6 
REVIEWS. 
The object of the book is to encourage a taste for natural history ; and 
the introductory portion of it is so well written that we defy any naturalist 
to read it without feeling his soul stirred within him; the opening pages at 
once arrest the attention. 
u You are going down, perhaps, by railway, to pass your usual six weeks at some 
watering-place along the coast, and, as you roll along, think more than once, and 
that not over cheerfully, of what you shall do when you get there. You are half- 
tired, half-ashamed of making one more in the ‘ ignoble army of idlers’ who saunter 
about the cliffs, and sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a 4 wharf of 
Lethe,’ by which they rot, ‘ dull as the oozy weeds.’ You foreknow your doom by 
sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out 
at the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one 
parade and down another; interminable reading of the silliest of novels, over which 
you fall asleep on a bench in the sun, and probably have your umbrella stolen; a 
purposeless line-weather sail in a yacht, accompanied by ineffectual attempts to 
catch a mackerel, and the consumption of many cigars; while your boys deafen 
your ears, and endanger your personal safety, by blazing away at innocent gulls 
and willocks, who go off to die slowly—a sport which you feel in your heart to be 
wanton, and cowardly, and cruel, and yet cannot find in your heart to stop, because 
1 the lads have nothing else to do, and, at all events, it kfeeps them out of the 
billiard-room ; ’ and after all, and worst of all, at night a soulless rechauffe of third- 
rate London frivolity. This is the life-in-death in which thousands spend the 
golden weeks of summer, and in which you confess with a sigh that you are going 
to spend them.” 
Here, though the sentences run on glibly, and are lightly and pleasantly 
written, a serious vein of earnestness pervades the whole, and the idler 
cannot but see. that the question is put to him—“ To what purpose does 
he live?” The answer to which, if correctly given, would, we fear, be no 
other than—“ To pass the time.” 
Again we quote Mr. Kingsley, at page 6 :— 
“We shall agree, at least, that the study of natural history has become now-a- 
days an honourable one. A Cromarty stone-mason is now, perhaps, the most 
important man in the city of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the 
successful investigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned among 
men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of 
his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study is now more than 
honourable; it is (what to many readers will be a far higher recommendation) even 
fashionable. Every well-educated person is eager to know something, at least, of 
the wonderful organic forms which surround him in every sunbeam and every 
pebble; and books of natural history are finding their way, more and more, into 
drawing-rooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst for a knowledge 
which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous to all but the professional 
student.” 
This, if true, and we believe that it comes very near the truth, may be 
productive of evil. If natural history become fashionable, it will be pursued 
for fashion’s sake by those who have no love of it; a demand for books on 
natural history will arise, to supply which all sorts of “ got up” publica¬ 
tions will appear; books written like this of Mr. Kingsley’s, by those who 
are no naturalists, and who will probably garble or distort the observations 
