NATURAL HISTORY OF DEESIDE 107 
view, or from an incidental reflective thought 
associated with the aspect of an object or scene 
which had specially impressed him, in which he 
gives utterance to his deepest thoughts or breathes 
out his most tender feelings or his holiest aspira¬ 
tions. There are more of such passages in that 
book than in any of his other works within the 
same compass. His sense of awe in the presence 
of the Great Mystery of Nature appears to have 
deepened. Religious thought and feeling had 
grown in him to greater maturity, and had come 
in a sense to dominate his science and his life, yet 
not so as to prevent him from seeing the facts of 
Nature as he had always seen them, or from 
drawing from them without bias the deductions 
which they appeared to him to warrant. 
In his preface to that book he says :_ 
“If the Valley of the Dee has many a time 
been traversed by the wise and the learned, the 
man of science and the man of wit, the poet, the 
painter, and the tourist, it is equally instructive to the 
naturalist, who ought in his own pevson to vepvesent 
all these." 
In his case the ideal naturalist was realised, 
for he combined all these characteristics in himself. 
He was eminently the man of science ; he had the 
heart and the imagination of the poet and the 
painter, and he was the patient, plodding pedestrian 
tourist, easily accommodated with lodging and 
food wherever he went—in his earlier days sleeping 
