but darken and confuse theinductive faculty: from haste and laziness, from melancholy

For his moral character, he must, like a knight of old, be first of allgentle and courteous, ready and able to ingratiate himself with the poorthe ignorant, and the savage, not only because foreign travel will beoften otherwise impossible, but because he knows how much invaluablelocal information can be only obtained from fishermen, miners, huntersand tillers of the soil Next, he should be brave and enterprising, anwithal patient and undaunted: not merely in travel, but n nvestigationknowing (as Lord Bacon might have put it) that the kingdom of Nature.like the kingdom of heaven, must be taken by violence, and that only tothose who knock long and eamestly does the great mother open thedoors of her sanctuary.

He must be of a reverent tum of mind also: notrashly discrediting any reports, however vague and fragmentary givingman credit always for some germ of truth, and giving Nature credit foran inexhaustible fertility and vanety, which will keep him his life longalways reverent, yet never superstitious: wondering at the commonest,but not surprised by the most strange: free from the idols of size andsensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the minutest objects, beauty,in the most ungainly: estimating each thing not carnally, as the vulgar doby its size or its pleasantness to the senses, but spiritually, by the amountof Divine thought revealed to Man therein; holding every phenomenonworth the noting down believing that every pebble holds a treasure,every bud a revelation; making it a point of conscience to pass overnothing through laziness or hastiness, lest the vision once offered anddespised should be withdrawn, and looking at every object as if he werenever to behold it again

Moreover, he must keep himself free from all those perturbations ofmind which not only weaken energy. but darken and confuse theinductive faculty: from haste and laziness, from melancholy. testiness.pride, and all the passions which make men see only what they wish tosee. Of solemn and scrupulous rererence for truth, of the habit of mindwhich regards each fact and discovery, not as our own possession, but athe possession of its Creator, independent of us, our tastes, our needs, orour vaim-glory, I hardly need to speak for it is the very essence of aature's faculty - the ver tenure of his existence. andtruthfulness science would be asssible now as chivalry would havebeen of oldAnd last but not least, the perfect naturalist should have in him thevery essence of true chivalry. namely. self-devotion the desire toadvance noteIf and his own fame or wealth but knowledmankind. He should have this great virtue: and in spite of manyshortcomings (for what man is there who liveth and sinneth not?).naturalists as a class have it to a degree which makes them stand outmost honourably in the midst of a self-seeking and mammonitegeneration, mclmed to value every thing by its money price, its privateutility. The spirit which gives freely, because it knows that it hasreceived freely, which communicates knowledge without hope ofrewardwithout jealousy and rivalry, to fellow-students and to the worid; whichcontent to delve and toil comparatively unknown, that from its obscureand seemingly worthless results others may derive pleasure, and evenbuild up great fortunes, and change the very face of cities and lands, bythe practical use of some stray talisman which the poor student hasnvented in his laboratory;-this is the spirit which is abroad among ourscientific men, to a greater degree than it ever has been among any bodyof men for many a century past, and might well be copied by those whoprofess deeper purposes and a more exalted calling, than the discoveryof a new zoophyte, or the classification of a moorland crag

And it is these qualities, however imperfectly thebe realizein any individual instance, which make our scientific men, as a class, thewholesomest and pleasantest of companions abroad, and at home themost blameless, simple, and cheerful, in all domestic relations: men forthe most part of manful heads, and yet of childlike hearts, who havetumed to quiet study, in these late piping times of peace, an intellectualhealth and courage which might have made them, in more fierce andtroublous times, capable of doing good service with very differentnstruments than the scalpel and the microscopeI have been sketching an ideal: but one which I seriouslyrecommend to the consideration of all parents; for, though it bempossible and absurd to wish that every young man should grow up anaturalist by profession, yet this age offers no more wholesome training.both moral and intellectual, than that which is given by instilling into theyoung an early taste for outdoor physical science. The education of ourchildren is now more than ever a puzzling problem, if by education wemean the development of the whole humanity, not merely ofarbitrarily chosen part of it. How to feed the imagination withwholesome food, and teach it to despise French novels, and that sugaredslough of sentimental poetry, in comparison with which the old fairy-tales and ballads were manful and rational: how to counteracttendency to shallowed and conceited sciolism, engendered by hearingpopular lectures on all manner of subjects, which can only be reallylearnt by stem methodic study, how to give habits of enterprise,patience, accurate observation, which the counting-house or the lbrarywill never bestow, above all, how to develop the physical powerswithout engendering brutality and coarseness-are questions becomingdaily more and more puzzling, while they need daily more and more to