41 8 The American Naturalist. [May, 
as a dry science. Yet without it one may admire flowers and 
trees as one may admire a great man or a beautiful woman 
whom one meets in a crowd ; but it is as a stranger. The 
botanist" or "one with even the slightest knowledge of that 
delightful science — when he goes out into the woods or into 
one of those fairy forests which we call fields, finds himself 
welcomed by a glad company of friends, every one with some- 
thing interesting to tell." 
The faculty of observation, so preternaturally acute in some 
minds like Aristotle's or Humboldt's or Darwin's, is rudi- 
mentary or dormant in a very large part of mankind. Said 
Emerson "if men should seethe stars but once in a thousand 
years how would they wonder and believe!" The cheapness 
of the pleasure may be fatal to its enjoyment. They see only 
the mud and soot, where the gold and the diamond lie. They 
have eyes but do not use them, and like Laura Bridgman are 
cut off from many of the enjoyments of nature. As Lubbock 
well says, many still " love birds as boys do — that is, they love 
throwing stones at them ; or wonder if they are good to eat, 
as the Esquimaux asked of the watch ; or treat them as certain 
devout Afreedee villagers are said to have treated a descendant 
of the Prophet — killed him in order to worship at his tomb." 
The study of Natural History, or Biology, if we use the newer 
term not only awakens the mind by cultivating the faculty 
of observation, but widens our enjoyments and enlists our sym- 
pathies, giving us a new and human interest in the manifold 
living beings around us which hold life by the same tenure as 
ourselves. It also fits in well with those instincts which we 
seem to have inherited from primitive man, with hunting and 
fishing, and also with travel, the facilities for which were never 
greater than in our day, and with short vacations in the 
country, all of which it enhances in interest, and to all of which it 
Says T. Digby Pigott, " Of all the poor creatures, whose fate 
it was to be strangled or battered to death by Hercules, there 
was only one who made a really good stand up fight, and at 
one time seemed to be fairly beating him. He was Antaeus, 
