THE ROYAL ARTILLERY INSTITUTION. 
15 
have had scientific men cordially agree with me—that they are the 
most modest and the most teachable of men. But even in their case 
there can be no harm in going over deliberately a question of such 
importance—in putting it, as it were., into shape, and insisting on 
arguments which may perhaps not have occurred to some of them. 
Let me, in the first place, reassure those—if any such there be—who may 
suppose, from the title of my lecture, that I am only going to recom¬ 
mend them to collect weeds and butterflies, “ rats and mice, and such 
small deer.” Far from it. The honourable title of Natural History 
has, and unwisely, been restricted too much of late years to the mere 
study of plants and animals; but I desire to restore the words to their 
original and proper meaning—the History of Nature; that is, of all 
that is born, and grows, in time—in short, of all natural objects. 
If anyone shall say, By that definition you make not only geology and 
chemistry branches of natural history, but meteorology and astronomy 
likewise—I cannot deny it; they deal, each of them, with realms of 
Nature. Geology is, literally, the natural history of soils and lands ; 
chemistry the natural history of compounds, organic and inorganic; 
meteorology the natural history of climates; astronomy the natural 
history of planetary and solar bodies. And more, you cannot now 
study deeply any branch of what is popularly called Natural History— 
that is, plants and animals—without finding it necessary to learn some¬ 
thing, and more and more as you go deeper, of those very sciences. 
As the marvellous interdependence of all natural objects and forces 
unfolds itself more and more, so the once separate sciences, which 
treated of different classes of natural objects, are forced to interpenetrate, 
(as it were), and supplement themselves by knowledge borrowed from 
each other. Thus—to give a single instance—no man can now be a 
first-rate botanist unless he be also no mean meteorologist, no mean 
geologist, and—as Mr. Darwin has shown in his extraordinary discoveries 
about the fertilisation of plants by insects—no mean entomologist 
likewise. 
It is difficult, therefore, and indeed somewhat unwise and unfair, 
to put any limit to the term Natural History, save that it shall deal 
only with nature and with matter, and shall not pretend—as some 
would have it do just now—to go out of its own sphere to meddle with 
moral and spiritual matters. But, for practical purposes, we may 
define the natural history of any given spot as the history of the causes 
which have made it what it is, and filled it with the natural objects 
which it holds. And if anyone would know how to study the natural 
history of a place, and how to write it, let him read—and if he has read 
its delightful pages in youth, read once again—that hitherto unrivalled 
little monograph, White j s “ History of Selborne and let him then 
try, by the light of improved science, to do for any district Where he 
may be stationed what White did for Selborne nearly 100 years ago. 
Let him study its plants, its animals, its soils and rocks, and last, but 
not least, its scenery, as the total outcome of what the soils, and 
plants, and animals have made it. I say, have made it. How far the 
nature of the soils and the rocks will affect the scenery of a district 
may be well learnt from a very clever and interesting little book of 
Professor Geikie's on “The Scenery of Scotland, as affected by its 
