8 
REVIEWS. 
“ But this/’ adds Mr. Kingsley, “ is most unsatisfactory.” If by this 
he means the preceding paragraph, we believe all naturalists will cordially 
agree with him. It is most unsatisfactory , because it might deter many a 
young hand from attempting some branch of study which is much in want 
of students, from the idea that the subject had been worked bare, and was 
“ well nigh exhausted.” The remainder of the passage we can heartily 
recommend:— 
“ For in giving up discovery, one gives up one of the highest enjoyments of 
natural history. There is a mysterious delight in the discovery of a new species, 
akin to that of seeing for the first time, in their native haunts, plants or animals of 
which one has till then only read. Some, surely, who read these pages have 
experienced that latter delight; and though they may find it hard to define whence 
the pleasure arose, know well that it was a solid pleasure, the memory of which 
they would not give up for hard cash. Some, surely, can recollect, at their first 
sight of the Alpine soldanella, the rhododendron, or the black orchis, growing 
upon the edge of the eternal snow, a thrill of emotion, not unmixed with awe—a 
sense that they were, as it were, brought face to face with the creatures of another 
world; that nature was independent of them, not merely they of her; that trees 
were not merely made to build their houses, or herbs to feed their cattle ; as they 
looked on those wild gardens, amid the wreaths of the untrodden snow, which had 
lifted their gay flowers to the sun year after year since the foundation of the world, 
taking no heed of man, and all the coil which he keeps in the valleys far below. 
“ And even, to take a simpler instance, there are those who will excuse, or even 
approve, of a writer for saying that, among the memories of a month’s eventful 
tour, those which stand out as beacon-points, those round which all the others 
group themselves, are the first wolf-track by the roadside in the Kyllwold; the 
first sight of the blue and green roller-birds, walking behind the plough, like rooks, 
in the tobacco-fields of Wittlich ; the first ball of olivine scraped out of the volcanic 
slag-heaps of the Dreisser-Weiher; the first pair of the lesser bustard which we 
flushed upon the downs of the Mosel-kopf; the first sight of the cloud of white 
ephemera, fluttering in the dusk, like a summer snow storm, between us and the 
black cliffs of the Rheinstein, while the broad Rhine beneath flashed blood-red in 
the blaze of the lightning and the fires of the Mausenthurm—a lurid Acheron, 
above which seemed to hover ten thousand unburied ghosts; and last, but not 
least, on the lip of the east Mosel-kopf crater, just above the point where the 
weight of the fiery lake has burst the side of the great slag-cup, and rushed forth 
between two cliffs of clinkstone across the downs, in a changing stream of fire, 
damming up rivulets, and blasting its path through forests, far away towards the 
valley of the Moselle, the sight of an object, for which was forgotten for the 
moment that battle-field of the Titans at our feet, and all the glorious panorama, 
Hundsruch and Taunus, Siebengebirge and Ardennes, and all the crater-peaks 
around, and which was—smile not, reader—our first yellow foxglove!” 
The following extract from the description of what a perfect naturalist 
should be (pp. 40-43) will be read with interest by all our readers; and 
with it we conclude this notice, which has already run to a length we 
little anticipated when we first sat down to our desk:— 
"He must be of a reverent turn of mind also; not rashly discrediting any 
reports, however vague and fragmentary ; giving men credit always for some germ 
of truth, and giving nature credit for an inexhaustible fertility and variety, which 
will keep him his life long always reverent, yet never superstitious ; wondering at 
the commonest, but not surprised by the most strange ; free from the idol of size 
and sensuous loveliness ; able to see grandeur in the minutest objects, beauty in 
the most ungainly; estimating each thing not casually, as the vulgar do, by its 
