A GARDEN DIARY 3 
least as much as to the explorers themselves. 
If we have not thridded Amazonian forests in 
our own persons with Mr. Bates, or Nicaraguan 
jungles with Mr. Belt, we know all that those 
indefatigable travellers have seen, done, dis- 
covered, experienced, and only need to take 
down their books from the shelf to be in the 
thick of those experiences once more. 
So too, with the rest—the botanists, zoolo- 
gists, paleontologists—greater, as well as less 
great. With the prince of them all one starts 
once more upon that immortal Voyage of the 
Beagle, which, besides circumnavigating the 
world, enables one to accumulate those pro- 
digious stores of observation, destined by-and- 
by to make one’s own name famous to the 
world’s end, and to endow that world itself 
with one or two practically new departments. 
With Professor Wallace, one spends years in 
the Malay Archipelago, till the geography of 
even the obscurer members of that bewildering 
group becomes rather more familiar than that 
of the next parish. With Collingwood one 
pores over the rock-pools of Chinese seas, which 
never before reflected human face, or at most 
that of some shore-haunting Mongolian, unin- 
terested in zoology. With the savants of the 
Challenger one sets forth, with all the pomp of 
subsidised science, upon a three years’ cruise, 
in search of Globigerine, of blind Decapoda, of 
