very best man of business, given to the reading of Scotch political economy, and gifted with peculiarly clear notions on the currency ques

tion?

It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help you somewhat toward solving the puzzle,

We shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has become now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason is now perhaps the most important man in the City of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful investigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned among men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study is now more than honourable; it is (what to many readers will be a far higher recommendation) even fashionable. Every welleducated person is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organic forms which surround him in sunbeam and every pebble; and books of Natural History are finding their way more and more into drawing

every

rooms and schoolrooms, and exciting greater

thirst for a knowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluous for all but the professional student.

What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the naturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went "bughunting," simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There are those alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullie out of the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection (at this moment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avernus, the British Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, for exploring which there is now established a society of subscribers and correspondents. They can remember, too, when, on the first appearance of Bewick's "British Birds," the excellent sportsman who brought it down to the Forest, was asked, Why on earth he had brought a book about "cock-sparrows?" and had to justify himself again and again, simply by lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince them that there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds (as they then held) indigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which turned the tide in favour of Natural

History, among the higher classes at least, in the south of England, was White's "History of Selbourne." A Hampshire gentleman and sportsman, whom everybody knew, had taken the trouble to write a book about the birds and the weeds in his own parish, and the everyday-things which went on under his eyes, and everyone else's. And all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the Vale of Blackmore, shrugged their shoulders mysteriously, and said, "Poor fellow !" till they opened the book itself, and discovered to their surprise that it read like any novel. And then came a burst of confused, but honest admiration; from the young squire's "Bless me! who would have thought that there were so many wonderful things to be seen in one's own park!" to the old squire's more morally valuable "Bless me! why I have seen that and that a hundred times, and never thought till now how wonderful they were !"

There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in which the naturalist was held ; great excuses for the pitying tone of banter with which the Spectator talks of "the ingenious' Don Saltero, (as no doubt the Neapolitan gentlemen talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecary,

and his museum;) great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes the collection of butterflies among the other "bigarrures de l'esprit humain." For, in the last generation, the needs of the world were different. It had no time for butterflies and fossils. While Buonaparte was hovering on the Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were needed were such as would raise up men to fight him; so the coarse, fierce, hardhanded training of our grandfathers came when it was wanted, and did the work which was required of it, else we had not been here now, Let us be thankful that we have had leisure for science; and show now in war that our science has at least not unmanned us.

Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundred years ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After, indeed, Linné, by his invention of generic and specific names, had made classification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shown how much could be done when once a method was established, the science has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing had been put into form definite enough to allure those who (as the many always will)

prefer to profit by others' discoveries, than to discover for themselves; and Natural History was attractive only to a few earnest seekers, who found too much trouble in disencumbering their own minds of the dreams of bygone generations, (whether facts, like cockatrices, basilisks, and krakens, the breeding of bees out of a dead ox, and of geese from barnacles, or theories, like those of the four elements, the vis plastrix in Nature, animal spirits, and the other musty heirlooms of Aristotelism and Neo-platonism,) to try to make a science popular, which as yet was not even a science at all. Honour to them, nevertheless. Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporaries in Holland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus; to Pomet, with his "Historie of Drugges;" even to the ingenious Don Saltero, and his tavern-museum in Cheyne Walk. Where all was chaos, every man was useful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing ground in the shape of a fact or a specimen. But it is a question whether Natural History would have ever attained its present honours, had not Geology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History with problems as vast and awful as they are captivating