14 
Transactions Texas Academy of Science. 
Let ns recall what old Dr. Thomas Burnet wrote more than two 
hundred years ago in his “Sacred History of the Earth”: “The 
greatest Objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to be- 
hold ; and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and those bound- 
less Regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon 
with more Pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the 
Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these 
Things, that inspires the Mind with great Thoughts and Passions; 
we do naturally upon such Occasions, think of God and his Great- 
ness. And whatsoever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of 
Infinite, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, 
they fill and over-bear the Mind with their Excess, and cast it into 
pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration . 9 
There is needed to-day more of this old-time spirit. Dr. Brooks 
has said that the microtome is responsible for the small number of 
naturalists. And indeed to many biologists the vital phenomena 
appear in the form of transparent, thin slices. Mutely in our 
museums stand thousands of stuffed skins of birds, and hundreds 
of thousands of dried bodies of insects. We go so far to eliminate 
the living from these collections, that we constantly fumigate to 
destroy the poor Dermestes that would make its home there. Such 
specimens are very necessary in their way, but they should be re- 
garded as simply parts of animals. Pity the man who has only a 
museum training, who knows only motionless carcasses, who goes 
into the field armed only with a cyanide bottle or a gun, and who 
writes at his desk only descriptions ! That kind of education pre- 
sents a miserable inadequate comprehension of animals and plants, 
and can not lead to a reverential appreciation of them. To under- 
stand organisms one must know how they work and change., It 
makes little difference what particular objects one is trying to inter- 
pret, provided one maintains a broad point of view. When one does 
that, and does not limit himself to too narrow a path of inquiry, 
then he can not but feel the uprising within himself of love and awe 
of the natural. He learns how pitifully weak he is in explanation, 
how great the unknown, and realizes that he is not a high priest but 
a supplicant. Then for the first time he has won the true spirit, and 
enters the lists armed properly with patience and humility. He 
alone deserves the name of naturalist, all the others fall short of it. 
He has become a worshipper of Nature. 
