THE SELBORNIAN ABROAD. 
215 
allowance of rum — -for pickling, of course. He is an ingenious 
youth, born and bred in London, who has yet developed a taste 
for natural history with so keen an edge that he has seized 
upon this original method of seeing other lands and seas. He 
“knows a hawk from a handsaw,” though some of his friends 
think him “mad” at all points of the compass. 
Among other good types of unenrolled Selbornian abroad is 
the captain of a certain mail steamer, to whom it is gall and 
wormwood and all sorts of bitterness to have to keep “ contract 
time ” with his steamer through the Sargasso Sea and other 
delightful places. He never fails to utilise his refrigerator to 
bring home animals as fresh as when newly taken. Strangely 
enough he believes in the sea serpent, though I fear he has 
too sane a mind ever to see it. Should he ever foregather 
with such a beast, as it is his dearest ambition to do, the odds 
are much in favour of our seeing it uncoiled from his freezing 
apparatus and transferred to Cromwell Road. 
Perhaps the most enthusiastic boy naturalist on record is a 
young friend of mine, a pure negro, and the happy possessor of 
a cap, shirt, and pair of smalls — anyhow I never saw more than 
this among his “ visible means of subsistence.” He and a few 
other sympathetic friends made a four days’ expedition into 
a West Indian forest in search of an animal called Peripatus , 
for which I had advertised a reward of five shillings. He did 
not find it, but he thought he had made sure by bringing with 
him a wild assortment of creeping things lodged in bamboo 
ioints, which make excellent collecting boxes. I shall never 
forget that boy’s delight when he first saw a dredge “ brought 
home ” and its contents displayed. But his tastes were 
incurably miscellaneous. 
A mutual friend of this boy's and mine, who dived success- 
fully for me, learned to distinguish, when beneath several 
fathoms of water, certain algae which an eminent phycologist 
failed to recognise with a microscope. Possibly the position 
quickened his faculties. He knew these algae and had his own 
names for them, some of the names being amusing enough. 
Such are a few of our brethren by whom we may take example, 
both for imitation and warning. They are all of them capable 
of good work for science when guided into the right groove. 
There are lights enough shining bravely to guide us safely past 
the Scylla of ignorance and the Charybdis of conceit. 
George Murray. 
