BEGINNINGS IN SCIENCE AT MUGBY SCHOOL. 59 



after the poor beggars behind hedges, and then bang at a robin, a 

 wren, a yellow-hammer, or a tit, and perhaps blow it to pieces ! 

 That was not good enough. Partridge and pheasant shooting, 

 Jack thought, are hardly much better sport, only you can eat 

 them. 



Of course, there was the excitement of cricket and foot-ball, 

 hare-and-hounds, paper-chases, hurdle-racing, jumping — not only 

 not bad, but altogether good and brave and manly sports. But, 

 somehow, a lad of superior mental abilities wants something 

 else. 



Now, the scientist is also a hunter. He traces his descent from 

 Nimrod — he is a hunter before the Lord. He roams through the 

 stellar universe for his prey — hunts for stars, comets, planets. He 

 is not daunted because he did not live on the world when it was 

 young, millions of years ago ; for he makes up for it by hunting 

 the remains of the animals and plants that lived during countless 



Fig. 4— Scale of Roach. 



Fig. 5.— Scale or Dace. 



ages, and which have long been buried in the rocks of the earth's 

 crust as fossils. He hunts for flowering plants and animals in 

 all parts of the earth ; braves heat and cold, hunger and thirst, 

 wounds and death, in his ardent search for them. The structures 

 of rocks do not escape his mineralogical hunting, nor the compo- 

 sition of any sort of substance, organic or inorganic, his chemical 

 analysis. He hunts down stars thousands of millions of miles 

 away with his telescope, and creatures less, than the fifteen- 

 thousandth part of an inch long with his microscope. Was there 

 ever such a great hunter ? This hunting instinct began scores of 

 thousands of years ago, when the hairy, naked Palaeolithic men 

 hunted extinct hairy elephants and rhinoceroses. It has been de- 



