1*76 Canadian Record of Science. 



nor laboratories nor systematic teaching, and it had for 

 stimulus and guidance merely the encouragement given at 

 home by parents who saw that the pursuit of natural 

 history was an elevating one, and of one or two teachers 

 who themselves cultivated some branches of natural 

 science. As a boy I collected indiscriminately fossils, 

 minerals, plants, insects, and later added to these birds, 

 which I had learned to prepare, and the shells and other 

 organisms of the sea. When I became the happy possessor 

 of a microscope, such as could be had in those early days, 

 I went largely into the minute forms of aquatic life and 

 sketched their structures and noted their habits, becoming 

 familiar thus with some curious animals and embryonic 

 forms, which only long afterwards were rediscovered as 

 described by naturalists, though most of those I met with 

 were already known and described, but not in works 

 then accessible to me. I had no idea of studying merely 

 the forms and structures of these creatures and knowing 

 their names. To me they were living things, having 

 strange wa} T s and modes of thinking and acting of their 

 own. They were truly acquaintances and friends, with 

 whom I communed in private and who were my most 

 pleasant teachers. It was for this reason that eventually 

 I gave up all the others for the fossil relics of former life, 

 because these, in addition to the living interest of the 

 modern forms, possessed that fascination which arises from 

 antiquity and from the stimulus to imagination given by 

 their varied and often obscure relations to the past and 

 present. 



Judging from such experiences, I believe that it is best 

 for young people to expatiate over a wide field of natural 

 learning and afterwards to select any special field. On the 

 other hand young people destitute of any developed taste 

 for general knowledge, and introduced to special studies at 

 first, will very likely beeome the crudest and narrowest 

 of thinkers and at once the readiest recipients of fanciful 

 hypotheses and the most stubborn sticklers for mere details 

 and names. 



In order to bring these desultory thoughts to some more 



