Ladies 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 learning," 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 on 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 self-education 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 sympathise 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 son of a Tory turn will
read Tory books, the son 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
villain 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
true. 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, liberty to hunt and amuse herself
in every way, even in intriguing with every court of Europe, as we
can show you again, if you will be patient and listen to facts. And
she herself was a very wicked and false woman, an adulteress and a
murderess (though fearfully ill-trained in early youth), who sowed
the wind, poor wretch, from girlhood to old age, and therefore
reaped the whirlwind, receiving the just reward of her deeds.
Catherine of Russia, meanwhile, instead of being beautiful and
unfortunate, was only handsome and successful. Brand her as a
disgrace to human nature. The morals and ways of the two were
pretty much on a par, with these exceptions in Catherine's favour--
that she had strong passions, Mary none; that she lived in outer
darkness and practical heathendom, while Mary had the light shining
all round her, and refused it deliberately again and again. What
matter to the sentimentalist? Hiss the stupid hard-hearted man of
facts, by all means. What if he be right? He has no business to be
right; we will consider him wrong accordingly, of our own sovereign
will and pleasure. For after all, if we had the facts put before us
(says the conscience of many a hearer), we could not judge of them;
we read to be amused and instructed, not to study cases like so many
barristers. So is history read. And so, alas, is history written,
too often, for want of a steady and severe training which would
enable people to judge dispassionately of facts. In politics the
case is the same. In poetry, which appeals more directly to the
feelings, it must needs be still worse; as has been shown sadly
enough of late by the success of several poems, in which every
possible form of bad taste has only met with unbounded admiration
from the many who have not had their senses exercised to discern
between good and evil.
Now what seems to me to be wanted for young minds, is a study in
which no personal likes or dislikes shall tempt them out of the path
of mental honesty; a study in which they shall be free to look at
facts exactly as they are, and draw their conclusions patiently and
dispassionately. And such a study I have found in that of natural
history.
Do not fancy it, I beg you, an easy thing to judge fairly of facts;
even to discover the facts at all, when they are staring you in the
face; and to see what it is that you do see. Any lawyer will tell
you, that if you ask three honest men to bear testimony concerning
an event which happened but yesterday, none of them, if he be at all
an interested party, will give you exactly the same account of it:
not that he wishes to say what is untrue; but that different parts
of the whole matter having struck each man with different force, a
different picture has been left on each man's memory. I have been
utterly astounded of late, in investigating these strange stories of
table-turning and spirit-rapping, to find how even clear-headed and
well-instructed persons (as one had fancied them) become unable to
examine fairly into a thing, the moment the desire to believe has
entered the heart; and how no amount of mere cultivation, if the
scientific habit of mind be wanting, can prevent people from finding
(as in table-turning) miracles in the most simple mechanical
accidents; or from becoming (as in spirit-rapping) the dupes of the
most clumsy, palpable, and degrading impostures, even after they
have been exposed over and over again in print. Humiliating,
indeed, it is, in this so self-confident and boastful nineteenth
century, amid steam-engines, railroads, electric telegraphs, and all
the wonders of our inductive science, to find exploded superstitions
leaping back into life even more monstrous and irrational than in
past ages, and to see our modern Pharisees and Sadducees, like those
in Judea of old, seeking after a sign of an unseen world; and being
unable to find one either in the heaven above or in the earth
beneath, discovering it at last (I am almost ashamed to speak the
words) under the parlour-table.
Against such extravagances, and against the loose sentimental tone
of mind which begets them, hardly anything would be a better
safeguard than the habitual study of nature. The chemist, the
geologist, the botanist, the zoologist, has to deal with facts which
will make him master of them, and of himself, only in proportion as
he obeys them. Many of you doubtless know Lord Bacon's famous
apothegm, Nature is only conquered by obeying her; and will
understand me when I say, that you cannot understand, much less use
for scientific purposes, the meanest pebble, unless you first obey
that pebble. Paradoxical; but true.
See this pebble which I hold in my hand, picked up out of the street
as I came along; it shall be my only object to-night. There the
thing is; and is as it is, and in no other way; and such it will be,
and so it will behave and act, in spite of me, and all my fancies
about it, and notions of what it ought to have been like, and what
it ought to have done. It is a thought of God's; and strong by the
eternal laws of matter, which are the will of God. It has the whole
universe, sun, and stars, and all, backing it by God's appointment,
to keep it where it is and what it is; and till (as Lord Bacon has
it) I have discovered and obeyed the will of God revealed in that
pebble, it is to me a riddle more insoluble than the Sphinx's, a
fortress more impregnable than Sevastopol. I may crush it: but
destroying is not conquering: but I cannot even mend the road with
it prudently, until I have discovered whether Almighty God has made
it fit to mend roads with. I may have the genius of a Plato or of a
Shakespeare, but all my genius will not avail to penetrate that
pebble, or see anything in it but a little round dirty stone, until
I have treated the pebble with reverence, as a thing independent of
my likes and dislikes, fancies, and aspirations; and have asked it
humbly to tell me its story, taking counsel meanwhile of hundreds of
kindred pebbles, each as silent and reserved as this one; and
watched and listened patiently, through many mistakes and
misreadings, to what it has to say for itself, and what God has made
it to be. And then at last that little black rounded pebble, from
the street outside, may, and will surely, if I be patient and honest
enough, tell me a tale wilder and grander than any which I could
have dreamed for myself; will shame the meanness of my imagination,
by the awful magnificence of God's facts, and say to me:
"Ages and AEons since, thousands on thousands of years before there
was a man to till the ground, I the little pebble was a living
sponge, in the milky depths of the great chalk ocean; and hundreds
of living atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter's
dreams, swam round me, and grew on me, and multiplied, till I became
a tiny hive of wonders, each one of which would take you a life to
understand. And then, I cannot yet tell you how, and till I tell
you you will never know, the delicate flint-needles in my skin
gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all my
inhabitants became a stone; and the chalk-mud settled round us, I
know not how, and covered us in; and for ages on ages I lay buried
in the nether dark, and felt the glow of the nether fires, and was
cracked and tossed by a hundred earthquakes. Again and again I have
been part of an island, and then again sunk beneath the sea, to be
upheaved again after long centuries, till I saw the light once more,
and dropped from the face of some chalk cliff far away among high
hills which have long since been swept off the face of the earth,
and was tossed by currents till I became a pebble on the beach,
while Reading was a sand-bank in a shallow sea. There I lay and
rolled till I was rounded, for many a century more; till flood after
flood past over me, and a new earth was made; and I was mixed up
with fresh flints from wasting chalk-hills, and with freestones from
the Gloucestershire wolds, and with quartz-boulders from the
mountains of Wales, while over me swept the carcases of drowned
elephants and bisons, and many a monstrous beast; and above me
floated uprooted palms, and tropic fruits and seeds, and the wrecks
of a dying world. And then there came another age--
And it grew wondrous cold;
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald;
and as the icebergs melted in the sun, the stones and the silt fell
out of them, and covered me up; and I was in darkness once more,
vexed by many an earthquake, till I became part of this brave
English land. And now I am a pebble here in Reading street, to be
ground beneath the wheels of busy men: and yet you cannot kill me,
or hinder my fulfilling the law which cannot be broken. This year I
am a pebble in the street; and next year I shall be dust upon the
fields above; and the year after that I shall be alive again, and
rise from the ground as fair green wheat-stems, bearing up food for
the use of man. And even after that you cannot kill me. The
trampled and sodden straw will rot only to enter into a new life;
and I shall pass through a fresh cycle of strange adventures, age
after age, till time shall be no more; doing my work in my
generation, and fulfilling to the last the will of God, as
faithfully as when I was the water-breathing sponge in the abysses
of the old chalk sea." All this and more, gentlemen and ladies, the
pebble could tell to you, and will: but he is old and venerable,
and like old men, he wishes to be approached with respect, and does
not like to be questioned too much or too rapidly; so that you must
not be offended if you meet with more than one rebuff from him; or
if he keeps stubborn silence, till he has seen that you are a modest
and attentive person, to whom it is worth while to open a little of
his forty or fifty thousand years' experience.
Second only to the good effect of this study on the logical faculty,
seems to me to be its effect on the imagination. Not merely in such
objects as the pebble, whose history I have so hastily, but I must
add faithfully, sketched; but in the tiniest piece of mould on a
decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool, will
imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land. And
I beg my elder hearers not to look on this as light praise.
Imagination is a valuable thing; and even if it were not, it is a
thing, a real thing, a faculty which every one has, and with which
you must do something. You cannot ignore it; it will assert its own
existence. You will be wise not to neglect it in young children;
for if you do not provide wholesome food for it, it will find
unwholesome food for itself. I know that many, especially men of
business, are inclined to sneer at it, and ask what is the use of
it? The simple answer is, God has made it; and He has made nothing
in vain. But you will find that in practice, in action, in
business, imagination is a most useful faculty, and is so much
mental capital, whensoever it is properly trained. Consider but
this one thing, that without imagination no man can possibly invent
even the pettiest object; that it is one of the faculties which
essentially raises man above the brutes, by enabling him to create
for himself; that the first savage who ever made a hatchet must have
imagined that hatchet to himself ere he began it; that every new
article of commerce, every new opening for trade, must be arrived at
by acts of imagination; by the very same faculty which the poet or
the painter employs, only on a different class of objects; remember
that this faculty is present in some strength in every mind of any
power, in every mind which can do more than follow helplessly in the
beaten track, and do nothing but what it has seen others do already:
and then see whether it be not worth while to give the young a study
which above all others is fitted to keep this important and
universal faculty in health. Now, from fifty to five-and-twenty
years ago, under the influence of the Franklin and Edgeworth school
of education, imagination was at a discount. That school was a good
school enough: but here was one of its faults. It taught people to
look on imagination as quite a useless, dangerous, unpractical, bad
thing, a sort of mental disease. And now, as is usual after an
unfair depreciation of anything, has come a revolution; and an
equally unfair glorifying of the imagination; the present generation
have found out suddenly that the despised faculty is worth
something, and therefore are ready to believe it worth everything;
so that nowadays, to judge from the praise heaped on some poets, the
mere possession of imagination, however ill regulated, will atone
for every error of false taste, bad English, carelessness for truth;
and even for coarseness, blasphemy, and want of common morality; and
it is no longer charity, but fancy, which is to cover the multitude
of sins.
The fact is, that youth will always be the period of imagination;
and the business of a good education will always be to prevent that
imagination from being thrown inward, and producing a mental fever,
diseasing itself and the whole character by feeding on its own
fancies, its own day dreams, its own morbid feelings, its likes and
dislikes; even if it do not take at last to viler food, to French
novels, and lawless thoughts, which are but too common, alas! though
we will not speak of them here.
To turn the imagination not inwards, but outwards; to give it a
class of objects which may excite wonder, reverence, the love of
novelty and of discovering, without heating the brain or exciting
the passions--this is one of the great problems of education; and I
believe from experience that the study of natural history supplies
in great part what we want. The earnest naturalist is pretty sure
to have obtained that great need of all men, to get rid of self. He
who, after the hours of business, finds himself with a mind relaxed
and wearied, will not be tempted to sit at home dreaming over
impossible scenes of pleasure, or to go for amusement to haunts of
coarse excitement, if he have in every hedge-bank, and wood land,
and running stream, in every bird among the boughs, and every cloud
above his head, stores of interest which will enable him to forget
awhile himself, and man, and all the cares, even all the hopes of
life, and to be alone with the inexhaustible beauty and glory of
Nature, and of God who made her. An hour or two every day spent
after business-hours in botany, geology, entomology, at the
telescope or the microscope, is so much refreshment gained for the
mind for to-morrow's labour, so much rest for irritated or anxious
feelings, often so much saved from frivolity or sin. And how easy
this pursuit. How abundant the subjects of it! Look round you
here. Within the reach of every one of you are wonders beyond all
poets' dreams. Not a hedge-bank but has its hundred species of
plants, each different and each beautiful; and when you tire of
them--if you ever can tire--a trip into the meadows by the Thames,
with the rich vegetation of their dikes, floating flower-beds of
every hue, will bring you as it were into a new world, new forms,
new colours, new delight. You ask why this is? And you find
yourself at once involved in questions of soil and climate, which
lead you onward, step by step, into the deepest problems of geology
and chemistry. In entomology, too, if you have any taste for the
beauties of form and colour, any fondness for mechanical and
dynamical science, the insects, even to the smallest, will supply
endless food for such likings; while their instincts and their
transformations, as well as the equally wondrous chemical
transformation of salts and gases into living plants, which
agricultural chemistry teaches you, will tempt you to echo every day
Mephistopheles's magic song, when he draws wine out of the table in
Auersbach's cellar:
Wine is grapes, and grapes are wood--
The wooden board yields wine as good:
It is but a deeper glance
Into Nature's countenance.
All is plain to him who seeth;
Lift the veil and look beneath,
And behold, the wise man saith,
Miracles, if you have faith.
Believe me you need not go so far to find more than you will ever
understand. An hour's summer walk, in the company of some one who
knows what to look for and how to look for it, by the side of one of
those stagnant dikes in the meadows below, would furnish you with
subjects for a month's investigation, in the form of plants, shells,
and animalcules, on each of which a whole volume might be written.
And even at this seemingly dead season of the year, fancy not that
nature is dead--not even that she sleeps awhile. Every leaf which
drops from the bough, to return again into its gases and its dust,
is working out chemical problems which have puzzled a Boyle and a
Lavoisier, and about which a Liebig and a Faraday will now tell you
that they have but some dim guess, and that they stand upon the
threshold of knowledge like (as Newton said of himself) children
gathering a few pebbles, upon the shore of an illimitable sea. In
every woodland, too, innumerable fungi are at work, raising from the
lower soil rich substances, which, strewed on the surface by quick
decay, will form food for plants higher than themselves; while they,
by their variety and beauty, both of form and colour, might well
form studies for any painter, and by the obscure laws of their
reproduction, studies for any philosopher. Why, there is not a heap
of dead leaves among which by picking it through carefully you might
not find some twenty species of delicate and elegant land-shells;
hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould, you might not
find the chrysalides of beautiful moths, where caterpillars have
crawled down the trunk in autumn, to lie there self-buried and die
to live again next spring in a new and fairer shape. And if you
cannot reach even there, go to the water-but in the nearest yard,
and there, in one pinch of green scum, in one spoonful of water,
behold a whole "Divina Commedia" of living forms, more fantastic a
thousand times than those with which Dante peopled his unseen world:
and then feel, as you should feel, abashed at the ignorance and
weakness of mortal man; abashed still more at that rash conceit of
his, which makes him fancy himself the measure of all things; and
say with me: "Oh Lord, thy works are manifold; thy ways are very
deep. In wisdom hast thou made them all, the earth is full of thy
riches. Thou openest thy hand, and fillest all things living with
plenteousness; they continue this day according to thine ordinance,
for all things serve thee. Thou hast made them fast for ever and
ever; thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken. Let
them praise the name of the Lord; for he spake the word and they
were made, he commanded, and they were created."
This I shall say, but little more than this, on the religious effect
of the study of natural history. I do not wish to preach a sermon
to you. I can trust God's world to bear better witness than I can,
of the Loving Father who made it. I thank him from my own
experience for the testimony of His Creation, only next to the
testimony of His Bible. I have watched scientific discoveries which
were supposed in my boyhood to be contrary to revelation, found out
one by one to confirm and explain revelation, as crude and hasty
theories were corrected by more abundant facts, and men saw more
clearly what both the Bible and Nature really did say; and I can
trust that the same process will go on for ever, and that God's
earth and God's word will never contradict each other. I have found
the average of scientific men, not less, but more, godly and
righteous men than the average of their neighbours; and I can trust
that this will be more and more the case as science deepens and
widens. And therefore I can trust that every patient, truthful, and
healthful mind will, the more it contemplates the works of God, re-
echo St. Paul's great declaration that the Invisible things of God
are clearly seen from the foundation of the world, being understood
by the things which are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.
And so trusting, I pass on to a lower view of the subject, and yet
not an unnecessary one.
In an industrial country like this, the practical utility of any
study must needs be always thrown into the scale; and natural
history seems at first sight somewhat unpractical. What money will
it earn for a man in after life?--is a question which will be asked;
and which it is folly to despise. For if the only answer be: "None
at all," a man has a right to rejoin: "Then let me take up some
pursuit which will train and refresh my mind as much as this one,
and yet be of pecuniary benefit to me some day." If you can find
such a study, by all means follow it: but I say that this study too
may be of great practical benefit in after life. How much money
have I, young as I am, seen wasted for want of a little knowledge of
botany, geology, or chemistry. How many a clever man becomes the
dupe of empirics for want of a little science. How many a mine is
sought for where no mine could be; or crop attempted to be grown,
where no such crop could grow. How many a hidden treasure, on the
other hand, do men walk over unheeding. How many a new material,
how many an improved process in manufacture is possible, yet is
passed over, for want of a little science. And for the man who
emigrates, and comes in contact with rude nature teeming with
unsuspected wealth, of what incalculable advantage to have if it be
but the rudiments of those sciences, which will tell him the
properties, and therefore the value, of the plants, the animals, the
minerals, the climates with which he meets? True--home-learnt
natural history will not altogether teach him about these things,
because most of them must needs be new: but it will teach him to
compare and classify them as he finds them, and so by analogy with
things already known to him, to discover their intrinsic worth.
For natural history stands to man's power over Nature, that is, to
his power of being useful to himself and to mankind, in the same
relation as do geography, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, political
economy; none of them, perhaps, bearing directly on his future
business in life; but all training his mind for his business, all
giving him the rudiments of laws which he will hereafter work out
and apply to his profession. And even at home, be sure that such
studies will bear fruit in after life. The productive wealth of
England is not exhausted, doubt it not; our grandchildren may find
treasures in this our noble island of which we never dreamed, even
as we have found things of which our forefathers dreamed not.
Recollect always that a great market town like this is not merely a
commercial centre; not perhaps even a commercial centre at all: but
that she is an agricultural centre, and one of the most important in
England; that the increase of science here will be sure more or less
to extend itself to the neighbourhood: and then lay to heart this
one fact. A friend of mine, and one whom I am proud to call my
friend, succeeding to an estate, thought good to cultivate it
himself. And being a man of common sense, he thought good to know
something of what he was doing. And he said to himself: The soil,
and the rain, and the air are my raw materials. I ought surely then
to find out what soil, and rain, and air are; so I must become a
geologist and a meteorologist. Vegetable substances are what I am
to make. And I ought surely to know what it is that I am making; so
I must become a botanist. The raw material does somehow or other
become manufactured into the produce; the soil into the vegetable.
I ought surely to know a little about the processes of my own
manufacture; so I must learn chemistry. Chance and blind custom are
not enough for me. At best they can but leave me where they found
me, at their mercy. Science I need; and science I will acquire.
What was the result? After many a mistake and disappointment, he
succeeded in discovering on his own estate a mine of unsuspected
wealth--not of gold indeed, but of gold's worth--the elements of
human food. He discovered why some parts of his estate were
fertile, while others were barren; and by applying the knowledge
thus gained, he converted some of his most barren fields into his
most fertile ones; he preserved again and again his crops from
blight, while those of others perished all around him; he won for
himself wealth, and the respect and honour of men of science; while
those around him, slowly opening their eyes to his improvements,
followed his lessons at second-hand, till the whole agriculture of
an important district has become gradually but permanently improved,
under the auspices of one patient and brave man, who knew that
knowledge was power, and that only by obeying nature can man conquer
her.
Bear in mind both these last great proverbs; and combine them in
your mind. Remember that while England is, and ever will be,
behindhand in metaphysical and scholastic science, she is the nation
which above all others has conquered nature by obeying her; that as
it pleased God that the author of that proverb, the father of
inductive science, Bacon Lord Verulam, should have been an
Englishman, so it has pleased Him that we, Lord Bacon's countrymen,
should improve that precious heirloom of science, inventing,
producing, exporting, importing, till it seems as if the whole human
race, and every land from the equator to the pole must henceforth
bear the indelible impress and sign manual of English science.
And bear in mind, as I said just now, that this study of natural
history is the grammar of that very physical science which has
enabled England thus to replenish the earth and subdue it. Do you
not see, then, that by following these studies you are walking in
the very path to which England owes her wealth; that you are
training in yourselves that habit of mind which God has approved as
the one which He has ordained for Englishmen, and are doing what in
you lies toward carrying out, in after life, the glorious work which
God seems to have laid on the English race, to replenish the earth
and subdue it?
One word more, and I have done. Unless you are already tired of
hearing me, I would suggest a few practical hints before we part.
The best way of learning these matters is by classes, in which men
may combine and interchange their thoughts and observations. The
greatest savants find this; and have their Microscopic Society,
Linnaean, Royal, Geological Societies, British Associations, and
what not, in which all may know what each has done, and each share
in the learning of all; for as iron sharpeneth iron, so a man
sharpens the face of his friend. I have nothing to say against
debating societies: perhaps it was my own fault that whenever I
belonged to one as a young man, I found them inclined to make me
conceited, dictatorial, hasty in my judgments, trying to state a
case before I had investigated it, to teach others before I had
taught myself, to make a fine speech, not to find out the truth;
till in, I think, a wise moment for me, I vowed at twenty never to
set foot in one again, and kept my vow. Be that as it may, I wish
that side by side with the debating society, I could see young men
joining in natural history societies; going out in company on
pleasant evenings to search together after the hidden treasures of
God's world, and read the great green book which lies open alike to
peasant and to peer; and then meeting, say once a week, to debate,
not of opinions but of facts; to show each what they had found, to
classify and explain, to learn and to wonder together. In such a
class many appliances would be possible. A microscope, for
instance, or chemical apparatus, might belong to the society, which
each individual by himself would not be able to afford; while as for
books--books on these subjects are now published at a marvellous
cheapness, which puts them within the reach of every one, and of an
excellence which twenty years ago was impossible. Any working man
in this town might now, especially in a class, consult scientific
books, for which I, as a lad, twenty years ago, was sighing in vain;
nay, many of which, twenty years ago, the richest nobleman could not
have purchased; for the simple reason, that, dear or cheap, they did
not exist. Such classes, too, would be the easiest, cheapest, and
pleasantest way of establishing what ought to exist, I think, in
connection with every institution like this, namely, a museum. If
the young men were really ready and willing to collect objects of
interest, I doubt not that public-spirited men would be found, who
would undertake the expense of mounting them in a museum. And you
cannot imagine, I assure you, how large and how interesting a museum
might be formed of the natural curiosities of a neighbourhood like
this, I may say, indeed, of any neighbourhood or of any parish: but
your museum need not be confined to the neighbourhood. Societies
now exist in every part of England, who will be happy to exchange
their duplicates for yours. As your collection increased in
importance, old members abroad would gladly contribute foreign
curiosities to your stock. Neighbouring gentlemen would send you
valuable objects which had been lumbering their houses, uncared for,
because they stood alone, and formed no part of a collection; and I,
for one, would be happy to add something from the fauna and flora of
those moorlands, where I have so long enjoyed the wonders of nature;
never, I can honestly say, alone; because when man was not with me,
I had companions in every bee, and flower, and pebble; and never
idle, because I could not pass a swamp, or a tuft of heather,
without finding in it a fairy tale of which I could but decipher
here and there a line or two, and yet found them more interesting
than all the books, save one, which were ever written upon earth.