A MAN OF FEELING 
139 
His Enthusiasm for Natural History. 
MacGillivray had a strongly marked Celtic 
temperament. Very reserved, he was emphatic¬ 
ally a man of feeling; full of enthusiasm for 
Nature, he expressed this in a quietly habitual 
outlook and activity, and only occasionally in 
outbursts of language. He did not suffer fools 
gladly, nor those who, being deaf and blind to 
Nature, despised his craft. Fundamentally 
scientific as he was, he had the “second sight,” 
that sees the transcendental side of things. 
Those to whom this temperament is as a rune 
whose meaning has been lost, cannot understand 
that the sometimes extraordinary outbursts of 
enthusiasm were “spates” on a habitually gentle 
stream, and that the religious reflections, which 
sound a little strange to modern ears, were 
perfectly natural to the author and congruent 
with the happily serious mood of the age. 
One simple fact should be borne in mind, 
that whereas the study of animated nature is now 
regarded as a worthy discipline of the developing 
human spirit, and even as a possibly useful branch 
of science—for that counts for much before the 
judgment seat of respectability—this was far from 
being the case in the first half of the nineteenth 
century. So when MacGillivray’s enthusiasm 
leads to a fervour of language which seems some¬ 
times a little overdone, we must remember what he 
