316 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



creation, but the product of a long process of evolution. These 

 men were as seeds that had lighted upon a fertile soil. The age 

 was ripe for them. We shall not be unmindful of the brilliant 

 company of their peers, a long procession extending from the 

 past into the present, a glorious muster-roll, including such men 

 as Harvey and Redi, Ray and Reaumur, Pallas and Humboldt, 

 Savigny and Lamarck, De Candolle and Milne-Edwards, Playfair 

 and Barrande, Sedgwick and Lyell, Owen and Huxley, with others 

 too numerous now to mention, all of whom have passed away, 

 but have obligingly left for our benefit inheritors of their inex- 

 haustible industry, their skill in controversy, their lucidity of 

 style, their penetrating insight, and other enlivening gifts of 

 genius. 



Auxiliary to the wits of the naturalists, and giving the modern 

 period a substantial advantage over earlier ages, there have been 

 a series of triumphs won by other men's wits, for other purposes 

 and in other domains. Carry back your minds to the almost 

 unthinkable time when printing was unknown, when as yet there 

 was no post office and no freedom of the press, when paper was 

 costly, and when men had to do their travelling without steamers 

 and without railways. You will see that under those conditions 

 naturalists were almost as helpless as monkeys, elephants, dogs, 

 and other sagacious animals which are kept at a low level of 

 civilization because their means of communicating and keeping on 

 record bright and improving ideas are so extremely imperfect. 



Work of astonishing accuracy has no doubt often been done 

 by lovers of nature with very simple apparatus, but the modern 

 student will not disown his indebtedness to the perfection of 

 modern appliances, and especially to the improvements in the 

 microscope. These, or rather those who devise them, have pro- 

 gressively been making research more easy, more fruitful, more 

 attractive. The wonder of the thing appeals not only to the man 

 with a purpose, but to the man without one, and in the exaltation 

 of science the concurrence of the idle, the leisurely, the contem- 

 plative, is not to be despised. From the law court and the camp, 

 from the ledger and the counting house, men turn sometimes for 

 amusement's sake to Natural History. They find it a delightful 

 and absorbing pastime. That in itself is something. But, though 

 the original motive may have been " to treat an idle subject in 



