SCIENCE AND THE HUMANITIES 141 
Some defend the system of wasting five or six 
years of a man’s life in learning so much Latin as 
may barely suffice to enable him to read a page of a 
classical author without the aid of a Dictionary, on 
the ground of its being an exercise calculated to 
fix the attention and to exercise the memory; 
but a more useful and far nobler study is that of 
Nature, which calls into action every faculty of the 
mind, engages the best affections, and has reference 
to the perfect works of a perfect Creator. ‘ Ask now 
the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls 
of the air, and they shall tell thee; or speak to the 
earth, and it shall teach thee ; and the fishes of the 
sea shall declare it unto thee. Who knoweth not 
in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought 
this ? ’ Let Latin and Greek have their due share of 
attention, but let not the incubus of classic lore be 
permitted to smother the mind, that, if unrestrained, 
would inhale with delight the pure air of heaven.” 
This was written in 1843, and while it has 
a quaint, antique flavour — the young science 
encouraging itself under the segis of religion—we 
read in its naive frankness what we may find 
around us to-day, on the one hand the naturalist’s 
constitutional difficulty in appreciating the sig¬ 
nificance of the humanities, and, on the other hand, 
the perennial hopefulness of the enthusiast that 
along his line of study will be found at last that 
liberal education which mankind has sought after 
for thousands of years. 
His Style. 
In estimating MacGillivray’s share in the 
development of natural history in Britain, we must 
