awaken men to the importance of the visible world, that they may judge from thence the higher importance of that invisible world whereof this is but the garment and the type; and in all times and places, instead of keeping the key of knowledge to pamper one's own power or pride, to lay that key frankly and trustfully in the hand of every human being who hungers after truth, and to say-Child of God, this key is thine as well as mine Enter boldly into thy Father's house, and behold the wonder, the wisdom, the beauty of its laws and its organisms, from the mightiest planet over thy head, to the tiniest insect beneath thy feet. Look at it, trustfully, joyfully, earnestly; for it is thy heritage. Behold its perfect

fitness for thy life here; and judge from thence its fitness for thy nobler life hereafter.

ON THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY.*

L

ADIES AND GENTLEMEN,-I speak to you to-night as to persons assembled, somewhat, no doubt, for amusement, but still more for instruction. Institutions such as this were originally founded for the purpose of instruction; to supply to those who wish to educate themselves some of the advantages of a regular course of scholastic or scientific training, by means of classes and of lectures.

I myself prize classes far higher than I do lectures. From my own experience, a lecture is often a very dangerous method of teaching; it is apt to engender in the mind of men ungrounded conceit and sciolism, or the bad habit of knowing about subjects without really knowing the subject itself. A young man hears an interesting lecture, and carries away from it doubtless a great many new facts and results: but he really must not go home fancying himself a much wiser man; and why? Because he has only heard the lecturer's side of the story. He has been forced to take the facts and the results on trust. He has not examined the facts for himself. He has had no share in the process by which the results were arrived at. In short, he has not gone into the real scientia, that is, the 'knowing' of the matter. He has gained a certain quantity of second-hand information: but he has gained nothing in mental training, nothing in the great art of learn

* Lecture delivered at Reading, 1846.

ing,' the art of finding out things for himself, and of discerning truth from falsehood. Of course, where the lecture is a scientific one, illustrated by diagrams, this defect is not so extreme: but still the lecturer who shows you experiments, is forced to choose those which shall be startling and amusing, rather than important; he is seldom or never able, unless he is a man of at once the deepest science and the most extraordinary powers of amusing, to give you those experiments in the proper order which will unfold the subject to you step by step; and after all, an experiment is worth very little to you, unless you perform it yourself, ask questions about it, or vary it a little to solve difficulties which arise in your own mind.

Now mind-I do not say all this to make you give up attending lectures. Heaven forbid. They amuse, that is, they turn the mind off from business; they relax it, and as it were bathe and refresh it with new thoughts, after the day's drudgery, or the day's commonplaces; they fill it with pleasant and healthful images for afterthought. Above all, they make one feel what a fair, wide, wonderful world one lives in; how much there is to be known, and how little one knows; and to the earnest man suggest future subjects of study. I only ask you not to expect from lectures what they can never give but as to what they can give, I consider, I assure you, the lecturer's vocation a most honourable one in the present day, even if we look on him as a mere advertiser of nature's wonders. As such, I appear here to-night; not to teach you natural history; for that you can only teach yourselves: but to set before you the subject and its value, and if possible, allure some of you to the study of it.

I have said that lectures do not supply mental training; that only personal study can do that. The

next question is, what study? And that is a question which I do not answer in a hurry, when I say, the study of natural history. It is not, certainly, a study which a young man entering on the business of selfeducation would be likely to take up. To him, naturally, man is the most important subject. His first wish is to know the human world; to know what men are, what they have thought, what they have done. And therefore, you find that poetry, history, politics, and philosophy are the matters which most attract the self-guided student. I do not blame him: but he seems to me to be beginning at the middle, rather than at the beginning. I fell into the same fault myself more than once, when I was younger, and meddled in matters too high for me, instead of refraining my soul, and keeping it low; so I can sympathize with others who do so. But I can assure them that they will find such lofty studies do them good, only in proportion as they have first learnt the art of learning. Unless they have learnt to face facts manfully, to discriminate between them skilfully, to draw conclusions from them rigidly; unless they have learnt in all things to look, not for what they would like to be true, but for what is true, because God has done it and it cannot be undone then they will be in danger of taking up only the books which suit their own prejudices—and every one has his prejudices-and using them, not to correct their own notions, but to corroborate and pamper them; to confirm themselves in their first narrow guesses, instead of enlarging those guesses into certainty. The lad of a Tory turn will read Tory books, the lad of a Radical turn Radical books; and the green spectacles of party and prejudice will be deepened in hue as he reads on, instead of being thrown away for the clear white

glass of truth, which will show him reason in all honest sides, and good in all honest men.

But, says the young man, I wish to be wide-minded and wide-hearted-I study for that very purpose. I will be fair, I will be patient, I will hear all sides ere I judge. And I doubt not that he speaks honestly. But (I quote with all reverence) though the spirit be willing, the flesh is weak. Studies which have to do with man's history, man's thoughts, man's feelings, are too exciting, too personal, often, alas, too tragical, to allow us to read them calmly at first. The men and women of whom we read are so like ourselves (for the human heart is the same in every age), that we unconsciously begin to love or hate them in the first five minutes, and read history as we do a novel, hurrying on to see when the supposed hero and heroine get safely married, and the supposed villains safely hanged, at the end of the chapter, having forgotten all the while in our haste to ascertain which is the hero, and which is the villain. Mary Queen of Scots was beautiful and unfortunate'—what heart would not bleed for a beautiful woman in trouble? Why stop to ask whether she brought it on herself? She was seventeen years in prison. Why stop to ascertain what sort of a prison it was? And as for her guilt, the famous casket letters were of course a vile forgery. Impossible that they could be Hoot down the cold-hearted, and disagreeable, and troublesome man of facts, who will persist in his stupid attempt to disenchant you, and repeat-But the casket letters were not a forgery, and we can prove it, if you will but listen to the facts. Her prison, as we will show you (if you will be patient and listen to facts), consisted in greater pomp and luxury than that of most noblemen, with horses, hounds, books, music,

true.