XV. PREFACE. 
generalized knowledge, I have omitted doing so; but in 
the execution of my task, surrounded and impeded by the 
cares, and toils, and trammels of the most irksome profes- 
sion under heaven, I have laboured under difficulties to 
an appreciation of which I will admit none but those who 
have been similarly circumstanced. 
To him who has no sufficient occupation or study to 
pass off the tedium of ennui I would most earnestly say,— 
take a lesson out of the great book of Nature, search our 
hedges or our shores for shells, gather the variety of plants 
which adorn our fields,— 
“ ____ Ca]l the vales and bid them hither cast 
Their bells and flourets of a thousand hues.” 
watch the habits of our birds in their woods,—try either 
of these pursuits, and you will not fail to be enamoured : 
without such occupations, man in vain looks abroad 
in search of happiness—real happiness, “he goes in and 
out, but without the feeling that can give attachment 
to any one spot’; but when the mind becomes habituated 
to these refreshing and healthful relaxations from business 
it gains consolation, security, and strength, and moves a 
contented spirit through the illimitable fields of Nature.— 
Happy indeed is that man who has within him in even its 
unawakened form that taste and inclination for natural 
pursuits which he can light up and appeal to in the hour 
of affliction or despair, or resort to as if it were a 
“ministering spirit” in the intervals of tedious attention 
to his needful calling, at the periods of its daily, and still 
more at its final close. Greatly in fault also are those 
parents who in the education of their children fail to sow 
within their bosoms those seeds which shall eventually 
