Society of Relfast, (Ann. of Nat. Hist. March 1840,) and 

 entitled " Additions to the Fauna of Ireland." The very frequent oc- 

 currence of these animals in such immense herds, in the northern shores 

 and islands of Scotland, and their occasional presence on the coasts of 

 England, as at Torbay, and of France, as offEretagne, left but little doubt 

 they might be found on the Irish shores. Hence we are not surprised to 

 learn, upon the authority of Mr Ptobert Ral! of Dublin, that individuals of 

 this species are occasionally driven ashore in large herds on the southern 



