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great coat to keep the damp out, as he potters about his little garden in the gloom of a winter's eve. The warmth of his own fireside is powerless to keep him indoors; by the light of his candle he makes his way outside, and wanders over the lawn in search of something new, something strange. And all he finds by the candle's glimmer are the worms that have stolen to the surface under cover of the night. It would not have excited a Biologist; but to him it is a discovery full of interest, worthy to be noted down in a letter to a friend. By finding the worms upon the surface he has learnt that they are not so deeply buried all the winter, after all. The secret of the birds' subsistence is explained one step further: it is enough to fill him with a simple joy.

But it is worthy of remark, as denoting the bent of his mind, that his investigations have no further object than the satisfaction of his own affectionate curiosity—a curiosity which arises from his love of living things, and his consequent interest in their welfare. Once satisfied, it leads him no further.

The Biologist is not thus easily pleased. "Hedge-sparrows frequent sinks and gutters"!-that will make him smile; nine times out of ten it will make him sneer-poor misguided man! He does not care a pin whether they frequent such places or not, unless the fact points to something further. He could not, to save his life, get up any enthusiasm over the old gentleman's worms and grass-plots, unless he perceived that they would have a bearing upon some theoretical point. The facts that were full of interest to the simpleminded old man of a century ago are nothing to him at all; nor does he count any facts to be worth his attention whose only value lies in their intrinsic power to interest and please.

Even Richard Jefferies is without honour amongst the Biologists, but possibly this may be because they have never seen what he describes many of them were born and bred in towns! The delight of recognition is missing therefore when, under the magic of his pen, country scenes and sounds rise up to the life. The chief charm of his work is lost upon them, and they find in Richard Jefferies a trifler, dull, unprofitable.

To those, however, who are not so unfortunate this knack of Jefferies is a wonderful thing. It does not matter where we are when we begin upon a page of his work at once the room and our surroundings begin to fade. With a few strokes of his pen he has carried us away whither his own fancy leads him; we are no longer within four walls, we are out in the open air, in the woods, in the fields.

Perhaps it is autumn with Richard Jefferies-he is fond of autumn; then it is autumn with us too-ay, though the swallows are twittering in the eaves outside the window and the June roses are in full bloom upon the wall. We tread with him on the faded tussocks of the white, dry autumn grass. The air is fragrant of autumn, of moist soil, of rotting leaves; the woods are full of colour-red and gold-but the foliage is getting thin; the air is chill; the yellow autumn sunlight slants weakly down upon the fields.

He has not finished yet. His pictures are full of living things-creatures we have seen before, sometimes, yet are glad to see again. A rabbit hobbles in the hedgerow; it is as if it were before us. The startled stare of the prominent round eye, the nibbling movement of the lips, the grey roundness of the hunched back, he can show them all to us-it is a living rabbit ! Or he will point out the gaunt figure of the carrion crow calling from the topmost branch of a thinly-foliaged oak, till we catch the light upon its shining back, the tilt of its body forwards; till we see the very opening of its bill, and listen to its raucous cry ringing out over the still autumn fields. At our feet the field mice rustle, running jerkily in the dry grass-they are real, too; everything is intensely real-the birds that shuffle in the hedgerows, the clouds that drift across the cold clear sky, the leaves that come twirling slowly downwards to the ground. This again is the true naturalist spirit. It is just this minute observation of country sights and sounds, without regard to their scientific value, that stamps a naturalist of the old school at once: affection, not inquisitiveness, is the basis of their researches. Listen to Jefferies:

"I do not want change; I want the same old and loved things, the same wild-flowers, the same trees and soft ash-green: the turtledoves, the blackbirds, the coloured yellowhammer sing, sing, singing so long as there is light to cast a shadow on the dial, for such is the measure of his song: and I want them in the same place."

That “sing, sing, singing" is life-like. As you read it there comes a vision of a July noon, full of summer scents and sounds, and the songs of drowsy birds; and the yellowhammer itself on the summit of a hedge singing ceaselessly, drearily, through the heat of the day.

The new natural history has its home in the laboratory; the old in the woods, the fields, the mountains, and the lonely stretches of the sea-shore.

The Biologist is of quite a different cast of mind. If he is infinitely more scientific he is also infinitely less tender his curiosity is perhaps greater, his affection is certainly less.

When he discovers a new bird he does not waste time, like the Naturalist, in watching its movements, in listening to its notes, in surrendering himself to a delicious mixture of excitement, wonder, and a host of tender emotions. He produces a gun and shoots it; that is the first duty of the Biologist. His subsequent course of action varies, but he will probably skin it, and cut it up in order that he may observe the arrangement of its intestinal convolutions, and discover whether its palate is formed on the desmognathous, dromeognathous, or schizognathous plan.

He is not to be blamed for so doing: there is no need to hold him up to reprobation; it is his business. If he could not cut it up it would lose half, perhaps all, its interest for him he would not thank you for showing it to him as it flew about, if that was all you could do. To earn his gratitude you would need to present him with a breech-loader and some cartridges; while two scalpels, a forceps, a pair of scissors, and a "seeker" would fill him with a fearful joy.

Between these two types of naturalists, therefore, a great gulf is fixed. Both are possessed with an overpowering interest in the animated world; but the interest of the one has its root in a deep and often passionate affection; that of the other is the product of a variety of causes, to the consideration of which it may be worth while to turn. It is difficult to doubt that, at the bottom, it is the theory that has revolutionised natural history that has also revolutionised naturalists.

With the birth of the evolutionary hypothesis natural history was shifted on to a fresh basis, and took in consequence a position in relation to the questions of the day that it had never occupied before. With the general acceptance of the new doctrine a light broke over the whole field of the science; dark places became plain, facts became significant, and biology acquired a direct connection with graver sciences-with ethics, theology, and religion. The immediate effect of this was as natural as it was palpable.

Natural History, dignified now into Biology, appealed to a far larger section of humanity than it could ever have done before. Men who did not care a straw whether hedge-sparrows frequented "sinks and gutters" or not, who were indifferent as to whether it was the greater or lesser "Pettychaps" that pilfered their raspberry bushes, flung themselves into the science of Biology when they learnt that it could throw light upon the origin and destiny of man.

Sociologists found that they might seek for confirmation or contradiction of their doctrines in the law of evolution that governed all

life; psychologists looked for light to the science that treated of their own beginning; and theologians, filled with a terrible fear, laid aside for a while the Apocrypha and the Fathers to try and refute the theory that promised to upset all they held most dear.

Of the theologians some have gone back to the Bible in despair, finding a certain consolation in simple and complete denial; while some are busy with Professor Drummond in patching up an evolved theology as a concession to the present mode of thought.

But the psychologists, the sociologists, and hosts of those whose curiosity is great after any ultimate truth; those whose object is not to prove what they already believe, but to believe only what they can consider proved, have turned their attention to Biology, as being the most fertile of all sources in the elucidation of final and fundamental facts.

This, Darwin himself foresaw. "In the future," he writes, in the conclusion of his great work, "I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already well laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer-that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

And so it comes about that amongst the crowd of speculative biologists the number of old-fashioned naturalists seems insignificant and diminished; it is to be feared, moreover, that appearances are not wholly deceptive. The overwhelming voices of the New school clamour for attention; the unobtrusive retiring nature that belongs to the Old, leads it to shun competition and sink its claims.

So, too, the bitter contempt of the New school for the Old, the most prevalent, the most unworthy feature of its members, arising solely from a total misapprehension of their own position, adds doubtless to the rapidity of the latter's decay.

Youthful naturalists dislike to be contemptuously disowned by the majority of those who now hold the name. They begin as an Edward, as a Jefferies; in a little while they learn to disown their former selves, to abandon wood and field, and to betake themselves to the laboratory.

It needs nowadays the courage of conviction in scientific circles to find anything worth attention in some of Gilbert White's quaint notes, anything that is not pitiable and futile in the work of Richard Jefferies.

True, the contempt is not all on one side; while the Biologist holds up to ridicule the Naturalist who has never heard of a

"notochord," that very Naturalist is secretly consumed with scorn for the Biologist who cannot tell a yellowhammer from a chaffinch

by its song.

There is a deeper-seated reason for antagonism yet. It lies in the religion of the one and the scepticism of the other. The beneficent Maker that the one discovers everywhere is flatly stated to be invisible by the other; the Biologist has taken away the Naturalist's. God, and he knows not where he has laid him. May we not more easily excuse the latter's bitterness than the former's harsh contempt ?

Take this passage from Thomas Edward, for example, written in his latest days:-" And although I am now like a beast tethered to its pasturage, with a portion of my faculties somewhat impaired, I can still appreciate and admire as much as ever the beauties and wonders of nature as exhibited in the incomparable work of our adorable Creator." In another place he says his desire was, "simply that I might learn all I could concerning the beautiful and wonderful works of God."

Now no Biologist writes in that strain; for him there is no Creator, because nothing was created; all was evolved.

Even Richard Jefferies, with all his questioning, has nothing in common with the typical Biologist. "I am always on the margin of life illimitable," he says, "and there are higher conditions

than existence."

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And here again are the words of this wonderer-not the words of a church-goer, nor yet of a sceptic, but beautiful words all the same "I went down to the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over the sun-lit waters. . . . . I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves-my soul was strong as the sea, and prayed with the sea's might: 'Give me fulness of life, like to the sea and the sun, to the earth and the air; give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their fulness; give me greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things, give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide, give it to me with all the force of the sea."" He is at heart pantheistical perhaps, but no materialist; he is as far removed in spirit from the modern Biologist as Thomas Edward or Gilbert White.

How completely the New school differs from the Old may be seen by observing what it is that really interests the former. The astonishing excitement that arose on the discovery of Bathybius; the commotion over Balanoglossus; the enthusiasm with which any new thing is hailed that can exhibit a rudimentary notochord, a pineal eye, a primitive condition of any organ, or anything indi

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