It is puzzling, truly

It is puzzling, truly. I shall be very glad if these pages help yousomewhat toward solving the puzzleWe shall agree at least that the study of Natural History has becomenow-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason was till latelyGod rest his noble soul!.the most important man in the City ofEdinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successfulinvestigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned amongmen of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, byvirtue of his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the studyis now more than honourable; it is(what to many readers will be a farhigher recommendation) even fashionable.

Every well-educatederson is eager to know something at least of the wonderful organicforms which surround him in every sunbeam and every pebble, andbooks of Natural History are finding their way more and more intodrawing-rooms and school-rooms, and exciting greater thirst for aknowledge which, even twenty years ago, was considered superfluousfor all but the professional studentWhat a change from the temper of two generations since, when thenaturalist was looked on as a harmless enthusiast. who went"bughunting, simply because he had not spirit to follow a fox! There arethose alive who can recollect an amiable man being literally bullied outof the New Forest, because he dared to make a collection(at thismoment, we believe, in some unknown abyss of that great Avemus, theBritish Museum) of fossil shells from those very Hordwell Cliffs, forexploring which there is now established a society of subscribers andcorrespondents. They can remember, too, when, on the firstappearance of Bewick's British Birds, the excellent sportsman whobrought it down to the Forest was asked, Why on earth he had bought abook about"cock sparrows"? and had to justify himself again and again,simply by lending the book to his brother sportsmen, to convince themthat there were rather more than a dozen sorts of birds(as they then heldndigenous to Hampshire. But the book, perhaps, which tumed the tiden favour of Natural History, among the higher classes at least, in thesouth of England, was White's History of Selbome. A Hampshiregentleman and sportsman, whom every body knew, had taken the troubleto wrte a book about the birds and the weeds in his own parish, and thevery-day things which went on under his eyes, and everyone else'sAnd all gentlemen, from the Weald of Kent to the vale of blackmoreshrugged their shoulders mysteriously, and said, "Poor fellow! "till theyopened the book itself, and discovered to their surprise that it read likeany novel. And then came a burst of confused, but honest admirationfrom the young squire's Bless me! who would have thought that therewere so many wonderful things to be seen n one's own park! to the oldsquire's more morally valuable"Bless me! why, I have seen that and thata hundred times. and never thought till now how wonderful they were!

There were great excuses, though, of old, for the contempt in whichthe naturalist was held; great excuses for the pity ing tone of banter withwhich the Spectator talks of the ingenious"Don Saltero(as no doubtthe Neapolitan gentleman talked of Ferrante Imperato the apothecaryand his museum); great excuses for Voltaire, when he classes thecollection of butterflies among the other"bizarrerie de l esprit humain.For, in the last generation, the needs of the world were different. It hadno time for butterflies and fossils. While Buonaparte was hovering onthe Boulogne coast, the pursuits and the education which were neededwere such as would raise up men to fight him; so the coarse, fierce.hard-handed training of our grandfathers came when it was wanted anddid the work which was required of it else we had not been here nowet us be thankful that we have had leisure for science- and show now inwar that our science has at least not unmanned us

Moreover, Natural History, if not fifty years ago, certainly a hundredyears ago, was hardly worthy of men of practical common sense. After,indeed, Linne, by his invention of generic and specifichad madeclassification possible, and by his own enormous labours had shownhow much could be done whena method was established, thescience has grown rapidly enough. But before him little or nothing hadbeen put into form definite enough to allure those who (as the manyalways will) prefer to profit by others' discoveries, than to discover forthemselves. and Natural Historyattractive only to a few eamestseekers who found too much trouble in disencumbering their own mindsof the dreams of bygone generations (whether facts, lke cockatrices,basilisks. andthe breeding of bees out of a dead ox and ofgeese fromtheories. like those of elements. the visPLASTRIX inanimal spints, and the other musty heirlooms ofAristotleism and Neo-platonism), to try to make a science popular,which as vet was not even a science at all. Honour to them.nevertheless. Honour to Ray and his illustrious contemporanes inHolland and France. Honour to Seba and Aldrovandus: to Pomet withhis"Historie of Drugges. even to the ingenious Don saltero and histaverm-museum in Cheyne walk Where all was chaos. every man wasuseful who could contribute a single spot of organized standing gron the shape of a fact or a specimen. But it is a question whetherNatural History would have ever attained its present honours, had notGeology arisen, to connect every other branch of Natural History withproblems as vast and awful as they are captivating to the imagination.Nay, the very opposition with which Geology met was of as great benefitto the sister sciences as to itself. For, when questions belonging to themost sacred hereditary beliefs of Christendom were supposed to beaffected by the verification of a fossil shell, of the proving that theMaestricht homo diluvia testis" was, after all, a monstrous eft it becamenecessary to work upon Conchology, Botany, and Comparative Anatomywith a care and a reverence, a caution and a severe induction, which hadbeen never before applied to them; and thus gradually, in the last half-century, the whole choir of cosmical sciences have acquired a soundnessseverity, and fulness, which render them, as mere intellectual exercisesas valuable to a manly mind as mathematics and metaphysics