The F resident's Address. By Dr. C. T. Hudsoii. 
138 
forces a constantly increasing number of students to take their natural 
history from books ; and too often these are either expensive volumes 
beyond their reach, or dismal abridgments which have shrunk, under 
examination pressure, till they are little less than a stony compound 
of the newest classification, and the oldest woodcuts. But the happier 
country lad wanders among fields and hedges, by moor and river, sea- 
washed cliff and shore, learning zoology as he learnt his native tongue, 
not in paradigms and rules, but from mother Nature’s own lips. He 
knows the birds by their flight and (still rarer accomplishment) by their 
cries. He has never heard of the (Edicnemus ere^itans, the Gharadrius 
fluvialis, or the Squatarola einerea, but he can find a plover’s nest, 
and has seen the young brown peewits peering at him from behind 
their protecting clods. He has watched the cunning flycatcher leaving 
her obvious and yet invisible young in a hole in an old wall, while 
she carries off the pellets that might betray their presence; and 
has stood so still to see the male redstart, that a field-mouse has 
curled itself up on his warm foot and gone to sleep. He gathers the 
delicate buds of the wild rose, happily ignorant of the forty-odd names 
under which that luckless plant has been smothered ; and if, perchance, 
his last birthday has been made memorable by the gift of a Micro- 
scope, before long he will be glorying in the transparent beauties of 
Asplanchna, unaware that he ought to crush his living prize, in 
order to find out which of some half-dozen equally barbarous names 
he ought to give it. 
The faults, indeed, of scientific names are so glaring, and the 
subject is altogether so hopeless, that I will not waste either your 
time or my patience by dilating on it. But, while admitting that 
distinct creatures must have different names, and very reluctantly 
admitting that it seems almost impossible to alter the present fashion 
of giving them, I see no reason why these, as well as the technical 
names of parts and organs, should not be kept, as much as possible, in 
the background ; and not suffered to bristle so in every page, that we 
might almost say with Job, “ there are thistles growing instead of 
wheat, and cockle instead of barley.” 
We laughed at the droll parody in which the word change was 
defined as “ a perichoretical synechy of pamparallagmatic and porro- 
teroporeumatical differentiations and integrations ” ; yet it would not 
be a difficult matter to point out sentences in recent works on our 
favourite pursuits, that would suggest a similar travesty. No doubt 
new notions must often be clothed in new language, and the severer 
studies of embryology and development require a minute precision of 
statement, that leads to the invention of a multitude of new terms. 
Moreover, the idea that the meaning of these terms should he contained 
in the names themselves is excellent, but I cannot say that the result 
is happy ; I might almost say that it is repulsive ; and if we suffer 
this language to invade the more popular side of natural history, I 
fear that we shall only write for one another, and that our scientific 
