118 A SCIENTIFIC APPRECIATION [oh. vi. 
in his whole walk and conversation, and especially 
in his Natural History of Deeside. This work, 
indeed, shows his synthetic outlook to the highest 
advantage. It is a regional survey, precise and 
detailed in parts as every floristic and faunistic and 
geographic study must be ; but its chapters compose 
into a picture, in which flowers and birds and rocks 
and weather are seen in perspective and harmony. 
As we read it we feel that the author saw Nature 
whole . It is significant that Alexander von Hum¬ 
boldt was one of Mac Gillivr ay’s heroes, and that 
the Scotch naturalist should have given a year of 
his life to preparing an authorised account of the 
German’s travels and researches (1832). Perhaps 
it is not going too far to say that the influence of 
the author of Cosmos remained with MacGillivray, 
for it was characteristic of both that they were able 
to look out on all orders of facts with keenly 
intelligent eyes, that they pointed forward to 
Darwin in the success with which they realised the 
complexity of inter-relations in Nature, that they 
tried to correlate peculiarities of fauna and flora in 
an area with the actual environmental conditions, 
and that they had an artistic as well as a scientific 
sense of the “ physiognomy ” of different regions. 
We are not, indeed, comparing the scientific 
importance of MacGillivray’s “simple journey” up 
and down the valley of the Dee with that of 
Humboldt’s travels in South America, but we are 
convinced that the two naturalists had the same 
outlook and the same methods : 
